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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#151
Gérard Debreu
#308
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Go to Profile#152
Bradley Efron
#2251
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Bradley Efron is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics . He is a past editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is the founding editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron is also the recipient of many awards .
Go to Profile#153
Manjul Bhargava
#2301
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
#154
Jacob Lurie
#3786
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Jacob Alexander Lurie is an American mathematician who is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Lurie is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. Life When he was a student in the Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School, Lurie took part in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won a gold medal with a perfect score in 1994. In 1996 he took first place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and was featured in a front-page story in the Washington Times.
Go to Profile#155
Paul Cohen
#2025
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Paul Joseph Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007) was an American mathematician. He is best known for his proofs that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal. Source: Wikipedia
Go to Profile#156
Atle Selberg
#2240
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Atle Selberg was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory and the theory of automorphic forms, and in particular for bringing them into relation with spectral theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 and an honorary Abel Prize in 2002.
Go to Profile#157
Joseph L. Doob
#2980
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
Joseph Leo Doob was an American mathematician, specializing in analysis and probability theory. The theory of martingaless was developed by Doob. Early life and education Doob was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, February 27, 1910, the son of a Jewish couple, Leo Doob and Mollie Doerfler Doob. The family moved to New York City before he was three years old. The parents felt that he was underachieving in grade school and placed him in the Ethical Culture School, from which he graduated in 1926. He then went on to Harvard where he received a BA in 1930, an MA in 1931, and a PhD in 1932. After postdo...
Go to Profile#158
Jerrold E. Marsden
#3460
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Jerrold Eldon Marsden was a Canadian mathematician. He was the Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. Marsden is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
Go to Profile#159
Edward Nelson
#2946
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Edward Nelson was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical logic, he was noted especially for his internal set theory, and views on ultrafinitism and the consistency of arithmetic. In philosophy of mathematics he advocated the view of formalism rather than platonism or intuitionism. He also wrote on the relationship between religion and mathematics.
Go to Profile#160
George Mackey
#2536
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
George Whitelaw Mackey was an American mathematician known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory, and noncommutative geometry. Career Mackey earned his bachelor of arts at Rice University in 1938 and obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under the direction of Marshall H. Stone. He joined the Harvard University Mathematics Department in 1943, was appointed Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science in 1969 and remained there until he retired in 1985.
Go to Profile#161
Luis Caffarelli
#3430
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Luis Ángel Caffarelli is an Argentine-American mathematician. He studies partial differential equations and their applications. Career Caffarelli was born and grew up in Buenos Aires. He obtained his Masters of Science and Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires. His Ph.D. advisor was Calixto Calderón. He currently holds the Sid Richardson Chair at the University of Texas at Austin and is core faculty at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. He also has been a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
Go to Profile#162
Kenkichi Iwasawa
#3737
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
Kenkichi Iwasawa was a Japanese mathematician who is known for his influence on algebraic number theory. Biography Iwasawa was born in Shinshuku-mura, a town near Kiryū, in Gunma Prefecture. He attended elementary school there, but later moved to Tokyo to attend Musashi High School.
Go to Profile#163
Elwyn Berlekamp
#1274
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.
Go to Profile#164
Vaughan Jones
#2363
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Sir Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones was a New Zealand mathematician known for his work on von Neumann algebras and knot polynomials. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1990. Early life Jones was born in Gisborne, New Zealand, on 31 December 1952. He was brought up in Cambridge, New Zealand, where he attended St Peter's School. He subsequently transferred to Auckland Grammar School after winning the Gillies Scholarship, and graduated in 1969 from Auckland Grammar. He went on to complete his undergraduate studies at the University of Auckland, obtaining a BSc in 1972 and an MSc in 1973. For ...
Go to Profile#165
Karen Uhlenbeck
#3276
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#166
Thomas Callister Hales
#3292
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Thomas Callister Hales is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group Sp . In discrete geometry, he settled the Kepler conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture. In 2014, he announced the completion of the Flyspeck Project, which formally verified the correctness of his proof of the Kepler conjecture.
Go to Profile#167
Paul Seymour
#3452
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul D. Seymour is a British mathematician known for his work in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, claw-free graphs, χ-boundedness, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture. Many of his recent papers are available from his website.
Go to Profile#168
Peter Hilton
#3437
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Peter John Hilton was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II. Early life He was born in Brondesbury, London, the son Mortimer Jacob Hilton, a Jewish physician who was in general practice in Peckham, and his wife Elizabeth Amelia Freedman, and was brought up in Kilburn. The physiologist Sidney Montague Hilton of the University of Birmingham Medical School was his elder brother.
Go to Profile#169
Elliott H. Lieb
#2331
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Elliott Hershel Lieb is an American mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics and physics at Princeton University who specializes in statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, and functional analysis.
Go to Profile#170
Herbert Seifert
#3545
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Herbert Karl Johannes Seifert was a German mathematician known for his work in topology. Biography Seifert was born in Bernstadt auf dem Eigen, but soon moved to Bautzen, where he attended primary school at the Knabenbürgerschule, and secondary school at the Oberrealschule.
Go to Profile#171
Martin Davis
#851
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Martin David Davis was an American mathematician and computer scientist who contributed to the fields of computability theory and mathematical logic. His work on Hilbert's tenth problem led to the MRDP theorem. He also advanced the Post–Turing model and co-developed the Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland algorithm, which is foundational for Boolean satisfiability solvers.
Go to Profile#172
Robert Tibshirani
#1314
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert Tibshirani is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University. He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1985 to 1998. In his work, he develops statistical tools for the analysis of complex datasets, most recently in genomics and proteomics.
Go to Profile#173
Katsumi Nomizu
#4413
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Katsumi Nomizu was a Japanese-American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry. Life and career Nomizu was born in Osaka, Japan on the first day of December, 1924. He studied mathematics at Osaka University, graduating in 1947 with a Master of Science then traveled to the United States on a U.S. Army Fulbright Scholarship. He studied first at Columbia University and then at the University of Chicago where in 1953 he became the first student to earn a Ph.D. under the thesis direction of Shiing-Shen Chern. The subject was affine differential geometry, a topic to which he would return much later in his career.
Go to Profile#174
David Cox
#3048
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Sir David Roxbee Cox was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox process, a point process named after him.
Go to Profile#175
John L. Kelley
#3921
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
John L. Kelley was an American mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in general topology and functional analysis. Kelley's 1955 text, General Topology, which eventually appeared in three editions and several translations, is a classic and widely cited graduate-level introduction to topology. An appendix sets out a new approach to axiomatic set theory, now called Morse–Kelley set theory, that builds on Von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory. He introduced the first definition of a subnet.
Go to Profile#176
Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar
#3087
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar was an Indian American mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. He, at the time of his death, held the Marshall Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Chair at Purdue University, and was also a professor of computer science and industrial engineering. He is known for Abhyankar's conjecture of finite group theory.
Go to Profile#177
Raymond Smullyan
#876
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Raymond Merrill Smullyan was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career was stage magic. He earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied with Alonzo Church.
Go to Profile#178
Ingrid Daubechies
#1650
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#179
Richard K. Guy
#2778
Overall Influence
1916 - 2020 (104 years)
Richard Kenneth Guy was a British mathematician. He was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary. He is known for his work in number theory, geometry, recreational mathematics, combinatorics, and graph theory. He is best known for co-authorship of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory. He published more than 300 scholarly articles. Guy proposed the partially tongue-in-cheek "strong law of small numbers", which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them – thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures.
Go to Profile#180
Roger Godement
#3404
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Roger Godement was a French mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis as well as his expository books. Biography Godement started as a student at the École normale supérieure in 1940, where he became a student of Henri Cartan. He started research into harmonic analysis on locally compact abelian groups, finding a number of major results; this work was in parallel but independent of similar investigations in the USSR and Japan. Work on the abstract theory of spherical functionss published in 1952 proved very influential in subsequent work, particularly that of Harish-Chandra. The isolation of the concept of square-integrable representation is attributed to him.
Go to Profile#181
Stephen Cook
#821
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Arthur Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#182
Thomas L. Saaty
#2065
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Thomas L. Saaty was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process , a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process , its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. Later on, he generalized the mathematics of the ANP to the Neural Network Process with application to neural firing and synthesis but none of them gain s...
Go to Profile#183
John Morgan
#4179
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Willard Morgan is an American mathematician known for his contributions to topology and geometry. He is a Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and a member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#184
David Blackwell
#2664
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.
Go to Profile#185
Heisuke Hironaka
#2404
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Heisuke Hironaka is a Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 for his contributions to algebraic geometry. Career Hironaka entered Kyoto University in 1949. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kyoto University, he received his Ph.D. in 1960 from Harvard University while under the direction of Oscar Zariski.
Go to Profile#186
Benedict Gross
#4507
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Benedict Hyman Gross is an American mathematician who is a professor at the University of California San Diego, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College.
Go to Profile#187
Richard Taylor
#4634
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Richard Lawrence Taylor is a British mathematician working in the field of number theory. He is currently the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Taylor received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics "for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama–Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato–Tate conjecture." He also received the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for his work on the Langlands program with Robert Langlands. He also served on th...
Go to Profile#188
Hyman Bass
#4320
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Hyman Bass is an American mathematician, known for work in algebra and in mathematics education. From 1959 to 1998 he was Professor in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University. He is currently the Samuel Eilenberg Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#189
Leonid Levin
#993
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Leonid Anatolievich Levin is a Soviet-American mathematician and computer scientist. He is known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic complexity and intractability, average-case complexity, foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic probability, theory of computation, and information theory. He obtained his master's degree at Moscow University in 1970 where he studied under Andrey Kolmogorov and completed the Candidate Degree academic requirements in 1972.
Go to Profile#190
Doron Zeilberger
#2927
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Doron Zeilberger is an Israeli mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics. Education and career He received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1976, under the direction of Harry Dym, with the thesis "New Approaches and Results in the Theory of Discrete Analytic Functions." He is a Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#191
Yum-Tong Siu
#5076
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Yum-Tong Siu is the William Elwood Byerly Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. Siu is a prominent figure in the study of functions of several complex variables. His research interests involve the intersection of complex variables, differential geometry, and algebraic geometry. He has resolved various conjectures by applying estimates of the complex Neumann problem and the theory of multiplier ideal sheaves to algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#192
Shinichi Mochizuki
#4231
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Shinichi Mochizuki is a Japanese mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is one of the main contributors to anabelian geometry. His contributions include his solution of the Grothendieck conjecture in anabelian geometry about hyperbolic curves over number fields. Mochizuki has also worked in Hodge–Arakelov theory and p-adic Teichmüller theory. Mochizuki developed inter-universal Teichmüller theory, which has attracted attention from non-mathematicians due to claims it provides a resolution of the abc conjecture.
Go to Profile#193
Albert Schwarz
#3326
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Albert Solomonovich Schwarz is a Soviet and American mathematician and a theoretical physicist educated in the Soviet Union and now a professor at the University of California, Davis. Early life Schwarz was born in Kazan, Soviet Union. His parents were arrested in the Stalinist purges in 1937. He has two children: a son, Michael A. Schwarz, and a daughter.
Go to Profile#194
Yitang Zhang
#2462
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Yitang Zhang is a Chinese-American mathematician primarily working on number theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2015. Previously working at the University of New Hampshire as a lecturer, Zhang submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics in 2013 which established the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often. This work led to a 2013 Ostrowski Prize, a 2014 Cole Prize, a 2014 Rolf Schock Prize, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. Zhang became a professor of mathematics at the Universit...
Go to Profile#195
Edward Norton Lorenz
#1461
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
Go to Profile#196
Gu Chaohao
#3268
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Gu Chaohao was a Chinese mathematician. He graduated from National Chekiang University in 1948, and received a doctorate in physics and mathematical science from Moscow University in 1959. He was primarily engaged in research on partial differential equations, differential geometry, solitons, and mathematical physics. He served as vice president of Fudan University and from 1988 to 1993 as president of the University of Science and Technology of China. In 1980, he was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received the Highest Science and Technology Award in 2009.
Go to Profile#197
Neil Sloane
#2343
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Neil James Alexander Sloane FLSW is a British-American mathematician. His major contributions are in the fields of combinatorics, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing. Sloane is best known for being the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences .
Go to Profile#198
Steven Strogatz
#1620
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Steven Henry Strogatz , born August 13, 1959, is an American mathematician and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his research in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory.
Go to Profile#199
James Glimm
#4222
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
James Gilbert Glimm is an American mathematician, former president of the American Mathematical Society, and distinguished professor at Stony Brook University. He has made many contributions in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#200
Edsger W. Dijkstra
#215
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, and science essayist. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Dijkstra studied mathematics and physics and then theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. Adriaan van Wijngaarden offered him a job as the first computer programmer in the Netherlands at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, where he worked from 1952 until 1962. He formulated and solved the shortest path problem in 1956, and in 1960 developed the first compiler for the programming language ALGOL 60 in conjunction with colleague . In 1962 he mov...
Go to Profile