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,
#1601
Alan Gaius Ramsay McIntosh
#34368
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Alan Gaius Ramsay McIntosh was an Australian mathematician who dealt with analysis . He was a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. McIntosh studied at the University of New England with a bachelor's degree in 1962 and PhD in 1966 with Frantisek Wolf at the University of California, Berkeley, . In Berkeley, he was also a student of Tosio Kato. As a post-doctoral student, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study and from 1967 he taught at Macquarie University and from 1999 at the Australian National University. In 2014 he became emeritus.
Go to Profile#1602
Yury Osipov
#8989
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Yury Sergeyevich Osipov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1987 and was a president of its successor, the Russian Academy of Sciences from 17 December 1991 to 29 May 2013.
Go to Profile#1603
Andrew M. Stuart
#22631
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Andrew M. Stuart is a British and American mathematician, working in applied and computational mathematics. In particular, his research has focused on the numerical analysis of dynamical systems, applications of stochastic differential equations and stochastic partial differential equations, the Bayesian approach to inverse problems, data assimilation, and machine learning.
Go to Profile#1604
Nina Holden
#36007
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Nina Holden is a Norwegian mathematician interested in probability theory and stochastic processes, including graphons, random planar maps, the Schramm–Loewner evolution, and their applications to quantum gravity. She is a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich, and has accepted a position as an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University beginning in 2021.
Go to Profile#1605
Ken Jennings
#1044
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III is an American game show host, author, and former game show contestant. He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,700 on the U.S. game show Jeopardy!. Since 2021, Jennings and Mayim Bialik have alternated as hosts of that show, as well as Celebrity Jeopardy!. In 2023, Jennings received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Game Show for hosting Jeopardy!.
Go to Profile#1606
Paul Dubreil
#15762
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Paul Dubreil was a French mathematician. He was born in Le Mans, Maine, France and died in Soisy-sur-École, France. Dubreil was married to fellow mathematician Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin. Selected publications
Go to Profile#1607
Heiko Harborth
#34128
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Heiko Harborth is Professor of Mathematics at Braunschweig University of Technology, 1975–present, and author of more than 188 mathematical publications. His work is mostly in the areas of number theory, combinatorics and discrete geometry, including graph theory.
Go to Profile#1608
John H. Hubbard
#20119
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Hamal Hubbard is an American mathematician and professor at Cornell University and the . He is known for the mathematical contributions he made with Adrien Douady in the field of complex dynamics, including a study of the Mandelbrot set. One of their most important results is that the Mandelbrot set is connected.
Go to Profile#1609
Charles Weibel
#34972
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charles Alexander Weibel is an American mathematician working on algebraic K-theory, algebraic geometry and homological algebra. Weibel studied physics and mathematics at the University of Michigan, earning bachelor's degrees in both subjects in 1972. He was awarded a master's degree by the University of Chicago in 1973 and achieved his doctorate in 1977 under the supervision of Richard Swan . From 1970 to 1976 he was an "Operations Research Analyst" at Standard Oil of Indiana, and from 1977 to 1978 was at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1978 he became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#1610
Wadim Zudilin
#32837
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Wadim Zudilin is a Russian mathematician and number theorist who is active in studying hypergeometric functions and zeta constants. He studied under Yuri V. Nesterenko and worked at Moscow State University, the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and the University of Newcastle, Australia. He now works at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#1611
Herbert Edelsbrunner
#16627
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Herbert Edelsbrunner is a computer scientist working in the field of computational geometry, the Arts & Science Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Duke University, Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria , and the co-founder of Geomagic, Inc. He was the first of only three computer scientists to win the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award.
Go to Profile#1612
Rodrigo Arocena
#29166
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Rodrigo Arocena Linn is an Uruguayan mathematician, and rector of the University of the Republic since July 2006. Biography Son of Germán Arocena Capurro and Mercedes Linn Davie, he comes from an Uruguayan upper-class family. His only brother Ignacio Arocena Linn disappeared on 20 August 1978 in Argentina, under circumstances surrounding the military regime. He began his academic life in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of the Republic of Uruguay. After a short time he began to teach at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, today called "Rafael Laguardia". During the military dictatorship in Uruguay, Arocena was exiled from the country, after spending a period in prison.
Go to Profile#1613
Giuseppe Mingione
#32224
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Giuseppe Mingione is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of partial differential equations and calculus of variations. Scientific activity Mingione received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Naples Federico II in 1999 having Nicola Fusco as advisor; he is professor of mathematics at the University of Parma. He has mainly worked on regularity aspects of the Calculus of Variations, solving a few longstanding questions about the Hausdorff dimension of the singular sets of minimisers of vectorial integral functionals and the boundary singularities of solutions to nonlinear elliptic systems.
Go to Profile#1614
John Wrench
#19128
Overall Influence
1911 - 2009 (98 years)
John William Wrench, Jr. was an American mathematician who worked primarily in numerical analysis. He was a pioneer in using computers for mathematical calculations, and is noted for work done with Daniel Shanks to calculate the mathematical constant pi to 100,000 decimal places.
Go to Profile#1615
Pham Huu Tiep
#37563
Overall Influence
Pham Huu Tiep is a Vietnamese American mathematician specializing in group theory and representation theory. He is currently a Joshua Barlaz Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#1616
Hermann Flaschka
#32828
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Hermann Flaschka was an Austrian-American mathematical physicist and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona, known for his important contributions in completely integrable systems . Childhood Flaschka had lived in the USA since his family immigrated when he was a teenager. They lived in Atlanta, GA. His father Hermenegild Arved Flaschka taught Chemistry at Georgia Tech. Hermann graduated from Druid Hills High School with the class of 1962 and received his Bachelor's degree at Georgia Tech in 1967. Among other achievements there he also received the "William Gilmer Perry Awa...
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Robert Creighton Buck
#27030
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Robert Creighton Buck , usually cited as R. Creighton Buck, was an American mathematician who, with Ralph Boas, introduced Boas–Buck polynomials. He taught at University of Wisconsin–Madison for 40 years. In addition, he was a writer.
Go to Profile#1618
Leon Bankoff
#33109
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Leon Bankoff , born in New York City, New York, was an American dentist. As an amateur mathematician he constructed the Bankoff circle. He was also an Esperantist. Life After a visit to the City College of New York, Bankoff studied dentistry at New York University. Later, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he taught at the University of Southern California; while there, he completed his studies. He practiced over 60 years as a dentist in Beverly Hills. Many of his patients were celebrities.
Go to Profile#1619
Charlotte Froese Fischer
#8503
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Charlotte Froese Fischer is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist noted for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock approach to atomic-structure calculations and its application to the description of atomic structure and spectra.
Go to Profile#1620
Jean Serra
#22020
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jean Paul Frédéric Serra is a French mathematician and engineer, and known as one of the co-founders of mathematical morphology. Biography Education Serra received a scientific baccalauréat in 1957, and an engineering degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy in 1962. He also obtained a Bachelor's degree in philosophy/psychology, from the University of Nancy, in 1965. He obtained a PhD in Mathematical Geology from the University of Nancy in 1967, and a doctorat d'etat in Mathematics, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, in 1986. He speaks French, Russian, E...
Go to Profile#1621
Rudolf Wille
#11443
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Rudolf Wille was a German mathematician and was professor of General Algebra from 1970 to 2003 at Technische Universität Darmstadt . His most celebrated work is the invention of formal concept analysis, an unsupervised machine learning technique that applies mathematical lattice theory to organize data based on objects and their shared attributes.
Go to Profile#1622
Harald Niederreiter
#30942
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Harald G. Niederreiter is an Austrian mathematician known for his work in discrepancy theory, algebraic geometry, quasi-Monte Carlo methods, and cryptography. Education and career Niederreiter was born on June 7, 1944, in Vienna, and grew up in Salzburg. He began studying mathematics at the University of Vienna in 1963, and finished his doctorate there in 1969, with a thesis on discrepancy in compact abelian groups supervised by Edmund Hlawka. He began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of Vienna, but soon moved to Southern Illinois University. During this period ...
Go to Profile#1623
Abraham Neyman
#19629
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abraham Neyman is an Israeli mathematician and game theorist, Professor of Mathematics at the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality and the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He served as president of the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society .
Go to Profile#1624
Peter Gavin Hall
#30174
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Peter Gavin Hall was an Australian researcher in probability theory and mathematical statistics. The American Statistical Association described him as one of the most influential and prolific theoretical statisticians in the history of the field. The School of Mathematics and Statistics Building at The University of Melbourne was renamed the Peter Hall building in his honour on 9 December 2016.
Go to Profile#1625
Akiva Yaglom
#22163
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Akiva Moiseevich Yaglom was a Soviet and Russian physicist, mathematician, statistician, and meteorologist. He was known for his contributions to the statistical theory of turbulence and theory of random processes. Yaglom spent most of his career in Russia working in various institutions, including the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics.
Go to Profile#1626
Maxwell Rosenlicht
#38093
Overall Influence
1924 - 1999 (75 years)
Maxwell Alexander Rosenlicht was an American mathematician known for works in algebraic geometry, algebraic groups, and differential algebra. Rosenlicht went to school in Brooklyn and studied at Columbia University and at Harvard University, where he studied under Zariski. He became a Putnam fellow twice, in 1946 and 1947. He was awarded in his doctorate on an Algebraic Curve Equivalence Concepts in 1950. In 1952, he went to Northwestern University. From 1958 until his retirement in 1991, he was a professor at Berkeley. He was also a visiting professor in Mexico City, IHÉS, Rome, Leiden, an...
Go to Profile#1627
Richard M. Dudley
#23658
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Richard Mansfield Dudley was Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education and career Dudley was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA at Harvard College and received his PhD at Princeton University in 1962 under the supervision of Edward Nelson and Gilbert Hunt. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1958. He was an instructor and assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley between 1962 and 1967, before moving to MIT as a professor in mathematics, where he stayed from 1967 until 2015, when he retired.
Go to Profile#1628
Etta Zuber Falconer
#20620
Overall Influence
1933 - 2002 (69 years)
Etta Zuber Falconer was an American educator and mathematician the bulk of whose career was spent at Spelman College, where she eventually served as department head and associate provost. She was one of the earlier African-American women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
Go to Profile#1629
Harley Flanders
#28586
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Harley M. Flanders was an American mathematician, known for several textbooks and contributions to his fields: algebra and algebraic number theory, linear algebra, electrical networks, scientific computing.
Go to Profile#1630
Laura DeMarco
#35200
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Laura Grace DeMarco is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, whose research concerns dynamical systems and complex analysis. Career DeMarco received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2002 under the supervision of Curtis T. McMullen. She held an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship and was an L. E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago from September 2002 to August 2005. She was also an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and then she moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was tenured and promoted to professor. She moved to Northwestern University in 2014, and was promoted to Henry S.
Go to Profile#1631
David Vogan
#34227
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David Alexander Vogan, Jr. is a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works on unitary representations of simple Lie groups. While studying at the University of Chicago, he became a Putnam Fellow in 1972. He received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1976, under the supervision of Bertram Kostant. In his thesis, he introduced the notion of lowest K type in the course of obtaining an algebraic classification of irreducible Harish Chandra modules. He is currently one of the participants in the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations.
Go to Profile#1632
Ivan M. Niven
#21199
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
Ivan Morton Niven was a Canadian-American mathematician, specializing in number theory and known for his work on Waring's problem. He worked for many years as a professor at the University of Oregon, and was president of the Mathematical Association of America. He was the author of several books on mathematics.
Go to Profile#1633
Herbert Grötzsch
#37070
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Camillo Herbert Grötzsch was a German mathematician. He was born in Döbeln and died in Halle. Grötzsch worked in graph theory. He was the discoverer and eponym of the Grötzsch graph, a triangle-free graph that requires four colors in any graph coloring, and Grötzsch's theorem, the result that every triangle-free planar graph requires at most three colors. A student of Paul Koebe, he made important contributions to the theory of conformal mappings and univalent functions: he was the first to introduce the concept of a quasiconformal mapping.
Go to Profile#1634
Ib Madsen
#23574
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ib Henning Madsen is a Danish mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Copenhagen. He is known for proving the Mumford conjecture on the cohomology of the stable mapping class group, and for developing topological cyclic homology theory.
Go to Profile#1635
David P. Robbins
#22107
Overall Influence
1942 - 2003 (61 years)
David Peter Robbins was an American mathematician. He is most famous for introducing alternating sign matrices. He is also known for his work on generalizations of Heron's formula on the area of polygons, due to which Robbins pentagons were named after him.
Go to Profile#1636
Gerd Grubb
#34214
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Gerd Grubb is a Danish mathematician known for her research on pseudo-differential operators. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, where she was the first female professor of mathematics.
Go to Profile#1637
Valentin Turchin
#6491
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin was a Soviet and American physicist, cybernetician, and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation. He was as a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a proponent of the global brain hypothesis.
Go to Profile#1638
Zvi Galil
#4060
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Zvi Galil is an Israeli-American computer scientist and mathematician. Galil served as the president of Tel Aviv University from 2007 through 2009. From 2010 to 2019, he was the dean of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity and cryptography. He has been credited with coining the terms stringology and sparsification. He has published over 200 scientific papers and is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
Go to Profile#1639
Marie-Françoise Roy
#30874
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Marie-Françoise Roy is a French mathematician noted for her work in real algebraic geometry. She has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rennes 1 since 1985 and in 2009 was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. In 2004, she received an Irène Joliot-Curie Prize.
Go to Profile#1640
Sergiu Hart
#29790
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sergiu Hart is an Israeli mathematician and economist. He is the Chairperson of the Humanities Division of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the past President of the Game Theory Society . He also is emeritus professor of mathematics at the Kusiel-Vorreuter University, and the emeritus professor of economics at the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Go to Profile#1641
Robert C. Prim
#5943
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Robert Clay Prim III was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Biography Robert Clay Prim III was born in Sweetwater, Texas on September 25, 1921. In 1941, Prim received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, where he also met his wife Alice Prim , whom he married in 1942. Later in 1949, he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University, where he also worked as a research associate from 1948 until 1949.
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Donald Allan Darling
#29388
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Donald Allan Darling was an American statistician, known for the Anderson–Darling test. Darling was born in 1915 in Los Angeles. In 1934 Darling began his undergraduate study at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1939. In 1940 he became a meteorologist at Pan American Airways and from 1942 to 1946, during World War II, he headed the statistics department of the Air Force Weather Research Project.
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Volker Mehrmann
#35607
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Volker Ludwig Mehrmann is a German mathematician. Education and career At Bielefeld University he completed his PhD in 1982 under Ludwig Elsner and his Habilitation in 1987 with a dissertation on control theory. Mehrmann was from 1990 to 1992 a Vertretungsprofessor at the RWTH Aachen University. From 1993 to 2000 he was a professor at the Chemnitz University of Technology. Since 2000 he has been a professor at the Institute for Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin. From June 2008 to May 2016 he was the spokesperson for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft's mathematical center called Matheon.
Go to Profile#1644
Haim Shapira
#20685
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Haim Shapira is an Israeli mathematician, pianist, speaker, philosopher and game theorist. He writes in Hebrew, and his books have been translated into English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Bengali and Korean. He is a sought-after lecturers in Israel, and was also was a speaker at TEDxJaffa on game theory and strategy. His first two books in English are Happiness and Other Small Things of Absolute Importance and Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust. He also arranged and performed music on the soundtrack for John Wick: Chapter 2.
Go to Profile#1645
Jonathan Partington
#34662
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jonathan Richard Partington is an English mathematician who is Emeritus Professor of pure mathematics at the University of Leeds. Education Professor Partington was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD thesis entitled "Numerical ranges and the Geometry of Banach Spaces" under the supervision of Béla Bollobás.
Go to Profile#1646
Zhu Xiping
#27413
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Zhu Xiping is a Chinese mathematician. He is a professor of Mathematics at Sun Yat-sen University, China. Poincaré conjecture In 2002 and 2003, Grigori Perelman posted three preprints to the arXiv claiming a resolution of the renowned Poincaré conjecture, along with the more general geometrization conjecture. His work contained a number of notable new results on the Ricci flow, although many proofs were only sketched and a number of details were unaddressed. Zhu collaborated with Huai-Dong Cao of Lehigh University in filling in the details of Perelman's work, along with reworking various elements.
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Walter Gautschi
#25904
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Walter Gautschi is a Swiss-born American mathematician, writer and professor emeritus of Computer science and Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is primarily known for his contributions to numerical analysis and has authored over 200 papers in his area and published four books.
Go to Profile#1648
Walter Warwick Sawyer
#32210
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Walter Warwick Sawyer was a mathematician, mathematics educator and author, who taught on several continents. Life and career Walter Warwick Sawyer was born in St. Ives, Hunts, England on April 5, 1911. He attended Highgate School in London. He was an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, obtaining a BA in 1933 and specializing in quantum theory and relativity. He was an assistant lecturer in mathematics from 1933 to 1937 at University College, Dundee and from 1937 to 1944 at University of Manchester. In 1940 he met Betty [Hilda Elizabeth Crowther] and within two weeks, they were married.
Go to Profile#1649
Karl Rubin
#22598
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karl Cooper Rubin is an American mathematician at University of California, Irvine as Thorp Professor of Mathematics. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a professor at Stanford, and before that worked at Ohio State University between 1987 and 1999. His research interest is in elliptic curves. He was the first mathematician to show that some elliptic curves over the rationals have finite Tate–Shafarevich groups. It is widely believed that these groups are always finite.
Go to Profile#1650
Carlton E. Lemke
#21225
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Carlton Edward Lemke was an American mathematician. After fighting in WWII with the 82nd Airborne Division, then under a GI grant, he received his bachelor's degree in 1949 at the University of Buffalo and his PhD in 1953 at Carnegie Mellon University . In 1952-1954 he was instructor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and in 1954–55 at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory of General Electric. In 1955-56 he was an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America in New Jersey. From 1956 he was assistant professor and later professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since 1967, he was ...
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