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).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#1201
Uwe Storch
#18900
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Uwe Storch was a German mathematician. His field of research was commutative algebra and analytic and algebraic geometry, in particular derivationss, divisor class group, resultants. Storch studied mathematics, physics and mathematical logic in Münster and in Heidelberg. He got his PhD 1966 under the supervision of Heinrich Behnke with a thesis on almost factorial ringss. 1972 Habilitation in Bochum, 1974 professor in Osnabrück and since 1981 professor for algebra and geometry in Bochum. 2005 Emeritation. Uwe Storch is married and has four sons.
Go to Profile#1202
Willi Jäger
#24487
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Willi Jäger is a German mathematician. He completed his PhD in 1966 the University of Munich under the direction of Erhard Heinz. From 1969 to 1970 Jäger was a visiting scientist at the Courant Institute in New York City. In 1970 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Münster and from 1974 he became professor of applied mathematics at the Heidelberg University. In 1987 Jäger was founding member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing in Heidelberg. He is a board member of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach.
Go to Profile#1203
Konrad Osterwalder
#16658
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Konrad Osterwalder is a Swiss mathematician and physicist, former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations, former Rector of the United Nations University , and Rector Emeritus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich . He is known for the Osterwalder–Schrader theorem.
Go to Profile#1204
George F. Carrier
#18168
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
George Francis Carrier was an engineer and physicist, and the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics Emeritus of Harvard University. He was particularly noted for his ability to intuitively model a physical system and then deduce an analytical solution. He worked especially in the modeling of fluid mechanics, combustion, and tsunamis.
Go to Profile#1205
Georg Kreisel
#4837
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Georg Kreisel FRS was an Austrian-born mathematical logician who studied and worked in the United Kingdom and America. Biography Kreisel was born in Graz and came from a Jewish background; his family sent him to the United Kingdom before the Anschluss in 1938. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, during World War II, worked on military subjects. Kreisel never took a Ph.D., though much later, in 1962, he was awarded the Cambridge degree of Sc.D., a `higher doctorate' given on the basis of published research.
Go to Profile#1206
Angus Macintyre
#18991
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Angus John Macintyre FRS, FRSE is a British mathematician and logician who is a leading figure in model theory, logic, and their applications in algebra, algebraic geometry, and number theory. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, at Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#1207
Henri Berestycki
#15556
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Henri Berestycki is a French mathematician who obtained his PhD from Université Paris VI – Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1975. His Dissertation was titled Contributions à l'étude des problèmes elliptiques non linéaires, and his doctoral advisor was Haïm Brezis. He was an L.E. Dickson Instructor in Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1975–77, after which he returned to France to continue his research. He has made many contributions in nonlinear analysis, ranging from nonlinear elliptic equations, hamiltonian systems, spectral theory of elliptic operators, and with applications to the description of mathematical modelling of fluid mechanics and combustion.
Go to Profile#1208
Rama Cont
#20564
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Rama Cont is the Professor of Mathematical Finance at the University of Oxford. He is known for contributions to probability theory, stochastic analysis and mathematical modelling in finance, in particular mathematical models of systemic risk. He was awarded the Louis Bachelier Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in 2010.
Go to Profile#1209
Amie Wilkinson
#26017
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Amie Wilkinson is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. Her research topics include smooth dynamical systems, ergodic theory, chaos theory, and semisimple Lie groups. Wilkinson, in collaboration with Christian Bonatti and Sylvain Crovisier, partially resolved the twelfth problem on Stephen Smale's list of mathematical problems for the 21st Century.
Go to Profile#1210
Thomas Royen
#24674
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Royen is a retired German professor of statistics who has been affiliated with the University of Applied Sciences Bingen. Royen came to prominence in the spring of 2017 for a relatively simple proof for the Gaussian Correlation Inequality , a conjecture that originated in the 1950s, which he had published three years earlier without much recognition. A proof of this conjecture, which lies at the intersection of geometry, probability theory and statistics, had eluded top experts for decades.
Go to Profile#1211
Michael Röckner
#25141
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael Röckner is a mathematician working in the fields of Stochastic analysis and Mathematical Physics. He obtained his PhD at the University of Bielefeld in 1984 under the supervision of Sergio Albeverio and Christopher John Preston.
Go to Profile#1212
Mina Rees
#8143
Overall Influence
1902 - 1997 (95 years)
Mina Spiegel Rees was an American mathematician. She was the first female President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research of the United States. Rees was a pioneer in the history of computing and helped establish funding streams and institutional infrastructure for research. Rees was also the founding president and president emerita of the Graduate School and University Center at CUNY. She received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest honor of the National Academy of Sciences; the King's Medal for Ser...
Go to Profile#1213
Marianna Csörnyei
#23028
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Marianna Csörnyei is a Hungarian mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Chicago. She does research in real analysis, geometric measure theory, and geometric nonlinear functional analysis. She proved the equivalence of the zero measure notions of infinite dimensional Banach spaces.
Go to Profile#1214
Olgierd Zienkiewicz
#5844
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Olgierd Cecil Zienkiewicz was a British academic of Polish descent, mathematician, and civil engineer. He was born in Caterham, England. He was one of the early pioneers of the finite element method. Since his first paper in 1947 dealing with numerical approximation to the stress analysis of dams, he published nearly 600 papers and wrote or edited more than 25 books.
Go to Profile#1215
Frank Wilson Warner
#29696
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Frank Wilson Warner III is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Education and career Warner graduated in 1959 with a bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University and in 1963 with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesis, written under the supervision of Isadore M. Singer, is entitled Conjugate Locus of a Riemannian Manifold. At the University of California, Berkeley, Warner was an assistant professor from 1965 to 1968. At the University of Pennsylvania, he became an associate professor in 1968 and a full professor in 1973.
Go to Profile#1216
Andries Brouwer
#16431
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Andries Evert Brouwer is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, Professor Emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology . He is known as the creator of the greatly expanded 1984 to 1985 versions of the roguelike computer game Hack that formed the basis for NetHack. He is also a Linux kernel hacker. He is sometimes referred to by the handle aeb.
Go to Profile#1217
Cyrus Derman
#18746
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Cyrus Derman was an American mathematician and amateur musician who did research in Markov decision process, stochastic processes, operations research, statistics and a variety of other fields. Early life Derman grew up in Collingdale Pennsylvania. He was the son of a grocery store owner who came to the US from Lithuania. As a young boy he was often invited to play the violin at a Philadelphia radio show for talented children. Although his initial dream was to become a concert violinist, in the end he chose to study mathematics. Indeed, after he finished his undergraduate degree at the Un...
Go to Profile#1218
Bryan John Birch
#21950
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Bryan John Birch FRS is a British mathematician. His name has been given to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Biography Bryan John Birch was born in Burton-on-Trent, the son of Arthur Jack and Mary Edith Birch. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He married Gina Margaret Christ in 1961. They have three children.
Go to Profile#1219
Jürg Fröhlich
#18497
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jürg Martin Fröhlich is a Swiss mathematician and theoretical physicist. He is best known for introducing rigorous techniques for the analysis of statistical mechanics models, in particular continuous symmetry breaking , and for pioneering the study of topological phases of matter using low-energy effective field theories.
Go to Profile#1220
Guido Weiss
#25127
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Guido Leopold Weiss in St. Louis Childhood Weiss was born in Trieste Italy into a Jewish family. His parents, Edoardo and Vonda Weiss, were both psychiatrists. Weiss was forced out of school at the age of 9, upon the passage of Italy's Italian Racial Laws, which forbade all Jewish children from attending public school. He attended a Jewish school in Rome until the end of 1939 when his father was sponsored by members of the Menninger family to emigrate to America. The family settled in Topeka, Kansas.
Go to Profile#1221
Lester Dubins
#18344
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Lester Dubins was an American mathematician noted primarily for his research in probability theory. He was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 through 2004, and in retirement was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics.
Go to Profile#1222
Francisco Santos Leal
#25255
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Francisco Santos Leal is a Spanish mathematician at the University of Cantabria, known for finding a counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture in polyhedral combinatorics. In 2015 he won the Fulkerson Prize for this research.
Go to Profile#1223
Daniela Witten
#16886
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Daniela M. Witten is an American biostatistician. She is a professor and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the use of machine learning to understand high-dimensional data.
Go to Profile#1224
Valentina Borok
#26154
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Valentina Mikhailovna Borok was a Soviet Ukrainian mathematician. She is mainly known for her work on partial differential equations. Life Borok was born on July 9, 1931, in Kharkiv in Ukraine , into a Jewish family. Her father, Michail Borok, was a chemist, scientist and an expert in material science. Her mother, Bella Sigal, was a well-known economist. Because of her mothers' high position at the ministry of Economics, Valentina Borok had a privileged early childhood. However, because of the political situation, her mother voluntarily resigned in 1937, and took a lower position, presumably because she knew she couldn't possibly have been spared the repressions of the late 1930s.
Go to Profile#1225
Wilhelm Klingenberg
#28196
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Wilhelm Paul Albert Klingenberg was a German mathematician who worked on differential geometry and in particular on closed geodesics. Life Klingenberg was born in 1924 as the son of a Protestant minister. In 1934 the family moved to Berlin; he joined the Wehrmacht in 1941. After the war, he studied mathematics at the University of Kiel, where he finished his Ph.D. in 1950 with , with a thesis in affine differential geometry.
Go to Profile#1226
Geoffrey Watson
#15303
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Geoffrey Stuart Watson was an Australian statistician. Watson was born in Bendigo, Victoria in 1921. He studied at the University of Melbourne, and received his PhD at the North Carolina State University in 1951. After taking positions at the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Toronto and Johns Hopkins University, he became chair of the Department of Statistics of Princeton University in 1970. He remained there until his death.
Go to Profile#1227
Igor Dolgachev
#22779
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Igor V. Dolgachev is a Russian–American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Michigan since 1978. He introduced Dolgachev surfaces in 1981.
Go to Profile#1228
Hélyette Geman
#11522
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Hélyette Geman is a French academic in the field of mathematical finance. Her career has spanned several sub-disciplines including insurance, probability theory and the finance of commodities. She is a Professor of Mathematical Finance at Birkbeck College, University of London where she is the Director of the Commodity Finance Centre and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#1229
Mark J. Ablowitz
#22959
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Mark Jay Ablowitz is a professor in the department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. He was born in New York City. Education Ablowitz received his Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from University of Rochester, and completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics under the supervision of David Benney at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971.
Go to Profile#1230
Vadym Adamyan
#21792
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Vadym Movsesovich Adamyan is a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician and theoretical physicist, professor and head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Odessa University. He is known for his contributions to operator theory and functional analysis.
Go to Profile#1231
Robin Gandy
#7176
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Robin Oliver Gandy was a British mathematician and logician. He was a friend, student, and associate of Alan Turing, having been supervised by Turing during his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where they worked together.
Go to Profile#1232
Frédéric Hélein
#25057
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Frédéric Hélein is a French mathematician. He is university professor at Paris Diderot University. Hélein earned his doctorate at École polytechnique under supervision of Jean-Michel Coron. In 1998 Hélein was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He won the 1999 Fermat Prize, jointly with Fabrice Bethuel, for several important contributions to the theory of variational calculus.
Go to Profile#1233
Melody Chan
#22453
Overall Influence
Melody Tung Chan is an American mathematician and violinist who works as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. She is a winner of the Alice T. Schafer Prize and of the AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. Her research involves combinatorial commutative algebra, graph theory, and tropical geometry.
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Martin Hyland
#10119
Overall Influence
Martin Elliott Hyland is professor of mathematical logic at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. His interests include mathematical logic, category theory, and theoretical computer science.
Go to Profile#1235
John Selfridge
#14757
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
John Lewis Selfridge , was an American mathematician who contributed to the fields of analytic number theory, computational number theory, and combinatorics. Education Selfridge received his Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Theodore Motzkin.
Go to Profile#1236
Helmut Wielandt
#22910
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
Helmut Wielandt was a German mathematician who worked on permutation groups. He was born in Niedereggenen, Lörrach, Germany. He gave a plenary lecture Entwicklungslinien in der Strukturtheorie der endlichen Gruppen at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1958 at Edinburgh and was an Invited Speaker with talk Bedingungen für die Konjugiertheit von Untergruppen endlicher Gruppen at the ICM in 1962 in Stockholm.
Go to Profile#1237
Arnold Schönhage
#7760
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Arnold Schönhage is a German mathematician and computer scientist. Schönhage was professor at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, and also in Tübingen and Konstanz. Together with Volker Strassen, he developed the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm for the multiplication of large numbers that has a runtime of O. For many years, this was the fastest way to multiply large integers, although Schönhage and Strassen predicted that an algorithm with a run-time of N should exist. In 2019, Joris van der Hoeven and David Harvey finally developed an algorithm with this runtime, proving that S...
Go to Profile#1238
Jan Karel Lenstra
#10207
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jan Karel Lenstra is a Dutch mathematician and operations researcher, known for his work on scheduling algorithms, local search, and the travelling salesman problem. Lenstra received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 1976, advised by Gijsbert de Leve. He then became a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, where he remained until 1989. After taking positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, he returned to CWI as its director in 2003. He stepped down in 2011, and at that time became a CWI Fellow. He was editor-in-chief o...
Go to Profile#1239
John Mighton
#7737
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
John Mighton, OC born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on October 2, 1957, is a Canadian mathematician, playwright and best-selling author, who is known for his work supporting children's math. Mighton founded JUMP Math as a charity in 2002 and developed the JUMP Math program to address student underachievement in math. Mighton has won national and international awards for his contributions to both Canadian theatre and math education.
Go to Profile#1240
Bernard Dacorogna
#26299
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bernard Dacorogna is a Swiss mathematician, born 15 October 1953, in Alexandria, Egypt. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and his Ph.D. at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, in 1980 under the supervision of John M. Ball. He is professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , Switzerland. He is a specialist of the calculus of variations and of partial differential equations. He has written several articles and books. The Chaire de la Vallée Poussin 2018 of the Université Catholique de Louvain is attributed to him.
Go to Profile#1241
A. K. Dewdney
#5904
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Alexander Keewatin Dewdney is a Canadian mathematician, computer scientist, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Dewdney is the son of Canadian artist and author Selwyn Dewdney, and brother of poet Christopher Dewdney.
Go to Profile#1242
Christopher Hacon
#22354
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Christopher Derek Hacon is a mathematician with British, Italian and US nationalities. He is currently distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Utah where he holds a Presidential Endowed Chair. His research interests include algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#1243
Hung Cheng
#18943
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Hung Cheng , also known as Hong Zheng,is an American mathematician, novelist, and physicist teaching at MIT. Education Cheng received his B.Sc and the Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, in 1959 and 1961. He had post-doctorate research appointments at Caltech, Princeton University and Harvard University before joining the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 1965. His doctoral advisor was Leverett Davis, Jr., and his thesis was on spin absorption lines of solids.
Go to Profile#1244
Bruce Lee Rothschild
#21520
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bruce Lee Rothschild is an American mathematician and educator, specializing in combinatorial mathematics. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Early life and education Rothschild was born in 1941 in Los Angeles, California.
Go to Profile#1245
Huzihiro Araki
#20572
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
was a Japanese mathematical physicist and mathematician who worked on the foundations of quantum field theory, on quantum statistical mechanics, and on the theory of operator algebras. Biography Araki is the son of the University of Kyoto physics professor Gentarō Araki, with whom he studied and with whom in 1954 he published his first physics paper. He earned his diploma under Hideki Yukawa and in 1960 he attained his doctorate at Princeton University with thesis advisors Rudolf Haag and Arthur Wightman. He was a professor at the University of Kyoto starting in 1966, and became the director o...
Go to Profile#1246
Michel Goemans
#17478
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Michel Xavier Goemans is a Belgian-American professor of applied mathematics and the RSA Professor of Mathematics at MIT working in discrete mathematics and combinatorial optimization at CSAIL and MIT Operations Research Center.
Go to Profile#1247
Abe Sklar
#7695
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Abe Sklar was an American mathematician and a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the inventor of copulas in probability theory. Education and career Sklar was born in Chicago to Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine. He attended Von Steuben High School and later enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1942, when he was only 16. Sklar went on to become a student of Tom M. Apostol at the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1956. His students at IIT have included geometers Clark Kimberling and Marj...
Go to Profile#1248
Basil Gordon
#28120
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Basil Gordon was a mathematician at UCLA, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. He obtained his Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Tom Apostol. Ken Ono was one of his students.
Go to Profile#1249
Robert W. Floyd
#1594
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Robert W Floyd was a computer scientist. His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm , which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph and his work on parsing; Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm for detecting cycles in a sequence was attributed to him as well. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering images, also called Floyd–Steinberg dithering . He pioneered in the field of program verification using logical assertions with the 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was a contribution to what later became Hoare logic.
Go to Profile#1250
Wang Yuan
#19745
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Wang Yuan was a Chinese mathematician and writer known for his contributions to the Goldbach conjecture. He was a president of the Chinese Mathematical Society and head of the Institute of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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