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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#12001
John Edmund Kerrich
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
John Edmund Kerrich was a mathematician noted for a series of experiments in probability which he conducted while interned in Nazi-occupied Denmark in the 1940s. Biography John Kerrich was born in Norfolk, England and grew up in South Africa. He was educated there and in the UK .
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Marcel Riesz
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Marcel Riesz was a Hungarian mathematician, known for work on summation methods, potential theory, and other parts of analysis, as well as number theory, partial differential equations, and Clifford algebras. He spent most of his career in Lund .
Go to Profile#12003
Stefan Banach
1892 - 1945 (53 years)
Stefan Banach was a Polish mathematician who is generally considered one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians. He was the founder of modern functional analysis, and an original member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. His major work was the 1932 book, Théorie des opérations linéaires , the first monograph on the general theory of functional analysis.
Go to Profile#12004
Philipp Frank
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Philipp Frank was a physicist, mathematician and philosopher of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was a logical positivist, and a member of the Vienna Circle. He was influenced by Mach and was one of the Machists criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
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Hanna Neumann
1914 - 1971 (57 years)
Johanna Neumann was a German-born mathematician who worked on group theory. Biography Neumann was born on 12 February 1914 in Lankwitz, Steglitz-Zehlendorf , Germany. She was the youngest of three children of Hermann and Katharina von Caemmerer. As a result of her father's death in the first days of the First World War, the family income was small, and from the age of thirteen she was coaching school children.
Go to Profile#12006
Arnaud Denjoy
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Arnaud Denjoy was a French mathematician. Biography Denjoy was born in Auch, Gers. His contributions include work in harmonic analysis and differential equations. His integral was the first to be able to integrate all derivatives. Among his students is Gustave Choquet. He is also known for the more general broad Denjoy integral, or Khinchin integral.
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Henry Roy Brahana
1895 - 1972 (77 years)
Henry Roy Brahana was a mathematician, specializing in metabelian groups and related geometric structures. H. Roy Brahana received his PhD from Princeton University in 1920 under the direction of Oswald Veblen. In the autumn of 1920, he joined the mathematics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and remained there until his retirement in 1963. Brahana was the editor for the publication by the University of Illinois Press of the collected works of George Abram Miller in 5 volumes, coming out in the years 1935, 1939, 1946, 1955, and 1959. The H. Roy Brahana Prize for undergraduates at U.
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Thomas Gerald Room
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Thomas Gerald Room FRS FAA was an Australian mathematician who is best known for Room squares. He was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Biography Thomas Room was born on 10 November 1902, near London, England. He studied mathematics in St John's College, Cambridge, and was a wrangler in 1923. He continued at Cambridge as a graduate student, and was elected as a fellow in 1925, but instead took a position at the University of Liverpool. He returned to Cambridge in 1927, at which time he completed his PhD, with a thesis supervised by H. F. Baker. Room remained at Cambrid...
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Otto Schilling
1911 - 1973 (62 years)
Otto Franz Georg Schilling was a German-American mathematician known as one of the leading algebraists of his time. He was born in Apolda and studied in the 1930s at the Universität Jena and the Universität Göttingen under Emmy Noether. After Noether was forced to leave Germany by the Nazis, he found a new advisor in Helmut Hasse, and obtained his Ph.D. from Marburg University in 1934 on the thesis Über gewisse Beziehungen zwischen der Arithmetik hyperkomplexer Zahlsysteme und algebraischer Zahlkörper. He then was post doc at Trinity College, Cambridge before moving to Institute for Advanced Study 1935–37 and the Johns Hopkins University 1937–39.
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Sidney Wilcox McCuskey
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Sidney Wilcox McCuskey was an American mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio on February 28, 1907, the son of Charles McCuskey and Lottie . In 1925 Sidney became an amateur radio hobbyist. He matriculated to the Case School of Applied Science where in 1929 he was awarded a B.S. in Civil Engineering. The following year he received his M.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a stint at surveying, he was influenced by Jason John Nassau to study astronomy at Harvard University. There his graduate adviser was the Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok.
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Harris Hancock
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Harris Hancock was a mathematics professor at the University of Cincinnati who worked on algebraic number theory and related areas. He was the brother of the horse breeder Arthur B. Hancock. Biography Harris Hancock was born at his family's estate, Ellerslie, in Albemarle County, Virginia on May 14, 1867. He graduated from the University of Virginia's school of mathematics in 1886. He received an AB from Johns Hopkins University in 1888, an AM and PhD from the University of Berlin in 1894, and an ScD from the University of Paris in 1901.
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Lloyd Dines
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Lloyd Lyne Dines was an American-Canadian mathematician, known for his pioneering work on linear inequalities. Education and career Dines received B.A. in 1906 and M.A. in 1907 from Northwestern University and Ph.D. in 1911 from the University of Chicago under Gilbert Bliss with thesis The highest common factor of a system of polynomials in one variable, with an application to implicit functions. In 1911 he became an instructor of mathematics at Columbia University and then became an associate professor at the University of Arizona. From 1915 to 1934 he was a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
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William Boone
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
William Werner Boone was an American mathematician. He completed his undergrad degree as a part time student at the University of Cincinnati. Alonzo Church was his Ph.D. advisor at Princeton, and Kurt Gödel was his friend at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Hugo Steinhaus
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów , where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach–Steinhaus theorem. After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in t...
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Earl D. Rainville
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
Professor Earl David Rainville taught in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he began as an assistant professor in 1941. He studied at the University of Colorado, receiving his B.A. there in 1930 before going on to graduate studies at Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1939 under the supervision of Ruel Churchill.
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Gisiro Maruyama
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Gisiro Maruyama was a Japanese mathematician, noted for his contributions to the study of stochastic processes. The Euler–Maruyama method for the numerical solution of stochastic differential equations bears his name.
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David Raymond Curtiss
1878 - 1953 (75 years)
David Raymond Curtiss was an American mathematician. He served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1935 to 1936. He was also vice president of the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Anthony Bartholomay
1919 - 1975 (56 years)
Anthony Francis Bartholomay was a mathematician who introduced molecular set theory, a topic on which he wrote books. Life Bartholomay was born on August 11, 1919. He would receive degrees from Hamilton College, Syracuse University, and Harvard University. Bartholomay would work at Harvard Medical School, Medical School of Ohio, Brown University, Keuka College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Rutgers University. He died on March 21, 1975, at 55 years old. A resident of the Somerset section of Franklin Township, Somerset County, New Jersey, he died at a New Brunswick, New Jersey hospital...
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Jacob Levitzki
1904 - 1956 (52 years)
Jacob Levitzki, also known as Yaakov Levitsky was an Israeli mathematician. Biography Levitzki was born in 1904 in the Russian Empire and emigrated to then Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1912. After completing his studies at the Herzliya Gymnasia, he travelled to Germany and, in 1929, obtained a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Emmy Noether. In 1931, after two years at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, Levitzki returned to Palestine to join the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Kazimierz Kuratowski
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Kazimierz Kuratowski was a Polish mathematician and logician. He was one of the leading representatives of the Warsaw School of Mathematics. He worked as a professor at the University of Warsaw and at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences . Between 1946 and 1953, he served as President of the Polish Mathematical Society.
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Prescott Durand Crout
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Prescott Durand Crout was an American mathematician. Crout was born in Ohio, but lived and worked in Massachusetts. In 1929 he finished the MIT class. His PhD thesis was entitled "The Approximation of Functions and Integrals by a Linear Combination of Functions".On January 2, 1933 he married Charlotte Louise Zander. They had four children.
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Juliusz Schauder
1899 - 1943 (44 years)
Juliusz Paweł Schauder was a Polish mathematician known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and mathematical physics. Life and career Born on 21 September 1899 in Lwów to a lawyer father of Jewish descent, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army right after his graduation from school and saw action on the Italian front. He was captured and imprisoned in Italy. He entered the university in Lwów in 1919 and received his doctorate in 1923. He got no appointment at the university and continued his research while working as teacher at a secondary school. Due t...
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Sally Elizabeth Carlson
1896 - 2000 (104 years)
Sally Elizabeth Carlson was an American mathematician, the first woman and one of the first two people to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Minnesota. Early life and education Carlson was born in Minneapolis to a large working-class family of Swedish immigrants. She became her high school valedictorian in 1913, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1917, and earned a master's degree there in 1918. After teaching mathematics for two years, she returned to graduate study in 1920, and completed her Ph.D. at Minnesota in 1924. Both students were supervised by Dunham...
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Paco Lagerstrom
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Paco Axel Lagerstrom was an applied mathematician and aeronautical engineer. He was trained formally in mathematics, but worked for much of his career in aeronautical applications. He was known for work in applying the method of asymptotic expansion to fluid mechanics problems. Several of his works have become classics, including "Matched Asymptotic Expansions: Ideas And Techniques".
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Edwin Plimpton Adams
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Edwin Plimpton Adams was an American physicist known for translating Einstein's lectures. Clinton Joseph Davisson attended his lectures. Adams was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1915.
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Henry Lewis Rietz
1875 - 1943 (68 years)
Henry Lewis Rietz was an American mathematician, actuarial scientist, and statistician, who was a leader in the development of statistical theory. He became the first president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
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Alexander Friedmann
1888 - 1925 (37 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He originated the pioneering theory that the universe is expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed known as the Friedmann equations.
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Leonida Tonelli
1885 - 1946 (61 years)
Leonida Tonelli was an Italian mathematician, noted for proving Tonelli's theorem, a variation of Fubini's theorem, and for introducing semicontinuity methods as a common tool for the direct method in the calculus of variations.
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Georges Darmois
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Georges Darmois was a French mathematician and statistician. He pioneered in the theory of sufficiency, in stellar statistics, and in factor analysis. He was also one of the first French mathematicians to teach British mathematical statistics.
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Åke Pleijel
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Åke Vilhelm Carl Pleijel was a Swedish mathematician. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Stockholm University in 1940 , and later became Professor of Mathematics at Uppsala University. Åke Vilhelm Carl Pleijel published the paper in which the Minakshisundaram–Pleijel zeta function was introduced.
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Subbaramiah Minakshisundaram
1913 - 1968 (55 years)
Subbaramiah Minakshisundaram , also known as Minakshi or SMS, was an Indian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and heat kernels. In 1946, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, America, where he met Åke Pleijel. In 1949, the two wrote a paper together called, Some properties of the eigenfunctions of the Laplace-operator on Riemannian manifolds, in which they introduced the Minakshisundaram-Pleijel zeta function.
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Johann Radon
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Johann Karl August Radon was an Austrian mathematician. His doctoral dissertation was on the calculus of variations . Life Radon was born in Tetschen, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, now Děčín, Czech Republic. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1910. He spent the winter semester 1910/11 at the University of Göttingen, then he was an assistant at the German Technical University in Brno, and from 1912 to 1919 at the Technical University of Vienna. In 1913/14, he passed his habilitation at the University of Vienna. Due to his near-sightedness, he was exempt from the draft d...
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Charles Ernest Weatherburn
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Charles Ernest Weatherburn was an Australian-born mathematician. Weatherburn graduated from the University of Sydney an MA in 1906. After being awarded a scholarship he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge sitting the Mathematical Tripos examinations in 1908. Weatherburn was awarded a First Class degree. On his return to Australia, Weatherburn taught at Ormond College of the University of Melbourne.
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Margaret Merrell
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Margaret Merrell was an American biostatistician who taught at Johns Hopkins University for many years and became the first female full professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is known for her research with Lowell Reed on the construction of life tables. She also observed that, for longitudinal data on individuals, fitting a curve to each individual and then averaging the parameters describing the curve will typically give different results than averaging the data values of the individuals and fitting a single curve to the averaged data.
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Burton Howard Camp
1880 - 1980 (100 years)
Burton Howard Camp was an American mathematician and mathematical statistician. For most of his career he was a professor of Mathematics at Wesleyan University. Early life and education He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Howard Alexander Camp and Alice Amelia Camp.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Temple Rice Hollcroft
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Temple Rice Hollcroft, Sr. was an American mathematician and local historian. Hollcroft received B.S. in 1912 and A.B. in 1914 from Hanover College and then A.M. in 1915 from the University of Kentucky. He received in 1917 his Ph.D. from Cornell University under Virgil Snyder and during WW I served in France as a second lieutenant in the Field Artillery. Hollcroft was a mathematics professor at Wells College from 1918 to 1954, when he retired as professor emeritus. He served for 14 years as associate secretary of the American Mathematical Society. In 1932 in Zurich he was an Invited Speaker o...
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Taira Honda
1932 - 1975 (43 years)
was a Japanese mathematician working on number theory who proved the Honda–Tate theorem classifying abelian varieties over finite fields.
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