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

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#1551

Anders Hald

#18930

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Anders Hjorth Hald was a Danish statistician. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1960 to 1982. While a professor, he did research in industrial quality control and other areas, and also authored textbooks. After retirement, he made important contributions to the history of statistics.

#1552

John Alan Robinson

John Alan Robinson

#3204

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

John Alan Robinson was a philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist. He was a professor emeritus at Syracuse University. Alan Robinson's major contribution is to the foundations of automated theorem proving. His unification algorithm eliminated one source of combinatorial explosion in resolution provers; it also prepared the ground for the logic programming paradigm, in particular for the Prolog language. Robinson received the 1996 Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning.

#1553

Thomas Wolff

#34859

Overall Influence

1954 - 2000 (46 years)

Thomas Hartwig Wolff was an American mathematician, working primarily in the fields of harmonic analysis, complex analysis, and partial differential equations. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he regularly played poker with his classmate Bill Gates. While a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley from 1976 to 1979, under the direction of Donald Sarason, he obtained a new proof of the corona theorem, a famously difficult theorem in complex analysis. He was made Professor of Mathematics at Caltech in 1986, and was there from 1988–1992 and from 1995 to his death in a car accident in 2000.

#1554

Francis Su

#25354

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Francis Edward Su is an American mathematician. He joined the Harvey Mudd College faculty in 1996, and is currently Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics. Su served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2015–2017 and is serving as a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2020-2023. Su has received multiple awards from the MAA, including the Henry L. Alder Award and the Haimo Award, both for distinguished teaching. He was also a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar during the 2019-2020 term.

#1555

Lawrence C. Washington

#34816

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lawrence Clinton Washington is an American mathematician at the University of Maryland who specializes in number theory. Biography Washington studied at Johns Hopkins University, where in 1971 he received his B.A. and master's degree. In 1974 he earned his PhD at Princeton University under Kenkichi Iwasawa with thesis extensions. He then became an assistant professor at Stanford University and from 1977 at the University of Maryland, where he became in 1981 an associate professor and in 1986 a professor. He held visiting positions at several institutions, including IHES , Max-Planck-Institut...

#1556

Cathy O'Neil

#10969

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Catherine Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.

#1557

Richard Beals

#32132

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Richard William Beals is an American mathematician who works on partial differential equations and functional analysis. He is known as the author or co-author of several mathematical textbooks. Beals studied at Yale University earning a B.A. in 1960, an M.A. in 1962, and a Ph.D. in 1964 under Felix Browder with thesis Non-Local Boundary Value Problems for Elliptic Partial Differential Operators. In the academic year 1965/1966 he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he became in 1966 an assistant professor and later a professor. In 1977 he became a professor a...

#1558

Kavita Ramanan

#25047

Overall Influence

Kavita Ramanan is a probability theorist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. Education and career Ramanan was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India to Anuradha Ramanan and algebraic geometer S. Ramanan. Ramanan earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1992. She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1996. Her dissertation, supervised by Paul Dupuis, was Construction and Large Deviation Analysis of Constrained Processes, with Applications to Communication Networks.

#1559

David Slepian

#13603

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

David S. Slepian was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work with algebraic coding theory, probability theory, and distributed source coding. He was colleagues with Claude Shannon and Richard Hamming at Bell Labs.

#1560

Hiroshi Toda

#37452

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Hiroshi Toda is a Japanese mathematician, who specializes in stable and unstable homotopy theory. He started publishing in 1952. Many of his early papers are concerned with the study of Whitehead products and their behaviour under suspension and more generally with the homotopy groups of spheres. In a 1957 paper he showed the first non-existence result for the Hopf invariant 1 problem. This period of his work culminated in his book Composition methods in homotopy groups of spheres . Here he uses as important tools the Toda bracket and the Toda fibration, among others, to compute the first 20...

#1561

Alexander Soifer

Alexander Soifer

#22515

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Alexander Soifer is a Russian-born American mathematician and mathematics author. His works include over 400 articles and 13 books. Soifer obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 and has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado since 1979. He was visiting fellow at Princeton University from 2002 to 2004, and again in 2006–2007. Soifer also teaches courses on art history and European cinema. His publications include 13 books and over 400 articles.

#1562

Valery Goppa

#32652

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Valery Denisovich Goppa is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He discovered a relation between algebraic geometry and codes, utilizing the Riemann-Roch theorem. Today these codes are called algebraic geometry codes. In 1981 he presented his discovery at the algebra seminar of the Moscow State University.

#1563

Glenn Shafer

#14241

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Glenn Shafer is an American mathematician and statistician. He is the co-creator of Dempster–Shafer theory. He is a University Professor and Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University. Early life and education Shafer grew up on a farm near Caney, Kansas. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University, then entered the Peace Corps, serving in Afghanistan. He returned to Princeton, earning a PhD in mathematical statistics in 1973 under Geoffrey Watson.

#1564

Sujatha Ramdorai

Sujatha Ramdorai

#11541

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sujatha Ramdorai is an algebraic number theorist known for her work on Iwasawa theory. She is a professor of mathematics and Canada Research Chair at University of British Columbia, Canada. She was previously a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

#1565

Llewellyn Thomas

Llewellyn Thomas

#3257

Overall Influence

1903 - 1992 (89 years)

Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas was a British physicist and applied mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to atomic and molecular physics and solid-state physics. His key achievements include calculating relativistic effects on the spin-orbit interaction in a hydrogen atom

#1566

Florence Nightingale David

#18107

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David was an English statistician. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside between 1970 – 77 and her research interests included the history of probability and statistical ideas.

#1567

Olli Lehto

#16817

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Olli Erkki Lehto was a Finnish mathematician, specializing in geometric function theory, and a chancellor of the University of Helsinki. Lehto earned his PhD in 1949 from the University of Helsinki under Rolf Nevanlinna with thesis Anwendung orthogonaler Systeme auf gewisse funktionentheoretische Extremal- und Abbildungsprobleme. At the University of Helsinki, Lehto was from 1961 to 1988 a professor, from 1978 the dean of science, from 1983 the rector, and from 1988 to 1993 the chancellor.

#1568

Daniel Huybrechts

Daniel Huybrechts

#34115

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Daniel Huybrechts is a German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Education and career Huybrechts studied mathematics from 1985 at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where in 1989 he earned his Diplom with Diplom thesis supervisor Herbert Kurke. In 1990–1992 Huybrechts studied at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, where he earned his PhD in 1992 under Herbert Kurke with thesis Stabile Vektorbündel auf algebraischen Flächen. Tjurins Methode zum Studium der Geometrie der Modulräume. In the academic year 1994–1995 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1996 at IHES.

#1569

Bonnie Berger

#8181

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.

#1570

Philip Holmes

#22755

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Philip John Holmes is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. As a member of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, he formerly served as the interim chair until May 2007.

#1571

James B. Carrell

James B. Carrell

#32394

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

James B. Carrell is an American and Canadian mathematician, who is currently an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His areas of research are algebraic geometry, Lie theory, transformation groups and differential geometry.

#1572

Howard Eves

#27847

Overall Influence

1911 - 2004 (93 years)

Howard Whitley Eves was an American mathematician, known for his work in geometry and the history of mathematics. Eves received his B.S. from the University of Virginia, an M.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1948, the last with a dissertation titled A Class of Projective Space Curves written under Ingomar Hostetter. He then spent most of his career at the University of Maine, 1954–1976. In later life, he occasionally taught at University of Central Florida.

#1573

Rekha R. Thomas

#27325

Overall Influence

Rekha Rachel Thomas is a mathematician and operations researcher. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, and was the Robert R. and Elaine F. Phelps Professor there from 2008 until 2012. Her research interests include mathematical optimization and computational algebra.

#1574

Roger W. Brockett

#10525

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Roger Ware Brockett was an American control theorist and the An Wang Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, who founded the Harvard Robotics Laboratory in 1983.

#1575

Lê Dũng Tráng

#31031

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Lê Dũng Tráng, is a Vietnamese-French mathematician. Life and work At the end 1949, Lê Dũng Tráng came to France, where he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He obtained a Ph.D. degree at the University of Paris in 1969 and 1971 under the supervision of Claude Chevalley and Pierre Deligne. From 1975 to 1999, he was professor at the University of Paris VII and research director of the CNRS. From 1983 to 1995 he was also a professor at the École Polytechnique. From 2002 to 2009 he headed the department of mathematics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics , in Trieste, Ita...

#1576

Peter McCullagh

#16861

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Peter McCullagh is a Northern Irish-born American statistician and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. Education McCullagh is from Plumbridge, Northern Ireland. He attended the University of Birmingham and completed his PhD at Imperial College London, supervised by David Cox and Anthony Atkinson.

#1577

Philip Wolfe

#18556

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Philip Starr "Phil" Wolfe was an American mathematician and one of the founders of convex optimization theory and mathematical programming. Life Wolfe received his bachelor's degree, masters, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He and his wife, Hallie, lived in Ossining, New York.

#1578

John C. Crank

#37993

Overall Influence

#1579

Michael Rosen

#34700

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Michael Ira Rosen is an American mathematician who works on algebraic number theory, arithmetic theory of function fields, and arithmetic algebraic geometry. Biography Rosen earned a bachelor's degree from Brandeis University in 1959 and a PhD from Princeton University in 1963 under John Coleman Moore with thesis Representations of twisted group rings. He is a mathematics professor at Brown University.

#1580

Assaf Naor

#18649

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Assaf Naor is an Israeli American and Czech mathematician, computer scientist, and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. Academic career Naor earned a baccalaureate from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996 and a doctorate from the same university in 2002, under the supervision of Joram Lindenstrauss. He worked at Microsoft Research from 2002 until 2007, with an affiliated faculty position at the University of Washington, and joined the NYU faculty in 2006.

#1581

K. Ruben Gabriel

#32468

Overall Influence

1929 - 2003 (74 years)

Kuno Ruben Gabriel was a statistician known for the inventing the biplot and the Gabriel graph and for his work in statistical meteorology. Gabriel was born in Germany, emigrated to France, grew up in Israel, was educated at the London School of Economics and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taught at the Hebrew University until 1975, and then moved to the University of Rochester where he remained until his retirement in 1997. He died on May 25, 2003.

#1582

Keith Martin Ball

Keith Martin Ball

#29037

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Keith Martin Ball FRS FRSE is a mathematician and professor at the University of Warwick. He was scientific director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences from 2010 to 2014. Education Ball was educated at Berkhamsted School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1982 and a PhD in 1987 for research supervised by Béla Bollobás.

#1583

Richard Burt Melrose

Richard Burt Melrose

#34365

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Richard Burt Melrose is an Australian mathematician and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works on geometric analysis, partial differential equations, and differential geometry.

#1584

Izabella Łaba

#37254

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Izabella Łaba is a Polish-Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Her main research specialties are harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, and additive combinatorics.

#1585

Zlil Sela

#22728

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Zlil Sela is an Israeli mathematician working in the area of geometric group theory. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sela is known for the solution of the isomorphism problem for torsion-free word-hyperbolic groups and for the solution of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first-order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups.

#1586

Paul R. Rosenbaum

#24762

Overall Influence

Paul R. Rosenbaum is the Robert G. Putzel Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked from 1986 through 2021. He has written extensively about causal inference in observational studies, including sensitivity analysis, optimal matching, design sensitivity, evidence factors, quasi-experimental devices, and the propensity score. With various coauthors, he has also written about health outcomes, racial disparities in health outcomes, instrumental variables, psychometrics and experimental design.

#1587

Georges Skandalis

#27683

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Georges Skandalis is a Greek and French mathematician, known for his work on noncommutative geometry and operator algebras. After following secondary education and classes préparatoires scientifiques in the parisian Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Skandalis studied from 1975 at 1979 at l’École Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm with agrégation in 1977. From 1979 he was an at the University of Paris VI, where under Alain Connes in 1986 he earned his doctorate . From 1980 to 1988 he was attaché de recherches and then chargé de recherches at CNRS and as of 1988 Professor at the University of Paris VII .

#1588

Kenneth Brown

#35121

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kenneth Stephen Brown is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, working in category theory and cohomology theory. Among other things, he is known for Ken Brown's lemma in the theory of model categories. He is also the author of the book Cohomology of Groups .

#1589

Carolyn Eisele

#13485

Overall Influence

1902 - 2000 (98 years)

Carolyn Eisele was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics known as an expert on the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. Education and career Eisele was born on June 13, 1902, in The Bronx, New York City. She studied at Hunter College High School and then Hunter College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1923. She earned a master's degree in mathematics and education from Columbia University in 1925. At that time, Columbia did not offer Ph.D.s in mathematics to women, but Eisele continued her graduate studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California before returning home to New York, without a doctorate, to care for her injured father.

#1590

Herman te Riele

#16669

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Hermanus Johannes Joseph te Riele is a Dutch mathematician at CWI in Amsterdam with a specialization in computational number theory. He is known for proving the correctness of the Riemann hypothesis for the first 1.5 billion non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function with Jan van de Lune and Dik Winter, for disproving the Mertens conjecture with Andrew Odlyzko, and for factoring large numbers of world record size. In 1987, he found a new upper bound for π − Li.

#1591

Sophie Morel

#28132

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Sophie Morel is a French mathematician, specializing in number theory. She is a CNRS directrice de recherches in mathematics at École normale supérieure de Lyon. In 2012 she received one of the ten prizes of the European Mathematical Society.

#1592

Ilka Agricola

#26337

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Ilka Agricola is a German mathematician who deals with differential geometry and its applications in mathematical physics. She is dean of mathematics and computer science at the University of Marburg, where she has also been responsible for making public the university's collection of mathematical models.

#1593

Igor Rodnianski

#33738

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Igor Rodnianski is an American mathematician at Princeton University. He works in partial differential equations, mathematical physics, and general relativity. Life Rodnianski studied at the University of Saint Petersburg, graduating in Physics in 1996. He graduated in 1999 from Kansas State University.

#1594

Nalini Joshi

#20614

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nalini Joshi is an Australian mathematician. She is a professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney, the first woman in the School to hold this position, and is a past-president of the Australian Mathematical Society. Joshi is a member of the School's Applied Mathematics Research Group. Her research concerns integrable systems. She was awarded the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2012. Joshi is also the Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union, and is the first Australian to hold this position.

#1595

David Luenberger

#9720

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

David Gilbert Luenberger is a mathematical scientist known for his research and his textbooks, which center on mathematical optimization. He is a professor in the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

#1596

Dietmar Salamon

#34651

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dietmar Arno Salamon is a German mathematician. Education and career Salamon studied mathematics at the Leibniz University Hannover. In 1982 he earned his doctorate at the University of Bremen with dissertation On control and observation of neutral systems. He subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by one year at the Mathematical Research Institute at ETH Zurich. In 1986 he became a lecturer at the University of Warwick, where he was appointed full professor in 1994. The summer semester 1988 he...

#1597

Martin Charles Golumbic

Martin Charles Golumbic

#12700

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Martin Charles Golumbic is a mathematician and computer scientist known for his research on perfect graphs, graph sandwich problems, compiler optimization, and spatial-temporal reasoning. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Haifa, and was the founder of the journal Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

#1598

Max Karoubi

#23160

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Max Karoubi is a French mathematician, topologist, who works on K-theory, cyclic homology and noncommutative geometry and who founded the first European Congress of Mathematics. In 1967, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Paris, under the supervision of Henri Cartan and Alexander Grothendieck.

#1599

Andrew Neitzke

#25617

Overall Influence

Andrew Neitzke is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist, at Yale University. He works in mathematical physics, mainly in geometric problems arising from physics, particularly from supersymmetric quantum field theory.

#1600

Lucien Le Cam

#20782

Overall Influence

1924 - 2000 (76 years)

Lucien Marie Le Cam was a mathematician and statistician. Biography Le Cam was born November 18, 1924, in Croze, France. His parents were farmers, and unable to afford higher education for him; his father died when he was 13. After graduating from a Catholic school in 1942, he began studying at a seminary in Limoges, but immediately quit upon learning that he would not be allowed to study chemistry there. Instead he continued his studies at a lycée, which did not teach chemistry but did teach mathematics. In May 1944 he joined an underground group, and then went into hiding, returning to his ...

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