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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,

#1651

Zoltán Szabó

#31649

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Zoltán Szabó is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University known for his work on Heegaard Floer homology. Education and career Szabó received his B.A. from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary in 1990, and he received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1994.

#1652

Colm Mulcahy

#22923

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Colm Mulcahy is an Irish mathematician, academic, columnist, book author, public outreach speaker, and amateur magician. He is Professor Emeritus at Spelman College, where he was on the faculty from 1988 to 2020. In addition to algebra, number theory, and geometry, his interests include mathemagical card magic and the culture of mathematics–particularly the contributions of Irish mathematicians and also the works of iconic mathematics writer Martin Gardner. He has blogged for the Mathematical Association of America, The Huffington Post, Scientific American, and for The Aperiodical; his puzzles have been featured in The New York Times.

#1653

Joan Birman

#26585

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.

#1654

Steve Selvin

#19922

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Steve Selvin is an American statistician who is a professor emeritus of biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Selvin joined the faculty of the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley in 1972 and in 1977 he became the head of its biostatistics division. As the head of Undergraduate Management Committee he was instrumental in the development of the school's undergraduate program. In addition to his work at UC Berkeley he also served from 1990 to 1998 as an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and since 2005 as a professor of biostatistics at the John...

#1655

Cameron Gordon

#30936

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Cameron Gordon is a Professor and Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, known for his work in knot theory. Among his notable results is his work with Marc Culler, John Luecke, and Peter Shalen on the cyclic surgery theorem. This was an important ingredient in his work with Luecke showing that knotss were determined by their complement. Gordon was also involved in the resolution of the Smith conjecture.

#1656

Karen Yeats

#35997

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Karen Amanda Yeats is a Canadian mathematician and mathematical physicist whose research connects combinatorics to quantum field theory. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Combinatorics in Quantum Field Theory at the University of Waterloo.

#1657

Tim Poston

#14287

Overall Influence

1945 - 2017 (72 years)

Timothy Poston was an English mathematician and polymath best known for his work on catastrophe theory. His early childhood was in Moscow where his father served in the British Embassy for 18 months. When his father moved back to the UK to work for the BBC, Tim went to Datchworth primary school. Later his father ran The Near East Broadcasting Station Sharq al-Adna; his mother taught her children by PNEU until Tim went to The Junior School in Nicosia as a boarder. After the Suez débâcle, his father returned to the UK to train as a parson, and the family lived in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Dorset.

#1658

Barbara MacCluer

#35887

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Barbara Diane MacCluer is an American mathematician, formerly a professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and now a professor emeritus there. Her research specialty is in operator theory and composition operators; she is known for the books she has written on this subject and related areas of functional analysis.

#1659

Miroslav Fiedler

#38966

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Miroslav Fiedler was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to linear algebra, graph theory and algebraic graph theory. His article, "Algebraic Connectivity of Graphs", published in the Czechoslovak Math Journal in 1973, established the use of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix of a graph to create tools for measuring algebraic connectivity in algebraic graph theory. Fiedler is honored by the Fiedler eigenvalue , with its associated Fiedler eigenvector, as the names for the quantities that characterize algebraic connectivity. Since Fiedler's original contribution, this structu...

#1660

Samuel Sanford Shapiro

#25405

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Samuel Sanford Shapiro was an American statistician and engineer. He was a professor emeritus of statistics at Florida International University. He was known for his co-authorship of the Shapiro–Wilk test and the Shapiro–Francia test.

#1661

William Floyd

#34105

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

William J. Floyd is an American mathematician specializing in topology. He is currently a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Floyd received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University 1978 under the direction of William Thurston.

#1662

Marc Lackenby

#30070

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Marc Lackenby is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford whose research concerns knot theory, low-dimensional topology, and group theory. Lackenby studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge beginning in 1990, and earned his Ph.D. in 1997, with a dissertation on Dehn Surgery and Unknotting Operations supervised by W. B. R. Lickorish. After positions as Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and as Research Fellow at Cambridge, he joined Oxford as a Lecturer and Fellow of St Catherine's in 1999. He was promoted to Professor at Oxford in 2006.

#1663

Clifford S. Gardner

#33406

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Clifford Spear Gardner was an American mathematician specializing in applied mathematics. Career Gardner studied at Phillips Academy and Harvard, where he earned his baccalaureate in 1944. In 1953 he earned a PhD from New York University, under the supervision of Fritz John. Thereafter he worked at NASA in Langley Field, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of NYU, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1967 to 1990, when he retired as professor emeritus..

#1664

David A. Freedman

David A. Freedman

#18316

Overall Influence

1938 - 2008 (70 years)

David Amiel Freedman was Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a distinguished mathematical statistician whose wide-ranging research included the analysis of martingale inequalities, Markov processes, de Finetti's theorem, consistency of Bayes estimators, sampling, the bootstrap, and procedures for testing and evaluating models. He published extensively on methods for causal inference and the behavior of standard statistical models under non-standard conditions – for example, how regression models behave when fitted to data from randomized experiments. Fre...

#1665

Paul T. Bateman

#32385

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Paul Trevier Bateman was an American number theorist, known for formulating the Bateman–Horn conjecture on the density of prime number values generated by systems of polynomials and the New Mersenne conjecture relating the occurrences of Mersenne primes and Wagstaff primes.

#1666

Liao Shijun

#37791

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Liao Shijun is a fluid mechanics and applied mathematics expert working in homotopy analysis method , nonlinear wavess, nonlinear dynamics, and applied mathematics. He was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Liao is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

#1667

Boris Levitan

#26660

Overall Influence

1914 - 2004 (90 years)

Boris Levitan was a mathematician known in particular for his work on almost periodic functions, and Sturm–Liouville operators, especially, on inverse scattering. Life Boris Levitan was born in Berdyansk , and grew up in Kharkiv. He graduated from Kharkov University in 1936; in 1938, he submitted his PhD thesis "Some Generalization of Almost Periodic Function" under the supervision of Naum Akhiezer. Then he defended the habilitation thesis "Theory of Generalized Translation Operators".

#1668

S. G. Dani

#18076

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Shrikrishna Gopalrao Dani is a professor of mathematics at the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, Mumbai who works in the broad area of ergodic theory. Education He did a master's degree from the University of Mumbai in 1969. He then joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Mumbai for a PhD which he was awarded in 1975. After that, he joined TIFR as a faculty member. After TIFR, he was the Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study during 1976–77 and 1983–84.

#1669

David Wolpert

#9916

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

David Hilton Wolpert is an American physicist and computer scientist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received two awards. His name is particularly associated with a theorem in computer science known as "no free lunch".

#1670

Dominique Perrin

#21906

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dominique Pierre Perrin is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to coding theory and to combinatorics on words. He is a professor of the University of Marne-la-Vallée and currently serves as the President of ESIEE Paris.

#1671

Xin-She Yang

#28876

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Xin-She Yang is Reader at the Middlesex University and was a senior research scientist at National Physical Laboratory, best known as a developer of various heuristic algorithms for engineering optimization. He obtained a DPhil in applied mathematics from Oxford University. He has given invited keynote talks at SEA2011, SCET2012, BIOMA2012 and Mendel Conference on Soft Computing . He has been elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Application in 2021. He has been on the prestigious list of Highly Cited Researchers since 2016 by Clarivate Analyatics/Web of Science.

#1672

Volodymyr Marchenko

#16620

Overall Influence

1922 - Present (102 years)

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Marchenko is a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician who specializes in mathematical physics. Biography He was born in Kharkiv in 1922. He defended his PhD thesis in 1948 under the supervision of Naum Landkof, and in 1951, he defended his DSc thesis. He worked in Kharkiv University until 1961. For 4 decades, he headed the Mathematical Physics Department at the Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

#1673

Martin Huxley

#33656

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Martin Neil Huxley FLSW is a British mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1970, the year after his supervisor Harold Davenport had died. He is a professor at Cardiff University.

#1674

Brendan Hassett

#35776

Overall Influence

Brendan Edward Hassett is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Brown University. His research interests include algebraic geometry and number theory. Education and career Hassett graduated from Yale College in 1992, and earned his doctorate in 1996 from Harvard University under the supervision of Joe Harris. After temporary positions at the Mittag-Leffler Institute, University of Chicago, and Chinese University of Hong Kong, he joined the Rice University faculty in 2000. He was promoted to full professor in 2006, chaired the department from 2009 to 2014, and was named as the Milton Brockett Porter Professor of Mathematics in 2013.

#1675

Laurence Chisholm Young

Laurence Chisholm Young

#30187

Overall Influence

1905 - 2000 (95 years)

Laurence Chisholm Young was a British mathematician known for his contributions to measure theory, the calculus of variations, optimal control theory, and potential theory. He was the son of William Henry Young and Grace Chisholm Young, both prominent mathematicians. He moved to the US in 1949 but never sought American citizenship.

#1676

Abe Gelbart

#17685

Overall Influence

1911 - 1994 (83 years)

Abraham Markham Gelbart was an American mathematician, the founding dean of the Belfer Graduate School of Science at Yeshiva University and the namesake of the International Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

#1677

Marie-Hélène Schwartz

#19414

Overall Influence

1913 - 2013 (100 years)

Marie-Hélène Schwartz was a French mathematician, known for her work on characteristic numbers of spaces with singularities. Education and career Born Marie-Hélène Lévy, she was the daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy and the great-granddaughter of philologist Henri Weil. After studying at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, she began studies at the École Normale Supérieure in 1934, but contracted tuberculosis which forced her to drop out. She married another Jewish mathematician, Laurent Schwartz, in 1938, and soon went into hiding while the Nazis occupied France. After the war, she taught at the Un...

#1678

Aleksander Pełczyński

#38511

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Aleksander "Olek" Pełczyński was a Polish mathematician who worked in functional analysis. Career Pełczyński studied mathematics from 1950 to 1956 at the University of Warsaw and received there his doctorate in 1958 under Stanisław Mazur with dissertation Własności izomorficzne przestrzeni Banacha związane ze słabą zbieżnością bezwarunkową szeregów . From 1967 to 2002 he worked at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

#1679

Carolyn S. Gordon

Carolyn S. Gordon

#31817

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carolyn S. Gordon is a mathematician and Benjamin Cheney Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. She is most well known for giving a negative answer to the question "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" in her work with David Webb and Scott A. Wolpert. She is a Chauvenet Prize winner and a 2010 Noether Lecturer.

#1680

R. James Milgram

#31165

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Richard James Milgram is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology. He is the son of mathematician Arthur Milgram. Biography Milgram graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in 1961. He received his doctorate in 1964 from the University of Minnesota with thesis The homology ring of symmetric products of Moore spaces under the supervision of Alfred Aeppli . Milgram taught from 1970 as a professor at Stanford University, where he is now emeritus. He was a visiting professor at the University of Lille , the Chinese Academy of Sc...

#1681

Peter Aczel

#18278

Overall Influence

1941 - 2023 (82 years)

Peter Henry George Aczel was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures.

#1682

Manfred W. Padberg

#18506

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Manfred Wilhelm Padberg was a German mathematician who worked with linear and combinatorial optimization. He and Ellis L. Johnson won the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 2000. Biography Padberg grew up in Zagreb, Croatia, and Westphalia. From 1961 he studied mathematics at the University of Münster, where he graduated in 1967. In 1967, he was a research assistant at the University of Mannheim. Starting in September 1968, he studied at Carnegie Mellon University, where he obtained a master's degree and his Ph.D. in Industrial Administration. His advisor was Egon Balas and his dissertation wa...

#1683

Ravindran Kannan

Ravindran Kannan

#14872

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ravindran Kannan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of Computer Science and Automation Department of Indian Institute of Science.

#1684

Michael Shulman

#28074

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Michael "Mike" Shulman is an American associate professor of mathematics at the University of San Diego who works in category theory and higher category theory, homotopy theory, logic as applied to set theory, and computer science.

#1685

Samuel Buss

#18395

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Samuel R. Buss is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made major contributions to the fields of mathematical logic, complexity theory and proof complexity. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.

#1686

Stephen Lichtenbaum

Stephen Lichtenbaum

#38518

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Stephen Lichtenbaum is an American mathematician who is working in the fields of algebraic geometry, algebraic number theory and algebraic K-theory. Lichtenbaum was an undergraduate at Harvard University , where he also obtained his Ph.D. in 1964 . After that, he was a lecturer at the Princeton University, in 1960 he was assistant professor at Cornell University, where he became associate professor in 1969 and professor in 1973. From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of the Faculty Board. Since 1990 he is professor at Brown University, where he was chairman from 1994 to 1997. He was also a visitin...

#1687

Daniela Kühn

#26924

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Daniela Kühn is a German mathematician and the Mason Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England. She is known for her research in combinatorics, and particularly in extremal combinatorics and graph theory.

#1688

Maggie Miller

#36422

Overall Influence

Maggie Miller is a mathematician, Visiting Clay Fellow, and Stanford Science Fellow at Stanford University in the Mathematics Department. Her primary research area is low-dimensional topology. Professional career Miller earned her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University, where she was advised by mathematician David Gabai and wrote her dissertation on extending fibrations of knot complements to ribbon disk complements. Prior to graduate school, she completed her undergraduate studies at University of Texas at Austin.

#1689

Robert C. Gunning

Robert C. Gunning

#38932

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Robert Clifford Gunning is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University specializing in complex analysis, who introduced indigenous bundles. Gunning was born in Longmont, Colorado, and attended to high school in his hometown. In 1947 he was admitted into the University of Colorado, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1952. For his graduate studies he went to Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D in 1955 under Salomon Bochner with thesis A classification of factors of automorphy. He then taught at the University of Chicago and in 1956 as Higgins-Lecturer at Princeton University.

#1690

Fred Galvin

#32580

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Frederick William Galvin is a mathematician, currently a professor at the University of Kansas. His research interests include set theory and combinatorics. His notable combinatorial work includes the proof of the Dinitz conjecture. In set theory, he proved with András Hajnal that if ℵω1 is a strong limit cardinal, thenholds. The research on extending this result led Saharon Shelah to the invention of PCF theory. Galvin gave an elementary proof of the Baumgartner–Hajnal theorem

#1691

Ivan Smith

#32614

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Ivan Smith is a British mathematician who deals with symplectic manifolds and their interaction with algebraic geometry, low-dimensional topology, and dynamics. He is a professor at the University of Cambridge.

#1692

Kenji Ueno

#40609

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kenji Ueno is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. He was in the 1970s at the University of Tokyo and was from 1987 to 2009 a professor at the University of Kyoto and is now the director of Yokkaichi University's Seki Kōwa Institute for Mathematics. In 1978 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki.

#1693

Vi Hart

#16734

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Victoria Hart , commonly known as Vi Hart , is an American mathematician and YouTuber. They describe themself as a "recreational mathemusician" and are well-known for creating mathematical videos on YouTube and popularizing mathematics. Hart founded the virtual reality research group eleVR and has co-authored several research papers on computational geometry and the mathematics of paper folding.

#1694

Jan Koenderink

#24673

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Jan Johan Koenderink is a Dutch physicist and psychologist known for his researches on visual perception, computer vision, and geometry. Koenderink earned a bachelor's degree from Utrecht University in 1964, a master's in 1967, and a Ph.D. in 1972 on a thesis titled Models of the visual system. He was a full professor of physics and astronomy at Utrecht University from 1978 until his mandatory retirement in 2008; since then, he has held fellow or visiting professor positions at Utrecht, the Delft University of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Katholieke Universiteit...

#1695

Guillermo Owen

#16400

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Guillermo Owen is a Colombian mathematician, and professor of applied mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, known for his work in game theory. He is also the son of the Mexican Poet and Diplomat Gilberto Owen.

#1696

Aleksei Parshin

Aleksei Parshin

#35689

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Aleksei Nikolaevich Parshin was a Russian mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry. He is most well-known for his role in the proof of the Mordell conjecture. Education and career Parshin entered the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University in 1959 and graduated in 1964. He then enrolled as a graduate student at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where he received his Kand. Nauk in 1968 under Igor Shafarevich. In 1983, he received his Doctor Nauk from Moscow State University.

#1697

Stuart Pocock

#27285

Overall Influence

Stuart J. Pocock is a British medical statistician. He has been professor of medical statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine since 1989. His research interests include statistical methods for the design, monitoring, analysis and reporting of randomized clinical trials. He also collaborates on major clinical trials, particularly in cardiovascular disease.

#1698

Jakša Cvitanić

#23274

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jakša Cvitanić is a Richard N. Merkin Professor of Mathematical Finance at the California Institute of Technology. His main research interests are in mathematical finance, contract theory, stochastic control theory, and stochastic differential equations.

#1699

Martin Barner

#33127

Overall Influence

1921 - 2020 (99 years)

Martin Barner was a German mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry and analysis. Barner received his doctorate in 1950 at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg. From 1957, he was professor in Karlsruhe and from 1962 at his alma mater in Freiburg, where he retired in 1989. From 1963 to 1994, he was director of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach and from 1968 to 1977 he was president of the German Mathematical Society.

#1700

Dan Abramovich

#36726

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Dan Abramovich is an Israeli-American mathematician working in the fields of algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry. As of 2019, he holds the title of L. Herbert Ballou University Professor at Brown University, and he is an Elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

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