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,
#1251
William Karush
#7077
Overall Influence
1917 - 1997 (80 years)
William Karush was an American professor of mathematics at California State University at Northridge and was a mathematician best known for his contribution to Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions. In his master's thesis he was the first to publish these necessary conditions for the inequality-constrained problem, although he became renowned after a seminal conference paper by Harold W. Kuhn and Albert W. Tucker. He also worked as a physicist for the Manhattan Project, although he signed the Szilárd petition and became a peace activist afterwards.
Go to Profile#1252
Yoav Benjamini
#11575
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Yoav Benjamini is an Israeli statistician best known for development of the “false discovery rate” criterion. He is currently The Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#1253
Jay Wright Forrester
#1050
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
Jay Wright Forrester was a pioneering American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.
Go to Profile#1254
Guy Terjanian
#23424
Overall Influence
Guy Terjanian is a French mathematician who has worked on algebraic number theory. He achieved his Ph.D. under Claude Chevalley in 1966, and at that time published a counterexample to the original form of a conjecture of Emil Artin, which suitably modified had just been proved as the Ax-Kochen theorem.
Go to Profile#1255
Montserrat Teixidor i Bigas
#26990
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Montserrat Teixidor i Bigas is a Spanish-American academic who is a professor of mathematics at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She specializes in algebraic geometry, especially Moduli of Vector Bundles on curves.
Go to Profile#1256
Michel Waldschmidt
#22002
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michel Waldschmidt is a French mathematician, specializing in number theory, especially transcendental numbers. Biography Waldschmidt was educated at Lycée Henri Poincaré and the University of Nancy until 1968. In 1972 he defended his thesis, titled Indépendance algébrique de nombres transcendants and directed by Jean Fresnel, the University of Bordeaux, where he was research associate of CNRS in 1971–2. He was then a lecturer at Paris-Sud 11 University in 1972–3, then a lecturer at the University of Paris VI , where he is Professor since 1973. Waldschmidt was also a visiting professor at places including the École normale supérieure.
Go to Profile#1257
Haynes Miller
#26139
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Haynes Robert Miller is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic topology. Miller completed his undergraduate study at Harvard University and earned his PhD in 1974 under the supervision of John Coleman Moore at Princeton University with thesis Some Algebraic Aspects of the Adams–Novikov Spectral Sequence. After his PhD, he became an assistant professor at Harvard and at Northwestern University, from 1977 at the University of Washington, and from 1984 a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Since 1986 he is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1992 t...
Go to Profile#1258
Philippe Michel
#20361
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Philippe Gabriel Michel is a French mathematician who holds the chair in analytic number theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Early life, education and career Michel was born in Lyon. He studied from 1989 to 1993 at the École normale supérieure de Cachan, and then moved to the University of Paris-Sud, where he earned a doctorate in 1995 under the supervision of Étienne Fouvry and then a habilitation in 1998. He was a professor at the University of Montpellier from 1998 to 2008, when he moved to EPFL.
Go to Profile#1259
Vida Dujmović
#25312
Overall Influence
Vida Dujmović is a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in graph theory and graph algorithms, and particularly for graph drawing, for the structural theory of graph width parameters including treewidth and queue number, and for the use of these parameters in the parameterized complexity of graph drawing. She is a professor of electrical engineering & computer science at the University of Ottawa, where she holds the University Research Chair in Structural and Algorithmic Graph Theory.
Go to Profile#1260
Jeffrey Lagarias
#13575
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jeffrey Clark Lagarias is a mathematician and professor at the University of Michigan. Education While in high school in 1966, Lagarias studied astronomy at the Summer Science Program. He completed an S.B. and S.M. in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. The title of his thesis was "Evaluation of certain character sums". He was a Putnam Fellow at MIT in 1970. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT for his thesis "The 4-part of the class group of a quadratic field", in 1974. His advisor for both his masters and Ph.D was Harold Stark.
Go to Profile#1261
Michèle Vergne
#23401
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michèle Vergne is a French mathematician, specializing in analysis and representation theory. Life and work Michèle Vergne studied from 1962 to 1966 at the École Normal Supérieure de jeunes filles, which today is part of the ENS. She wrote her diploma thesis in 1966 with Claude Chevalley, entitled "Variété des algèbres de Lie nilpotentes" and her doctoral thesis in 1971 under the supervision of Jacques Dixmier at the University of Paris. She is currently Directeur de Recherche at CNRS.
Go to Profile#1262
Zenon Ivanovich Borevich
#30111
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Zenon Ivanovich Borevich Зенон Иванович Боревич was a Russian mathematician who worked on homological algebra, algebraic number theory, integral representations, and linear groups.
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François Golse
#20800
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
François Golse is a French mathematician. Golse was awarded a doctorate in 1986 at the Paris XIII University with thesis advisor Claude Bardos and thesis Contributions à l'étude des équations du transfert radiatif. In 1987 he became a scientist of CNRS at the École normale supérieure. In 1993 he became a professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University . He has been a professor at the École Polytechnique since 2006.
Go to Profile#1264
Jeff Kahn
#25434
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jeffry Ned Kahn is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University notable for his work in combinatorics. Education Kahn received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1979 after completing his dissertation under his advisor Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri.
Go to Profile#1265
Takahiro Shiota
#27518
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Takahiro Shiota is a Japanese mathematician at Kyoto University. In 1986, he proved Novikov's conjecture about the Riemann–Schottky problem by characterization of Jacobian varieties. Shiota obtained his doctorate at Harvard University in 1984.
Go to Profile#1266
Ivan Cherednik
#25951
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ivan Cherednik is a Russian-American mathematician. He introduced double affine Hecke algebras, and used them to prove Macdonald's constant term conjecture in . He has also dealt with algebraic geometry, number theory and Soliton equations. His research interests include representation theory, mathematical physics, and algebraic combinatorics. He is currently the Austin M. Carr Distinguished Professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Lizhen Ji
#30705
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lizhen Ji , is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Biography April 1964, Ji was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Ji graduated BS from Hangzhou University in Hangzhou in 1984. From 1984 to 1985, Ji was a master student at the Department of Mathematics of Hangzhou University. Ji went to United States to continue his study in 1985, and in 1987 Ji obtained MS from the Department of Mathematics of the University of California, San Diego. In 1991, Ji obtained PhD from the Northeastern University .
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Joan Clarke
#7592
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted the German secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire , in 1946.
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Thomas W. Hungerford
#23659
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Thomas William Hungerford was an American mathematician who worked in algebra and mathematics education. He is the author or coauthor of several widely used and widely cited textbooks covering high-school to graduate-level mathematics. From 1963 until 1980 he taught at the University of Washington and then at Cleveland State University until 2003. From 2003–2014 he was at Saint Louis University. Hungerford had a special interest in promoting the use of technology to teach mathematics.
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Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
#6865
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht is a Polish-American mathematician and computer scientist. Life Andrzej Ehrenfeucht formulated the Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game, using the back-and-forth method given in Roland Fraïssé's PhD thesis. Also named for Ehrenfeucht is the Ehrenfeucht–Mycielski sequence.
Go to Profile#1271
Eduardo D. Sontag
#11921
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Eduardo Daniel Sontag is an Argentine-American mathematician, and distinguished university professor at Northeastern University, who works in the fields control theory, dynamical systems, systems molecular biology, cancer and immunology, theoretical computer science, neural networks, and computational biology.
Go to Profile#1272
Wu-Chung Hsiang
#20090
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Wu-Chung Hsiang is a Chinese-American mathematician, specializing in topology. Hsiang served as chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University from 1982 to 1985 and was one of the most influential topologists of the second half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#1273
Eberhard Freitag
#24351
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Eberhard Freitag is a German mathematician, specializing in complex analysis and especially modular forms. Education and career Freitag studied from 1961 mathematics, physics and astronomy at Heidelberg University, where he received in 1964 his Diplom and in 1966 his Ph.D. , supervised by Hans Maaß , with thesis Modulformen zweiten Grades zum rationalen und Gaußschen Zahlkörper, published in Sitzungsberichte Heidelberger Akad. Wiss. 1967. From 1964 he was a research assistant at the Mathematischen Institut in Heidelberg, where he received at the end of 1969 his habilitation and became there a Privatdozent and in 1970 a scientific advisor.
Go to Profile#1274
Jack Thorne
#26616
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Jack A. Thorne is a British mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands Program. He specialises in algebraic number theory. Education Thorne read mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He completed his PhD with Benedict Gross and Richard Taylor at Harvard University in 2012.
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Clifford Cocks
#4535
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Clifford Christopher Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In the early 1970s, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters , he developed an early public-key cryptography system. This predated commercial offerings, but due the classified nature of Cocks' work, it did not become widely known until 1997 when the work was declassified.
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Peter A. Loeb
#29201
Overall Influence
Peter Albert Loeb is a mathematician at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He co-authored a basic reference text on nonstandard analysis . Reviewer Perry Smith for MathSciNet wrote:This book is a welcome addition to the literature on nonstandard analysis.The notion of Loeb measure named after him has become a standard tool in the field.
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Felix Finster
#26661
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Felix Finster is a German mathematician working on problems in mathematical physics, geometry and analysis. Life and work Finster studied physics and mathematics at Heidelberg University, where he graduated in 1992 with Franz Wegner and Claus Gerhardt. In 1992–1995 he wrote his PhD thesis at ETH Zürich with Konrad Osterwalder. In 1996–1998 he was post-doc at Harvard University. From 1998–2002 he was member of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. He got his habilitation in 2000 at Leipzig University. Since 2002 he is full professor of mathematics at the Universi...
Go to Profile#1278
Kazimierz Urbanik
#21562
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Kazimierz Urbanik was a prominent member of the Polish School of Mathematics. He founded the journal Probability and Mathematical Statistics and served as rector of the University of Wrocław. Early life and education Urbanik was born in Krzemieniec and studied at the lyceum there. During World War II the town came under Soviet control, and was annexed by Ukraine; after the war, Urbanik's family moved to Brzeg, which remained Polish. Beginning in 1948, Urbanik studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wrocław, where he was mentored by Hugo Steinhaus and Edward Marczewski. He complet...
Go to Profile#1279
Wei Zhang
#25072
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Wei Zhang is a Chinese mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Zhang grew up in Sichuan province in China and attended Chengdu No.7 High School. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in 2004 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2009 under the supervision of Shou-Wu Zhang.
Go to Profile#1280
Yinyu Ye
#6594
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Yinyu Ye is a Chinese American theoretical computer scientist working on mathematical optimization. He is a specialist in interior point methods, especially in convex minimization and linear programming. He is a professor of Management Science and Engineering and Kwoh-Ting Li Chair Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Ye also is a co-founder of minMax Optimization Inc.
Go to Profile#1281
David Aldous
#21842
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David John Aldous FRS is a mathematician known for his research on probability theory and its applications, in particular in topics such as exchangeability, weak convergence, Markov chain mixing times, the continuum random tree and stochastic coalescence. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1970 and received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1977 under his advisor, D. J. H. Garling. Aldous was on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley from 1979 until his retirement in 2018.
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Đuro Kurepa
#23008
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Đuro Kurepa was a Yugoslav mathematician, university professor and academic. Throughout his life, Kurepa published over 700 articles, books, papers, and reviews and over 1,000 scientific reviews. He lectured at universities across Europe, as well as those in Canada, Cuba, Iraq, Israel, and the United States, and was quoted saying "I lectured at almost each of [the] nineteen universities of [the former] Yugoslavia..."
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Deborah Loewenberg Ball
#19878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Deborah Loewenberg Ball is an educational researcher noted for her work in mathematics instruction and the mathematical preparation of teachers. From 2017 to 2018 she served as president of the American Educational Research Association. She served as dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2016, and she currently works as William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of education. Ball directs TeachingWorks, a major project at the University of Michigan to redesign the way that teachers are prepared for practice, and to build materials and tools that will serve the field of teacher education broadly.
Go to Profile#1284
Shmuel Agmon
#14828
Overall Influence
1922 - Present (102 years)
Shmuel Agmon is an Israeli mathematician. He is known for his work in analysis and partial differential equations. Biography Shmuel Agmon was born in Tel Aviv to writer Nathan Agmon and Chaya Gutman, and spent the first years of his life in Nazareth. A member of the HaMahanot HaOlim youth movement, Agmon studied at the Gymnasia Rehavia and joined a hakhshara program at Kibbutz Na'an after graduating from high school.
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Georgy Adelson-Velsky
#8104
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Georgy Maximovich Adelson-Velsky was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. Born in Samara, Adelson-Velsky was originally educated as a pure mathematician. His first paper, with his fellow student and eventual long-term collaborator Alexander Kronrod in 1945, won a prize from the Moscow Mathematical Society. He and Kronrod were the last students of Nikolai Luzin, and he earned his doctorate in 1949 under the supervision of Israel Gelfand.
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Chung Tao Yang
#23919
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Chung Tao Yang, or Chung-Tao Yang, Yang Zhongdao , was a notable Chinese American topologist. He was an academician of the Academia Sinica and served as the chair of the Department of Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania.
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Peter Koellner
#20271
Overall Influence
Peter Koellner is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D from MIT in 2003. His main areas of research are mathematical logic, specifically set theory, and philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, analytic philosophy, and philosophy of language.
Go to Profile#1288
Stephen Semmes
#29412
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Stephen William Semmes is the Noah Harding Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. He is known for contributions to analysis on metric spaces, as well as harmonic analysis, complex variables, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. He received his B.S. at the age of 18, a Ph.D. at 21 from Washington University in St. Louis and became a full professor at Rice at 25.
Go to Profile#1289
Vladimír Šverák
#26153
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Vladimír Šverák is a Czech mathematician. Since 1990, he has been a professor at the University of Minnesota. Šverák made notable contributions to calculus of variations. Šverák obtained his doctorate from the Charles University in Prague in 1986, under supervision of Jindřich Nečas. He worked on problems in the theory of non-linear elasticity. In 1992, he won an EMS Prize for producing a counterexample to a problem first posed by Charles B. Morrey, Jr. in 1950, whether rank-one convexity implies quasiconvexity. In 1994, Šverák was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathemati...
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Kyoji Saito
#28576
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kyōji Saitō is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and complex analytic geometry. Education and career Saito received in 1971 his promotion Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen under Egbert Brieskorn, with thesis Quasihomogene isolierte Singularitäten von Hyperflächen . Saito is a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences of Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#1291
John R. Isbell
#28527
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
John Rolfe Isbell was an American mathematician, for many years a professor of mathematics at the University at Buffalo . Biography Isbell was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of an army officer from Isbell, a town in Franklin County, Alabama. He attended several undergraduate institutions, including the University of Chicago, where professor Saunders Mac Lane was a source of inspiration. He began his graduate studies in mathematics at Chicago, briefly studied at Oklahoma A&M University and the University of Kansas, and eventually completed a Ph.D. in game theory at Princeton University in 1954 under the supervision of Albert W.
Go to Profile#1292
Daoxing Xia
#23943
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Daoxing Xia is a Chinese American mathematician. He is currently a professor at the Department of Mathematics, Vanderbilt University in the United States. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science in 1980.
Go to Profile#1293
Stephen Stigler
#9217
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen Mack Stigler is the Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Statistics of the University of Chicago. He has authored several books on the history of statistics; he is the son of the economist George Stigler.
Go to Profile#1294
Alessio Corti
#27311
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Alessio Corti is a Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London working in Algebraic Geometry. Corti studied at the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he gained a diploma in 1987. He obtained his PhD in 1992 at the University of Utah under the supervision of János Kollár.
Go to Profile#1295
László Fuchs
#22811
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
László Fuchs is a Hungarian-born American mathematician, the Evelyn and John G. Phillips Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Mathematics at Tulane University. He is known for his research and textbooks in group theory and abstract algebra.
Go to Profile#1296
William Alvin Howard
#5939
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
William Alvin Howard is a proof theorist best known for his work demonstrating formal similarity between intuitionistic logic and the simply typed lambda calculus that has come to be known as the Curry–Howard correspondence. He has also been active in the theory of proof-theoretic ordinals. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1956 for his dissertation "k-fold recursion and well-ordering". He was a student of Saunders Mac Lane.
Go to Profile#1297
Alfred Goldie
#24671
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Alfred William Goldie was an English mathematician. Biography Goldie was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School and then read mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge. His studies were interrupted by war work on ballistics with the Armament Research Department of the Ministry of Supply, eventually taking his BA in 1942 and MA in 1946.
Go to Profile#1298
Jean Paul Van Bendegem
#11765
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jean Paul Van Bendegem is a mathematician, a philosopher of science, and a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels. Career Van Bendegem received his master's degree in mathematics in 1976. Afterwards, he went to study philosophy. He attended lectures on the philosophy of mathematics from Leo Apostel. He received his master's degree in philosophy in 1979.
Go to Profile#1299
Manohar Vartak
#31728
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Manohar N. Vartak was a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Professor Vartak was one of founder members of the Department of Mathematics and the head of the department . He was superannuated in 1986. Vartak was specialized in balanced incomplete block designs, graph theory and operations research.
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Paul Chester Kainen
#25144
Overall Influence
Paul Chester Kainen is an American mathematician, an adjunct associate professor of mathematics and director of the Lab for Visual Mathematics at Georgetown University. Kainen is the author of a popular book on the four color theorem, and is also known for his work on book embeddings of graphs.
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