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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#1501

James Arthur

#27010

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

James Greig Arthur is a Canadian mathematician working on automorphic forms, and former President of the American Mathematical Society. He is a Mossman Chair and University Professor at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics.

#1502

John M. Lee

#34346

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

John "Jack" Marshall Lee is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Washington specializing in differential geometry. Education Lee graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1972, then became a systems programmer and a teacher at Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut in 1975–1977. He continued his studies at Tufts University in 1977–1978. He received his doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 under the direction of Richard Melrose with the dissertation Higher asymptotics of the complex Monge-Ampère equation and geometry of CR ...

#1503

Raghavan Narasimhan

Raghavan Narasimhan

#19340

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

Raghavan Narasimhan was an Indian mathematician at the University of Chicago who worked on real and complex manifolds and who solved the Levi problem for complex manifolds. Early life and education He attended Loyola College in Madras, where, like many other well-known Indian mathematicians, he was taught by the French Jesuit priest Racine, and received his doctorate in 1963 from K. Chandrasekharan in Bombay. In 1966 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Narasimhan was a professor at the University of Chicago.

#1504

Peng Shige

#23312

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Peng Shige is a Chinese mathematician noted for his contributions in stochastic analysis and mathematical finance. Biography Peng Shige was born in Binzhou and raised in Shandong, while his parents' hometown is Haifeng County in south-eastern Guangdong, he is a grandnephew of the famous revolutionary Peng Pai, and his grandfather is also recognized a "revolutionary martyr" by the nation. He went to a countryside working with farmers as an "Educated youth" from 1968 to 1971, and studied in the Department of Physics, Shandong University from 1971 to 1974 and went to work at the Institute of Mathematics, Shandong University in 1978.

#1505

Donald Marquardt

#23648

Overall Influence

1929 - 1997 (68 years)

Donald W. Marquardt was an American statistician, the rediscoverer of the Levenberg–Marquardt nonlinear least squares fitting algorithm. Marquardt was educated at Columbia University with bachelor's degree in 1950 in physics and mathematics and at the University of Delaware with master's degree in 1956 in mathematics and statistics. Marquardt joined DuPont in 1953 and worked there for 39 years. He also founded and managed the DuPont Quality Management & Technology Center. In 1963 he published his famous paper "algorithm for least-squares estimation of nonlinear problems" in SIAM journal. Marquardt developed his algorithm to solve fitting nonlinear chemical models to laboratory data.

#1506

Lajos Pósa

#22550

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Lajos Pósa is a Hungarian mathematician working in the topic of combinatorics, and one of the most prominent mathematics educators of Hungary, best known for his mathematics camps for gifted students. He is a winner of the Széchenyi Prize. Paul Erdős's favorite "child", he discovered theorems at the age of 13. Since 2002, he has worked at the Rényi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; earlier he was at the Eötvös Loránd University, at the Departments of Mathematical Analysis, Computer Science.

#1507

Pascal Auscher

#31954

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Pascal Auscher is a French mathematician working at University of Paris-Sud. Specializing in harmonic analysis and operator theory, he is mostly known for, together with Steve Hofmann, Michael Lacey, Alan McIntosh and Philippe Tchamitchian, solving the famous Kato's conjecture.

#1508

Alexander Razborov

#21506

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Razborov , sometimes known as Sasha Razborov, is a Soviet and Russian mathematician and computational theorist. He is Andrew McLeish Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

#1509

Dieter Kotschick

#34443

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dieter Kotschick is a German mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and topology. Biography At age fifteen, Kotschick moved from Transylvania to Germany. He first studied at Heidelberg University and then at the University of Bonn. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1989 under the supervision of Simon Donaldson with thesis On the geometry of certain 4-manifolds and held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge. He became a professor at the University of Basel in 1991 and a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1998.

#1510

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy

#5114

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andy Goldsworthy is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. Early life Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on 26 July 1956, the son of Muriel and F. Allin Goldsworthy , a former professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leeds. He grew up on the Harrogate side of Leeds. From the age of 13, he worked on farms as a labourer. He has likened the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculpture: "A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the ...

#1511

Alexei Skorobogatov

#29170

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Alexei Nikolaievich Skorobogatov is a British-Russian mathematician and Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London specialising in algebraic geometry. His work has focused on rational points, the Hasse principle, the Manin obstruction, exponential sums, and error-correcting codes.

#1512

Dorian M. Goldfeld

Dorian M. Goldfeld

#17217

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Dorian Morris Goldfeld is an American mathematician working in analytic number theory and automorphic forms at Columbia University. Professional career Goldfeld received his B.S. degree in 1967 from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "Some Methods of Averaging in the Analytical Theory of Numbers", was completed under the supervision of Patrick X. Gallagher in 1969, also at Columbia. He has held positions at the University of California at Berkeley , Hebrew University , Tel Aviv University , Institute for Advanced Study , in Italy , at MIT , University of Texas at Austin and Harvard .

#1513

Halil Mete Soner

Halil Mete Soner

#19291

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Halil Mete Soner is a Turkish American mathematician born in Ankara. Soner's current research interests are nonlinear partial differential equations; asymptotic analysis of Ginzburg-Landau type systems, viscosity solutions, and mathematical finance.

#1514

Bernard Silverman

Bernard Silverman

#22425

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Sir Bernard Walter Silverman, is a British statistician and former Anglican clergyman. He was Master of St Peter's College, Oxford, from 1 October 2003 to 31 December 2009. He is a member of the Statistics Department at Oxford University, and has also been attached to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. He has been a member of the Council of Oxford University and of the Council of the Royal Society. He was briefly president of the Royal Statistical Society in January 2010, a po...

#1515

Harro Heuser

#28900

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Harro Heuser was a German mathematician. In German-speaking countries he is best known for his popular two-volume introduction into real analysis, Lehrbuch der Analysis. Heuser studied mathematics, physics and philosophy from 1948 to 1954 at the University of Tübingen to receive a teaching degree and went on to study for his PhD, which he received in 1957. The advisor of his thesis, entitled Über Operatoren mit endlichen Defekten, was Helmut Wielandt. After receiving his PhD he moved to the University of Karlsruhe, where he received his habilitation in 1962. In 1963 he became a professor at the University of Kiel and in 1964 at the University of Mainz.

#1516

Feng Kang

#15938

Overall Influence

1920 - 1993 (73 years)

Feng Kang was a Chinese mathematician. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980. After his death, the Chinese Academy of Sciences established the Feng Kang Prize in 1994 to reward young Chinese researchers who made outstanding contributions to computational mathematics.

#1517

Gilles Châtelet

#14456

Overall Influence

1944 - 1999 (55 years)

Gilles Châtelet was a French philosopher and mathematician. Biography Châtelet began studying at the École Normale Supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud-Lyon in 1963. During the student upheavals of the late 1960s and the following years, he was a member of the Communist Party and associated with the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire . He became a gay activist due to his time in California in 1969, but went to the FHAR as a "way of finding again the ambiance of the United States." He later studied at University of Paris XI where he obtained his PhD in pure mathematics on 20 December 1975 a...

#1518

Robert Megginson

#31978

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert Eugene Megginson is an American mathematician, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. His research concerns functional analysis and Banach spaces; he is the author of the textbook An Introduction to Banach Space Theory .

#1519

Linda Preiss Rothschild

Linda Preiss Rothschild

#31574

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Linda Preiss Rothschild is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Her thesis research concerned Lie groups, but subsequently her interests broadened to include also polynomial factorization, partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and the theory of several complex variables.

#1520

Bob Vaughan

#30769

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Robert Charles "Bob" Vaughan FRS is a British mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory. Life Since 1999 he has been Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and since 1990 Fellow of the Royal Society. He did his PhD at the University of London under supervision of Theodor Estermann. He supervised Trevor Wooley's PhD.

#1521

Florian Pop

#28493

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Florian Pop is a Romanian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. Pop received his Ph.D. in 1987 and his habilitation in 1991, both from the University of Heidelberg. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a professor at the University of Bonn prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty.

#1522

Richard Friederich Arens

Richard Friederich Arens

#32726

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

Richard Friederich Arens was an American mathematician. He was born in Iserlohn, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1925. Arens received his Ph.D. in 1945 from Harvard University. He was several times was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study . He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#1523

Kevin Buzzard

#23005

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Kevin Mark Buzzard is a British mathematician and currently a professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London. He specialises in arithmetic geometry and the Langlands program. Biography While attending the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe he competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won a bronze medal in 1986 and a gold medal with a perfect score in 1987.

#1524

Andreas Schleicher

Andreas Schleicher

#5908

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Andreas Schleicher is a German mathematician, statistician and researcher in the field of education who is currently the director for education and skills, and special adviser on education policy to the secretary-general, at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.

#1525

Grace Wahba

#20428

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Grace Goldsmith Wahba is an American statistician and retired I. J. Schoenberg-Hilldale Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a pioneer in methods for smoothing noisy data. Best known for the development of generalized cross-validation and "Wahba's problem", she has developed methods with applications in demographic studies, machine learning, DNA microarrays, risk modeling, medical imaging, and climate prediction.

#1526

Emma Previato

#31178

Overall Influence

1952 - 2022 (70 years)

Emma Previato was a professor of mathematics at Boston University. Her research concerned algebraic geometry and partial differential equations. Career Previato received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1983 under David Mumford. She was a faculty member at Boston University. She was the author or co-author of nearly 100 research articles. She served as editor or co-editor of 6 books, including Dictionary of Applied Math for Engineers and Scientists .

#1527

Zoltán Pál Dienes

#33399

Overall Influence

1916 - 2014 (98 years)

Zoltán Pál Dienes was a Hungarian mathematician whose ideas on education have been popular in some countries. He was a world-famous theorist and tireless practitioner of the "new mathematics": an approach to mathematics learning that uses games, songs, and dance to make it more appealing to children. He is credited with the creation of Base ten blocks, popularly referred to as Dienes blocks.

#1528

Burt Totaro

#31160

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Burt James Totaro, FRS , is an American mathematician, currently a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in algebraic geometry and algebraic topology. Education and early life Totaro participated in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth while in grade school and enrolled at Princeton University at the age of thirteen, becoming the youngest freshman in its history. He scored a perfect 800 on the math portion and a 690 on the verbal portion of the SAT-I exam at the age of 12. He graduated in 1984 and went on to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D.

#1529

Geordie Williamson

Geordie Williamson

#28250

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Geordie Williamson is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney. He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36. Education Educated at Chevalier College, Williamson graduated in 1999 with a UAI of 99.45. He studied at the University of Sydney and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2003 and then at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 2008 under the supervision of Wolfgang Soergel. Williamson is the brother of the late James Williamson, a World Solo 24-hour mountain bike champion ...

#1530

Ryszard Engelking

#28817

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Ryszard Engelking was a Polish mathematician. He was working mainly on general topology and dimension theory. He is the author of several influential monographs in this field. The 1989 edition of his General Topology is nowadays a standard reference for topology. Engelking died on 16 November 2023, his 88th birthday.

#1531

Seymour Lipschutz

#26727

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Seymour Saul Lipschutz was an author of technical books on pure mathematics and probability, including a collection of Schaum's Outlines. Lipschutz received his Ph.D. in 1960 from New York University's Courant Institute . He received his BA and MA degrees in Mathematics at Brooklyn College. He was a mathematics professor at Temple University, and before that on the faculty at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

#1532

Henry Wallman

#30071

Overall Influence

1915 - 1992 (77 years)

Henry "Hank" Wallman was an American mathematician, known for his work in lattice theory, dimension theory, topology, and electronic circuit design. A native of Brooklyn and a 1933 graduate of Brooklyn College, Wallman received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1937, under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz and became a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was associated with the Radiation Laboratory. During World War II he did classified work at MIT, possibly involving radar. In 1948, he left MIT to become a professor of electrotechnics ...

#1533

Vashishtha Narayan Singh

#10665

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Vashishtha Narayan Singh was an Indian mathematician and academic. He taught mathematics at various institutes in India between the 1960s and the 1970s. He is popular on social media for supposedly having challenged Einstein's Theory of Relativity but there are no credible sources that prove so. In the early 1970s, Singh was diagnosed with schizophrenia due to which he was repeatedly in and out of psychiatric hospitals and only returned to academia in 2014. He was posthumously awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award of India for his contributions, in 2020.

#1534

Michael McQuillan

#30827

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Michael Liam McQuillan is a Scottish mathematician studying algebraic geometry. As of 2019 he is Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Career Michael McQuillan received the doctorate in 1992 at Harvard University under Barry Mazur .

#1535

Alain Lascoux

#22749

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

Alain Lascoux was a French mathematician at Université de Paris VII, University of Marne la Vallée and Nankai University. His research was primarily in algebraic combinatorics, particularly Hecke algebrass and Young tableaux.

#1536

Heinrich Guggenheimer

#23938

Overall Influence

1924 - 2021 (97 years)

Heinrich Walter Guggenheimer was a German-born Swiss-American mathematician who has contributed to knowledge in differential geometry, topology, algebraic geometry, and convexity. He has also contributed volumes on Jewish sacred literature.

#1537

Alex Eskin

#31948

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Alex Eskin is an American mathematician. He is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on rational billiards and geometric group theory.

#1538

Metrodorus

#20956

Overall Influence

Metrodorus was a Greek grammarian and mathematician, who collected mathematical epigrams which appear in the Greek Anthology. Nothing is known about the life of Metrodorus. The time he lived is not certain: he may have lived as early as the 3rd century AD, but it is more likely that he lived in the time of the emperors Anastasius I and Justin I, in the early 6th century.

#1539

Susan Montgomery

#29216

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

M. Susan Montgomery is a distinguished American mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras: in particular, Hopf algebras, their structure and representations, and their actions on other algebras. Her early research was on group actionss on rings.

#1540

Walter Hayman

#29541

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Walter Kurt Hayman FRS was a British mathematician known for contributions to complex analysis. He was a professor at Imperial College London. Life and work Hayman was born in Cologne, Germany, the son of Roman law professor Franz Haymann and Ruth Therese Hensel, daughter of mathematician Kurt Hensel. He was a great-grandson of acclaimed composer Fanny Mendelssohn. Because of his Jewish heritage, he left Germany, then under Nazi rule, alone by train in 1938. He continued his schooling at Gordonstoun School, and later at St John's College, Cambridge under John Edensor Littlewood and his doctoral advisor Mary Cartwright.

#1541

Brian Bowditch

#23719

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Brian Hayward Bowditch is a British mathematician known for his contributions to geometry and topology, particularly in the areas of geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. He is also known for solving the angel problem. Bowditch holds a chaired Professor appointment in Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

#1542

Wolfgang Walter

#28826

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Wolfgang Ludwig Walter was a German mathematician, who specialized in the theory of differential equations. His textbook on ordinary differential equations became a standard graduate text on the subject at many institutions.

#1543

Jean-Pierre Eckmann

Jean-Pierre Eckmann

#31622

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jean-Pierre Eckmann is a Swiss mathematical physicist in the department of theoretical physics at the University of Geneva and a pioneer of chaos theory and social network analysis. Eckmann is the son of mathematician Beno Eckmann. He completed his PhD in 1970 under the supervision of Marcel Guenin at the University of Geneva. He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 2001. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He is also a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

#1544

Lisa Sauermann

#26513

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (32 years)

Lisa Sauermann is a mathematician from Germany known for her performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where in 2011 she had the single highest score. She won four gold medals and one silver medal at the olympiad, representing Germany.

#1545

Charles M. Newman

#18703

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Charles Michael "Chuck" Newman is a mathematician and a physicist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He works in the fields of mathematical physics, statistical mechanics, and probability theory.

#1546

Oldřich Vašíček

#11696

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Oldřich Alfons Vašíček is a Czech mathematician and quantitative analyst, best known for his pioneering work on interest rate modelling; see Vasicek model. Vašíček received his master's degree in math from the Czech Technical University, 1964, and a doctorate in probability theory from Charles University four years later. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he defected to America, settled in San Francisco, and found employment in the management science department of Wells Fargo Bank in January 1969. In 1989 Stephen Kealhofer, John McQuown and Oldřich Vašíček founded company KMV.

#1547

Gerhard Wanner

#28618

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gerhard Wanner is an Austrian mathematician. Education and career Wanner grew up in Seefeld in Tirol and studied mathematics at the University of Innsbruck, where he received his doctorate in 1965 with advisor Wolfgang Gröbner and dissertation Ein Beitrag zur numerischen Behandlung von Randwertproblemen gewöhnlicher Differentialgleichungen . He taught in Innsbruck and from 1973 at the University of Geneva.

#1548

Valentin Afraimovich

#26872

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

Valentin Afraimovich was a Soviet, Russian and Mexican mathematician. He made contributions to dynamical systems theory, qualitative theory of ordinary differential equations, bifurcation theory, concept of attractor, strange attractors, space-time chaos, mathematical models of non-equilibrium media and biological systems, travelling waves in lattices, complexity of orbits and dimension-like characteristics in dynamical systems.

#1549

C. William Gear

#17998

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

C. William Gear was a British-American mathematician who specialized in numerical analysis and computer science. Gear was an American citizen. Gear studied at the University of Cambridge with a bachelor's degree in 1957 and an M.A. in 1960, and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with an M.S. in 1957 and a Ph.D. in 1960 under Abraham H. Taub with his thesis Singular Shock Intersections in Plane Flow. From 1960 to 1962, he worked as an engineer for IBM. From 1962 to 1990, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was the head of the computer science department from 1985 to 1990.

#1550

Corrado Böhm

#1778

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Corrado Böhm was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a computer scientist known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathematics, combinatory logic, lambda calculus, and the semantics and implementation of functional programming languages.

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