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,
#1451
Maksym Radziwill
#33039
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Maksym Radziwill is a Polish-Canadian mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Life He was born in Moscow in 1988. His family moved to Poland in 1991 where he graduated from high school and in 2006 to Canada. Radziwill graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 2009, and in 2013 earned a PhD under Kannan Soundararajan at Stanford University in California. In 2013–2014, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey as a visiting member, and in 2014 became a Hill assistant professor at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#1452
Tsit Yuen Lam
#32266
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Tsit Yuen Lam is a Hong Kong-American mathematician specializing in algebra, especially ring theory and quadratic forms. Academic career Lam earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Hong Kong in 1963 and his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1967 under Hyman Bass, with a thesis titled On Grothendieck Groups. Subsequently, he was an instructor at the University of Chicago and since 1968 he has been at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became assistant professor in 1969, associate professor in 1972, and full professor in 1976. He served as assistant department head several times.
Go to Profile#1453
Neil Turok
#5993
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Neil Geoffrey Turok is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.
Go to Profile#1454
Jane Piore Gilman
#30967
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jane Piore Gilman is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Her research concerns topology and group theory. Education and career Gilman is one of three children of physicist Emanuel R. Piore. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1965, and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. Her thesis, supervised by Lipman Bers, was entitled Relative Modular Groups in Teichmüller Spaces. She worked for a year as an instructor at Stony Brook University before joining Rutgers in 1972.
Go to Profile#1455
Yves Laszlo
#29528
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Yves Laszlo is a French mathematician working in the University of Paris-Sud. He specializes in algebraic geometry. Laszlo obtained his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Paris-Sud under the supervision of Arnaud Beauville. He started the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard in 2011, and directed it until 2012.
Go to Profile#1456
Anne Schilling
#24647
Overall Influence
Anne Schilling is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic combinatorics, representation theory, and mathematical physics. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#1457
Urmila Mahadev
#23930
Overall Influence
Urmila Mahadev is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Education and career Mahadev is originally from Los Angeles, where her parents are physicians. She became interested in quantum computing through a course with Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, where she graduated in 2010.
Go to Profile#1458
Oliver Penrose
#9573
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Oliver Penrose is a British theoretical physicist. He is the son of the scientist Lionel Penrose and brother of the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose, and geneticist Shirley Hodgson. He was associated with the Open University for seventeen years and was a Professor of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh from 1986 until his retirement in 1994. He has the title of Professor Emeritus at Heriot-Watt, and remains active in research there. His topics of interest include statistical mechanics, phase transitions in metals and the physical chemistry of surfactants.
Go to Profile#1459
Leonid Pastur
#15334
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Leonid Andreevich Pastur is a Ukrainian mathematical physicist and theoretical physicist, known in particular for contributions to random matrix theory, the spectral theory of random Schrödinger operators, statistical mechanics, and solid state physics . Currently, he heads the Department of Theoretical Physics at the B Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering.
Go to Profile#1460
Caroline Series
#25509
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Caroline Mary Series is an English mathematician known for her work in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and dynamical systems. Early life and education Series was born on March 24, 1951, in Oxford to Annette and George Series. She attended Oxford High School for Girls and from 1969 studied at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was interviewed for admission by Anne Cobbe. She obtained a B.A. in Mathematics in 1972 and was awarded the university Mathematical Prize. She was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship and studied at Harvard University from 1972, obtaining her Ph.D. in 1976 supervised ...
Go to Profile#1461
Balázs Szegedy
#24660
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Balázs Szegedy is a Hungarian mathematician whose research concerns combinatorics and graph theory. Szegedy earned a master's degree in 1998 and a PhD in 2003 from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. His dissertation, supervised by Péter Pál Pálfy, was about group theory and was entitled "On the Sylow and Borel subgroups of classical groups". After temporary positions at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Microsoft Research, and the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2006. He returned to the Rényi Institute in 2013.
Go to Profile#1462
Aleksandr Logunov
#33171
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Aleksandr Andreyevich Logunov is a Russian mathematician, specializing in harmonic analysis, potential theory, and geometric analysis. Logunov received his Candidate of Sciences in 2015 from the Saint Petersburg State University under Viktor Petrovich Havin with thesis . He works at the Chebyshev Mathematics Laboratory of the Saint Petersburg State University and at the University of Tel Aviv.
Go to Profile#1463
Arthur E. Bryson
#9343
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Arthur Earl Bryson Jr. is the Paul Pigott Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University and the "father of modern optimal control theory". With Henry J. Kelley, he also pioneered an early version of the backpropagation procedure, now widely used for machine learning and artificial neural networks.
Go to Profile#1464
Yasumasa Kanada
#14058
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Yasumasa Kanada was a Japanese computer scientist most known for his numerous world records over the past three decades for calculating digits of . He set the record 11 of the past 21 times. Kanada was a professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan until 2015.
Go to Profile#1465
Boris Weisfeiler
#7773
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Boris Weisfeiler was a Soviet-born mathematician and professor at Penn State University who lived in the United States before disappearing in Chile in 1985. Declassified US documents suggest a Chilean army patrol seized Weisfeiler and took him to Colonia Dignidad, a secretive Germanic agricultural commune set up in Chile in the 1960s. During the Chilean Pinochet military dictatorship Boris Weisfeiler allegedly drowned. He is known for the Weisfeiler filtration, Weisfeiler–Leman algorithm and Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures.
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Mangala Narlikar
#14452
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Mangala Narlikar was an Indian mathematician who did research in pure mathematics as well as writing for a lay audience. After her degrees in mathematics, she initially worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and later worked as a lecturer in the University of Bombay and Pune.
Go to Profile#1467
Kentaro Yano
#25942
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Kentaro Yano was a mathematician working on differential geometry who introduced the Bochner–Yano theorem. He also published a classical book about geometric objects and Lie derivatives of these objects.
Go to Profile#1468
Robert Edmund Edwards
#29908
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
Robert Edmund Edwards , usually cited simply as R. E. Edwards, was a British-born Australian mathematician who specialized in functional analysis. He is the author of several volumes in Springer's Graduate Texts in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1469
Albert R. Meyer
#9099
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Albert Ronald da Silva Meyer is Hitachi America Professor emeritus of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Biography Meyer received his PhD from Harvard University in 1972 in applied mathematics, under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT in 1969. Meyer became the Hitachi America Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in 1991. He retired from MIT in 2016.
Go to Profile#1470
Andrey Tikhonov
#24028
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Andrey Nikolayevich Tikhonov was a leading Soviet Russian mathematician and geophysicist known for important contributions to topology, functional analysis, mathematical physics, and ill-posed problems. He was also one of the inventors of the magnetotellurics method in geophysics. Other transliterations of his surname include "Tychonoff", "Tychonov", "Tihonov", "Tichonov".
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Peter Landweber
#28848
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Peter Steven Landweber is an American mathematician working in algebraic topology. Landweber studied at the University of Iowa and Harvard University , where he graduated in 1965 after studying under Raoul Bott . He was then Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia and at Yale University from 1968 to 1970. From 1967 to 1968 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1970, he became Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he taught from 1974 until his retirement in 2007. From 1974 to 1975 he was a NATO fellow at the University of Cambridge. Sin...
Go to Profile#1472
Gladys West
#4442
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Gladys Mae West is an American mathematician. She is known for her contributions to mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of satellite geodesy models, that were later incorporated into the Global Positioning System . West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018. West was awarded the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of satellite geodesy models.
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David Bressoud
#20077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Marius Bressoud is an American mathematician who works in number theory, combinatorics, and special functions. As of 2019 he is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College, Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences and a former President of the Mathematical Association of America.
Go to Profile#1474
János Komlós
#19976
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
János Komlós is a Hungarian-American mathematician, working in probability theory and discrete mathematics. He has been a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University since 1988. He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University, then became a fellow at the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1984–1988 he worked at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#1475
David M. Goldschmidt
#31313
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David M. Goldschmidt is an American mathematician specializing in group theory. Goldschmidt received in 1969 from the University of Chicago a Ph.D. under John Griggs Thompson with thesis On the 2-exponent of a finite group. From 1969 to 1971 he was a Gibbs Instructor at Yale University. From 1971 to 1989 he was on the faculty of the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989–1991 he was Deputy Director and in 1991 he became Director of the Institute for Defense Analyses's Center for Communication Research in Princeton, New Jersey.
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David Buchsbaum
#27327
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
David Alvin Buchsbaum was a mathematician at Brandeis University who worked on commutative algebra, homological algebra, and representation theory. He proved the Auslander–Buchsbaum formula and the Auslander–Buchsbaum theorem.
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Danny Calegari
#29657
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Danny Matthew Cornelius Calegari is a mathematician and, , a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include geometry, dynamical systems, low-dimensional topology, and geometric group theory.
Go to Profile#1478
David Jerison
#34853
Overall Influence
David Saul Jerison is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an expert in partial differential equations and Fourier analysis.
Go to Profile#1479
Ralph Louis Cohen
#29680
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ralph Louis Cohen is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and differential topology. Career Cohen received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978 from Brandeis University where he worked under the supervision of Edgar H. Brown, Jr. His thesis was titled On Odd Primary Stable Homotopy Theory. He did his postdoctoral training as an L.E. Dickson Instructor at the University Chicago, and then became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University in 1980. In 1983, he became an Associate Professor and was promoted to Full Professor in 1987.
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John Aitchison
#23757
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
John Aitchison was a Scottish statistician. Career John Aitchison studied at the University of Edinburgh after being uncomfortable explaining to his headmaster that he didn’t plan to attend university. He graduated in 1947 with an MA in mathematics.
Go to Profile#1481
Mu-Tao Wang
#25095
Overall Influence
Mu-Tao Wang is a Taiwanese mathematician and current Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. Education He entered National Taiwan University in 1984, originally for international business, but after a year he switched to mathematics. He earned his BS in Mathematics at National Taiwan University in 1988 and his MS from the same institution in 1992. He received a PhD in Mathematics in 1998 from Harvard University with a thesis entitled "Generalized harmonic maps and representations of discrete groups." His thesis adviser at Harvard was Chinese Fields Medalist and differential geometer...
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David Wood
#26748
Overall Influence
David Ronald Wood is a Professor in the School of Mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research area is discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, especially structural graph theory, extremal graph theory, geometric graph theory, graph colouring, graph drawing, and combinatorial geometry.
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François Bruhat
#22697
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
François Georges René Bruhat was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic groups. The Bruhat order of a Weyl group, the Bruhat decomposition, and the Schwartz–Bruhat functions are named after him.
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Jorge Nocedal
#15634
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jorge Nocedal is an applied mathematician, computer scientist and the Walter P. Murphy professor at Northwestern University who in 2017 received the John Von Neumann Theory Prize. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.
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Zalman Usiskin
#26501
Overall Influence
Zalman Usiskin is an educator best known as the Director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project. He was born to Nathan and Esther Usiskin. A faculty member since 1969, he also has taught junior and senior high-school mathematics and has authored and co-authored many textbooks, including a six-volume series used as part of the University School Mathematics Project secondary curriculum. In recognition of his work, he has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1486
Michael J. Larsen
#28751
Overall Influence
Michael Jeffrey Larsen is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington. Academic biography In high school, Larsen tied with four other competitors for the top score in the 1977 International Mathematical Olympiad in Belgrade, winning a gold medal. As an undergraduate mathematics student at Harvard University, Larsen became a Putnam Fellow in 1981 and 1983. He graduated from Harvard in 1984, and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988, under the supervision of Gerd Faltings. After working at the Institute for Advanced Study he ...
Go to Profile#1487
Charles S. Peskin
#16809
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Charles Samuel Peskin is an American mathematician known for his work in the mathematical modeling of blood flow in the heart. Such calculations are useful in the design of artificial heart valves. From this work has emerged an original computational method for fluid-structure interaction that is now called the “immersed boundary method", which allows the coupling between deformable immersed structures and fluid flows to be handled in a computationally tractable way. With his students and colleagues, Peskin also has worked on mathematical models of such systems as the inner ear, arterial pu...
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Mikhail Kapranov
#23448
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mikhail Kapranov, is a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, representation theory, mathematical physics, and category theory. He is currently a professor of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.
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Jean Giraud
#22807
Overall Influence
1936 - 2007 (71 years)
Jean Giraud was a French mathematician, a student of Alexander Grothendieck. His research focused on non-abelian cohomology and the theory of topoi. In particular, he authored the book Cohomologie non-abélienne and proved the theorem that bears his name, which gives a characterization of a Grothendieck topos.
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Dan Segal
#23402
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Daniel Segal is a British mathematician and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He specialises in algebra and group theory. He studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before taking a PhD at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1972, supervised by Bertram Wehrfritz, with a dissertation on group theory entitled Groups of Automorphisms of Infinite Soluble Groups. He is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, where he was sub-warden from 2006 to 2008.
Go to Profile#1491
Roland Glowinski
#25495
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Roland Glowinski was a French-American mathematician. He obtained his PhD in 1970 from Jacques-Louis Lions and was known for his work in applied mathematics, in particular numerical solution and applications of partial differential equations and variational inequalities. He was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and held an endowed chair at the University of Houston from 1985. Glowinski wrote many books on the subject of mathematics. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#1492
Karma Dajani
#27319
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Karma Dajani is a Lebanese-Dutch mathematician whose research interests include ergodic theory, probability theory, and their applications in number theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#1493
Steve Hofmann
#29985
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Steve Hofmann is a mathematician who helped solve the famous Kato's conjecture. Said Hofmann, “It's a problem that has interested me since I was a graduate student... It was one of the biggest open problems in my field and everybody thought it was too hard and wouldn't be solved. I had toyed with it for years and then put in three years of very serious work before hitting the key breakthrough.”
Go to Profile#1494
Alain Bensoussan
#16616
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Alain Bensoussan, born on 12 May 1940 in Tunis, is a French mathematician. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris-Dauphine and Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Biography Alain Bensoussan is a former student of the École polytechnique , a graduate of ENSAE and a doctor of mathematics from the Faculty of Sciences in Paris under the supervision of Jacques-Louis Lions. He was a lecturer at the École polytechnique from 1970 to 1986 and a professor at the École normale supérieure from 1980 to 1985. He was Director of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels from 1975 to 1977.
Go to Profile#1495
Sylvain Cappell
#20912
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sylvain Edward Cappell , a Belgian American mathematician and former student of William Browder at Princeton University, is a topologist who has spent most of his career at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, where he is now the Silver Professor of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1496
Frances Kirwan
#23257
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry. Education Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge. She took a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.
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Bernard Roy
#12466
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Bernard Roy was an emeritus professor at the Université Paris-Dauphine. In 1974 he founded the "Laboratoire d'Analyse et de Modélisation des Systèmes pour l'Aide à la Décision" . He was President of Association of European Operational Research Societies from 1985 to 1986. In 1992 he was awarded the EURO Gold Medal, the highest distinction within Operations Research in Europe. In 2015 he received the EURO Distinguished Service Award.
Go to Profile#1498
Richard Swan
#33434
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Richard Gordon Swan is an American mathematician who is known for the Serre–Swan theorem relating the geometric notion of vector bundles to the algebraic concept of projective modules, and for the Swan representation, an l-adic projective representation of a Galois group. His work has mainly been in the area of algebraic K-theory.
Go to Profile#1499
William Kumuyi
#8905
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William Folorunso Kumuyi is the founder and General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry situated at Gbagada, Lagos, Nigeria. He is the author of several Christian books and devotionals.
Go to Profile#1500
Nathan Divinsky
#15440
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Nathan Joseph Harry Divinsky was a Canadian mathematician, university professor, chess master, chess writer, and chess official. Divinsky was also known for being the former husband of the 19th prime minister of Canada, Kim Campbell. Divinsky and Campbell were married from 1972 to 1983.
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