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,
#12001
James H. Wilkinson
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
James Hardy Wilkinson FRS was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering.
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Kurt Gödel
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege.
Go to Profile#12003
Keith Stewartson
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Keith Stewartson was an English mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. Early life The youngest of three children, Stewartson was born to an English baker in 1925. He was raised in Billingham, County Durham, where he attended Stockton Secondary School, and went to St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1942. He won the Drury Prize in 1943 for his work in Mathematical Tripos.
Go to Profile#12004
George W. Snedecor
1881 - 1974 (93 years)
George Waddel Snedecor was an American mathematician and statistician. He contributed to the foundations of analysis of variance, data analysis, experimental design, and statistical methodology. Snedecor's F-distribution and the George W. Snedecor Award of the American Statistical Association are named after him.
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Elliott Waters Montroll
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Elliott Waters Montroll was an American scientist and mathematician. Education Elliott Montroll was born on May 4, 1916, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his elementary and high school education at the Dormont Public Schools. In 1933 he entered the University of Pittsburgh and in 1937 he received a BS degree in Chemistry. From 1937 until 1939 he was a graduate assistant in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and during the first semester of the school year 1939–1940 he carried out research in the Chemistry Department of Columbia University. He was awarded a ...
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Herman Otto Hartley
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Herman Otto Hartley was a German American statistician. He made significant contributions in many areas of statistics, mathematical programming, and optimization. He also founded Texas A&M University's Department of Statistics.
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Rudolf Ernest Langer
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Rudolf Ernest Langer was an American mathematician, known for the Langer correction and as a president of the Mathematical Association of America. Career Langer, the elder brother of William L. Langer, earned his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under G. D. Birkhoff. He taught mathematics at Dartmouth College from 1922 to 1925. From 1927 to 1964 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, from 1942 to 1952, the chair of the mathematics department. From 1956 to 1963 he was the director of the Army Mathematics Research Center; he was succeeded as director by J. Barkley Rosser.
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John Lighton Synge
1897 - 1995 (98 years)
John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician and physicist, whose seven-decade career included significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the USA. He was a prolific author and influential mentor, and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity.
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Lancelot Hogben
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and wrote popular books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.
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Alfréd Rényi
1921 - 1970 (49 years)
Alfréd Rényi was a Hungarian mathematician known for his work in probability theory, though he also made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory. Life Rényi was born in Budapest to Artúr Rényi and Borbála Alexander; his father was a mechanical engineer, while his mother was the daughter of philosopher and literary critic Bernhard Alexander; his uncle was Franz Alexander, a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician.
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Sydney Goldstein
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sydney Goldstein FRS was a British mathematician noted for his contribution to fluid dynamics. He is described as: "... one of those who most influenced progress in fluid dynamics during the 20th century."
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Hans Freudenthal
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Hans Freudenthal was a Jewish German-born Dutch mathematician. He made substantial contributions to algebraic topology and also took an interest in literature, philosophy, history and mathematics education.
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Claude Chevalley
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Claude Chevalley was a French mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry, class field theory, finite group theory and the theory of algebraic groups. He was a founding member of the Bourbaki group.
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Jack Kiefer
1924 - 1981 (57 years)
Jack Carl Kiefer was an American mathematical statistician at Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley . His research interests included the optimal design of experiments, which was his major research area, as well as a wide variety of topics in mathematical statistics.
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J. H. C. Whitehead
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
John Henry Constantine Whitehead FRS , known as "Henry", was a British mathematician and was one of the founders of homotopy theory. He was born in Chennai , in India, and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1960.
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Marston Morse
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Harold Calvin Marston Morse was an American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large, a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. The Morse–Palais lemma, one of the key results in Morse theory, is named after him, as is the Thue–Morse sequence, an infinite binary sequence with many applications.
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Stanisław Ulam
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Stanisław Marcin Ulam was a Polish-American mathematician and nuclear physicist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures.
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Joseph L. Walsh
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Joseph Leonard Walsh was an American mathematician who worked mainly in the field of analysis. The Walsh function and the Walsh–Hadamard code are named after him. The Grace–Walsh–Szegő coincidence theorem is important in the study of the location of the zeros of multivariate polynomials.
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Reuben Goodstein
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Reuben Louis Goodstein was an English mathematician with a strong interest in the philosophy and teaching of mathematics. Education Goodstein was educated at St Paul's School in London. He received his Master's degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge. After this, he worked at the University of Reading but ultimately spent most of his academic career at the University of Leicester. He earned his PhD from the University of London in 1946 while still working in Reading.
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Arthur Erdélyi
1908 - 1977 (69 years)
Arthur Erdélyi FRS, FRSE was a Hungarian-born British mathematician. Erdélyi was a leading expert on special functions, particularly orthogonal polynomials and hypergeometric functions. Biography He was born Arthur Diamant in Budapest, Hungary to Ignác Josef Armin Diamant and Frederike Roth. His name was changed to Erdélyi when his mother remarried to Paul Erdélyi. He attended the primary and secondary schools there from 1914 to 1926. His interest in mathematics dates back to this time. Erdélyi was a Jew, and so it was difficult for him to receive a university education in his native Hungary. He travelled to Brno, Czechoslovakia, to obtain a degree in electrical engineering.
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Abraham Adrian Albert
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Abraham Adrian Albert was an American mathematician. In 1939, he received the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize in Algebra for his work on Riemann matrices. He is best known for his work on the Albert–Brauer–Hasse–Noether theorem on finite-dimensional division algebras over number fields and as the developer of Albert algebras, which are also known as exceptional Jordan algebras.
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Jacob Tamarkin
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Jacob David Tamarkin was a Russian-American mathematician, best known for his work in mathematical analysis. Biography Tamarkin was born in Chernigov, Russian Empire , to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, David Tamarkin, was a physician and his mother, Sophie Krassilschikov, was from a family of a landowner. He shares a common ancestor with the Van Leer family, sometimes spelled Von Löhr or Valar. He moved to St. Petersburg as a child and grew up there. In high school, he befriended Alexander Friedmann, a future cosmologist, with whom he wrote his first mathematics paper in 1906, and remained friends and colleagues until Friedmann's sudden death in 1925.
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Charles Francis Richter
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist. Richter is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at the California Institute of Technology.
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David Widder
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
David Vernon Widder was an American mathematician. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1924 under George Birkhoff and went on to join the faculty there. He was a co-founder of the Duke Mathematical Journal and the author of the textbook Advanced Calculus . He wrote also The Laplace transform , An introduction to transform theory, and The convolution transform .
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Rensis Likert
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.
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Carl Ludwig Siegel
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Carl Ludwig Siegel was a German mathematician specialising in analytic number theory. He is known for, amongst other things, his contributions to the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem in Diophantine approximation, Siegel's method, Siegel's lemma and the Siegel mass formula for quadratic forms. He has been named one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.
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Joseph Ritt
1893 - 1951 (58 years)
Joseph Fels Ritt was an American mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century. He was born and died in New York. After beginning his undergraduate studies at City College of New York, Ritt received his B.A. from George Washington University in 1913. He then earned a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University in 1917 under the supervision of Edward Kasner. After doing calculations for the war effort in World War I, he joined the Columbia faculty in 1921. He served as department chair from 1942 to 1945, and in 1945 became the Davies Professor of Mathematics. In 1932, Ge...
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L. H. C. Tippett
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Leonard Henry Caleb Tippett , known professionally as L. H. C. Tippett, was an English statistician. Tippett was born in London but spent most of his early life in Cornwall and attended St Austell County Grammar School, where his contemporaries included the historian A. L. Rowse. Tippett graduated in physics in the early 1920s from Imperial College London. He studied for his Master of Science in statistics under Karl Pearson at the Galton Laboratory, University College London and R. A. Fisher at Rothamsted. He spent his entire career, 1925 to 1965, on the staff of the Shirley Institute, Manchester becoming in 1952 one of the first Assistant Directors.
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Douglas Hartree
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano.
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Reginald Ruggles Gates
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Reginald Ruggles Gates , was a Canadian-born geneticist who published widely in the fields of botany and eugenics. Early life Reginald Ruggles Gates was born on May 1, 1882, near Middleton, Nova Scotia, to a family of English ancestry. He had a twin sister named Charlotte.
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Marshall H. Stone
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Marshall Harvey Stone was an American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, topology and the study of Boolean algebrass. Biography Stone was the son of Harlan Fiske Stone, who was the Chief Justice of the United States in 1941–1946. Marshall Stone's family expected him to become a lawyer like his father, but he became enamored of mathematics while he was a Harvard University undergraduate. He completed a Harvard PhD in 1926, with a thesis on differential equations that was supervised by George David Birkhoff. Between 1925 and 1937, he taught at Harvard, Yale University, and Columbia University.
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Austin Bradford Hill
1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Sir Austin Bradford Hill was an English epidemiologist and statistician, pioneered the randomised clinical trial and, together with Richard Doll, demonstrated the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Hill is widely known for pioneering the "Bradford Hill" criteria for determining a causal association.
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Maurice Kendall
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Sir Maurice George Kendall, FBA was a prominent British statistician. The Kendall tau rank correlation is named after him. Education and early life Maurice Kendall was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire as the only child of engineering worker John Roughton Kendall and Georgina, née Brewer. His paternal grandfather was a publican, running The Woolpack at Kettering.
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Karol Borsuk
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Karol Borsuk was a Polish mathematician. His main interest was topology, while he obtained significant results also in functional analysis. Borsuk introduced the theory of absolute retracts and absolute neighborhood retracts , and the cohomotopy groups, later called Borsuk–Spanier cohomotopy groups. He also founded shape theory. He has constructed various beautiful examples of topological spaces, e.g. an acyclic, 3-dimensional continuum which admits a fixed point free homeomorphism onto itself; also 2-dimensional, contractible polyhedra which have no free edge. His topological and geometric...
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Richard E. Bellman
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Richard Ernest Bellman was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founded the leading biomathematical journal Mathematical Biosciences.
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Max Born
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Max Born was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".
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G. I. Taylor
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM FRS FRSE was a British physicist and mathematician, who made contributions to fluid dynamics and wave theory. Early life and education Taylor was born in St. John's Wood, London. His father, Edward Ingram Taylor, was an artist, and his mother, Margaret Boole, came from a family of mathematicians . As a child he was fascinated by science after attending the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and performed experiments using paint rollers and sticky-tape.
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John von Neumann
1903 - 1957 (54 years)
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analy...
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Richard von Mises
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:
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Harold Hotelling
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
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G. H. Hardy
1877 - 1947 (70 years)
Godfrey Harold Hardy was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. In biology, he is known for the Hardy–Weinberg principle, a basic principle of population genetics.
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Jerzy Neyman
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Jerzy Neyman was a Polish mathematician and statistician who spent the first part of his professional career at various institutions in Warsaw, Poland and then at University College London, and the second part at the University of California, Berkeley. Neyman first introduced the modern concept of a confidence interval into statistical hypothesis testing and co-revised Ronald Fisher's null hypothesis testing .
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George Pólya
1887 - 1985 (98 years)
George Pólya was a Hungarian American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of The Martians, an informal category which included one of his most famous students at ETH Zurich, John von Neumann.
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