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,
#1701
Christine Darden
#14479
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christine Darden is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who devoted much of her 40-year career in aerodynamics at NASA to researching supersonic flight and sonic booms. She had an M.S. in mathematics and had been teaching at Virginia State University before starting to work at the Langley Research Center in 1967. She earned a Ph.D. in engineering at George Washington University in 1983 and has published numerous articles in her field. She was the first African-American woman at NASA's Langley Research Center to be promoted to the Senior Executive Service, the to...
Go to Profile#1702
Rick Durrett
#25395
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Richard Timothy Durrett is an American mathematician known for his research and books on mathematical probability theory, stochastic processes and their application to mathematical ecology and population genetics.
Go to Profile#1703
Howard Wainer
#6821
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Howard Charles Wainer is an American statistician, past principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author, known for his contributions in the fields of statistics, psychometrics, and statistical graphics.
Go to Profile#1704
Sabir Gusein-Zade
#34182
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sabir Medgidovich Gusein-Zade is a Russian mathematician and a specialist in singularity theory and its applications. He studied at Moscow State University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1975 under the joint supervision of Sergei Novikov and Vladimir Arnold. Before entering the university, he had earned a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Go to Profile#1705
Élisabeth Lutz
#27653
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
Élisabeth Lutz was a French mathematician. The Nagell–Lutz theorem in Diophantine geometry describes the torsion points of elliptic curves; it is named after Lutz and Trygve Nagell, who both published it in the 1930s.
Go to Profile#1706
Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón
#20337
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón Irigaray is a Spanish mathematician, and professor of computer languages and systems at the University of La Rioja since 2001. He is a recognized specialist in scientific monologues. He develops his research in the area of computational algebra, to which he has contributed 25 research publications and collaborations with Spanish and European mathematicians such as Henry P. Wynn.
Go to Profile#1707
Andrew Ogg
#33908
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Andrew Pollard Ogg is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Education Ogg was a student at Bowling Green State University in the mid 1950s. Ogg received his Ph.D. in 1961 from Harvard University under the supervision of John Tate.
Go to Profile#1708
Boris Tsirelson
#19723
Overall Influence
1950 - 2020 (70 years)
Boris Semyonovich Tsirelson was a Russian–Israeli mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University in Israel, as well as a Wikipedia editor. Biography Tsirelson was born in Leningrad to a Russian Jewish family. From his father Simeon's side, he was the great-nephew of rabbi Yehuda Leib Tsirelson, chief rabbi of Bessarabia from 1918 to 1941, and a prominent posek and Jewish leader. He obtained his Master of Science from the University of Leningrad and remained there to pursue graduate studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1975, with thesis "General properties of bounded Gaussian...
Go to Profile#1709
Peter Shalen
#31383
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Peter B. Shalen is an American mathematician, working primarily in low-dimensional topology. He is the "S" in JSJ decomposition. Life He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1962, and went on to earn a B.A. from Harvard College in 1966 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972. After posts at Columbia University, Rice University, and the Courant Institute, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#1710
Stanisław Łojasiewicz
#40716
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Stanisław Łojasiewicz was a Polish mathematician. Biography At the end of the 1950s, he solved the problem of distribution division by analytic functions, introducing the %C5%81ojasiewicz inequality. Its solution opened the road to important results in the new theory of partial differential equations. The method established by Łojasiewicz led him to advance the theory of semianalytic sets, which opened an important chapter in modern analysis.
Go to Profile#1711
Wilhelmus Luxemburg
#19254
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Wilhelmus Anthonius Josephus Luxemburg was a Dutch American mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. from the University of Leiden in 1950; his M.A., in 1953; his Ph.D., from the Delft Institute of Technology, in 1955. He was assistant professor at Caltech during 1958–60; Associate Professor, during 1960–62; Professor, during 1962–2000; Professor Emeritus, from 2000. He was the Executive Officer for Mathematics during 1970–85. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Luxemburg became a correspondin...
Go to Profile#1712
Georg Nöbeling
#37406
Overall Influence
1907 - 2008 (101 years)
Georg August Nöbeling was a German mathematician. Education and career Born and raised in Lüdenscheid, Nöbeling studied mathematics and physics at University of Göttingen between 1927 and 1929 and University of Vienna, where he was a student of Karl Menger and received his PhD in 1931 on a generalization of the embedding theorem, which for one special case can be visualized by the Menger sponge. Nöbeling worked and researched in Menger's Mathematical Colloquium with Kurt Gödel, Franz Alt, Abraham Wald, Olga Taussky-Todd and others.
Go to Profile#1713
Christopher Bingham
#13270
Overall Influence
Christopher Bingham is an American statistician who introduced the Bingham distribution. In joint work with C. M. D. Godfrey and John Tukey he introduced complex demodulation into the analysis of time series. The Kent distribution, also known as the Fisher–Bingham distribution, is named after Bingham and the English biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher.
Go to Profile#1714
Craig Huneke
#38582
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Craig Lee Huneke is an American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra. He is a professor at the University of Virginia. Huneke graduated from Oberlin College with a bachelor's degree in 1973 and in 1978 earned a Ph.D. from the Yale University under Nathan Jacobson and David Eisenbud . As a post-doctoral fellow, he was at the University of Michigan. In 1979 he became an assistant professor and was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Bonn . In 1981 he became an assistant professor at Purdue University, where in 1984 he became an associate professor and became a professor in 1987.
Go to Profile#1715
Richard Bronson
#31984
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Richard D. Bronson is an American professor emeritus of mathematics at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Acting Dean of the College of Science and Engineering, Interim Provost of the Metropolitan Campus, Director of Government Affairs, and Senior Executive Assistant to the President. He served as an officer of the International Association of University Presidents, where he was actively involved in the creation of the United Nations Academic Impact initiative and the World Innovative Summit in Education, held annually in Qatar.
Go to Profile#1716
Harry Coonce
#23821
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Harry Bernard Coonce is an American mathematician notable for being the originator of the now-popular Mathematics Genealogy Project, launched in 1996, a web-based catalog of mathematics doctoral advisors and students.
Go to Profile#1717
Sheldon M. Ross
#30461
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sheldon M. Ross is the Daniel J. Epstein Chair and Professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is the author of several books in the field of probability. Biography Ross received his B. S. degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1963, his M.S. degrees in mathematics from Purdue University in 1964 and his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from Stanford University in 1968, studying under Gerald Lieberman and Cyrus Derman. He served as a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1976 until joining the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2004. He serves as the Editor for several journals, among which Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences.
Go to Profile#1718
Martin J. Taylor
#23346
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir Martin John Taylor, FRS is a British mathematician and academic. He was Professor of Pure Mathematics at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester and, prior to its formation and merger, UMIST where he was appointed to a chair after moving from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1986. He was elected Warden of Merton College, Oxford on 5 November 2009, took office on 2 October 2010 and retired in September 2018.
Go to Profile#1719
Michel Broué
#30369
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michel Broué is a French mathematician. He holds a chair at Paris Diderot University. Broué has made contributions to algebraic geometry and representation theory. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#1720
Lawrence G. Brown
#38971
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Lawrence G. Brown is an American mathematician who studies operator algebras. Brown studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1968 with George Mackey as his advisor and thesis entitled On the Structure of Locally Compact Groups. He was a professor at Purdue University until his retirement.
Go to Profile#1721
Robert M. Miura
#26118
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Robert M. Miura was a Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Sciences and of Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. He was formerly a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Go to Profile#1722
Robert Tijdeman
#32487
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Tijdeman is a Dutch mathematician. Specializing in number theory, he is best known for his Tijdeman's theorem. He is a professor of mathematics at the Leiden University since 1975, and was chairman of the department of mathematics and computer science at Leiden from 1991 to 1993. He was also president of the Dutch Mathematical Society from 1984 to 1986.
Go to Profile#1723
Susan Friedlander
#29233
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Susan Jean Friedlander is an American mathematician. Her research concerns mathematical fluid dynamics, the Euler equations and the Navier-Stokes equations. Education Friedlander graduated from University College, London with a BS in Mathematics in 1967. She was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to study at MIT, where she earned an MS in 1970. She completed her doctorate in 1972 from Princeton University under the supervision of Louis Norberg Howard.
Go to Profile#1724
Renfrey Potts
#31282
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Renfrey Burnard Potts AO was an Australian mathematician and is notable for the Potts model and his achievements in: operations research, especially networks; transportation science, car-following and road traffic; Ising-type models in mathematical physics; difference equations; and robotics. He was interested in computing from the early days of the computing revolution and oversaw the first computer purchases at the University of Adelaide.
Go to Profile#1725
James Tanton
#34611
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
James Stuart Tanton is a mathematician and math educator. He is a winner of the Kidder Faculty Prize for his teaching at The St. Mark’s Math Institute, scholar at the Mathematical Association of America, author of over ten books on mathematics, curriculum, and education, and creator of videos on mathematics on YouTube. As of February 2020 his approximately 190 videos had earned over 800,000 views.
Go to Profile#1726
Serguei Barannikov
#37669
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Serguei Barannikov is a mathematician, known for his works in algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. Biography Barannikov graduated with honors from Moscow State University in 1994.
Go to Profile#1727
Daniel Allcock
#36724
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Daniel Allcock is a mathematician specializing in group theory, Lie theory and algebraic geometry. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. Career Allcock graduated from the University of Texas in 1991 with a double major in mathematics and physics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 under the supervision of Richard Borcherds and Andrew Casson. After temporary positions at the University of Utah and Harvard University, he returned to the University of Texas as a faculty member in 2002.
Go to Profile#1728
Noriko Yui
#21685
Overall Influence
Noriko Yui is a professor of mathematics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Career A native of Japan, Yui obtained her B.S. from Tsuda College, and her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rutgers University in 1974 under the supervision of Richard Bumby.
Go to Profile#1729
Richard Lipton
#14864
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Jay Lipton is an American computer scientist who is Associate Dean of Research, Professor, and the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has worked in computer science theory, cryptography, and DNA computing.
Go to Profile#1730
Roger J-B Wets
#28360
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Roger Jean-Baptiste Robert Wets is a "pioneer" in stochastic programming and a leader in variational analysis who publishes as Roger J-B Wets. His research, expositions, graduate students, and his collaboration with R. Tyrrell Rockafellar have had a profound influence on optimization theory, computations, and applications. Since 2009, Wets has been a distinguished research professor at the mathematics department of the University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#1731
Mary Wheeler
#30156
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Mary Fanett Wheeler is an American mathematician. She is known for her work on numerical methods for partial differential equations, including domain decomposition methods. In 1998, Wheeler was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for "the computer simulation of subsurface flow and the underlying mathematical algorithms".
Go to Profile#1732
Imre Simon
#16725
Overall Influence
1943 - 2009 (66 years)
Imre Simon was a Hungarian-born Brazilian mathematician and computer scientist. His research mainly focused on theoretical computer science, automata theory, and tropical mathematics, a subject he founded, and which was so named because he lived in Brazil. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was also actively interested in questions of intellectual property and collaborative work, and was an enthusiastic advocate for open collaborative information systems, of which Wikipedia is an example.
Go to Profile#1733
Jonathan Keating
#28248
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jonathan Peter Keating is a British mathematician. As of September 2019, he is the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and from 2012 to 2019 was the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Science . He has made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular to quantum chaos, random matrix theory and number theory.
Go to Profile#1734
Bernard Maurey
#34435
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Bernard Maurey is a French mathematician who deals with functional analysis and especially the theory of Banach spaces. He received in 1973 his Ph.D. from the University Paris VII under Laurent Schwartz with thesis Théorèmes de factorisation pour les opérateurs linéaires à valeurs dans les espaces Lp. Maurey is a professor at the University of Paris VII and a member of the CNRS's Laboratoire d'Analyse et de Mathématiques Appliquées of the University of Marne-la-Vallée. He was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1974 in Vancouver.
Go to Profile#1735
Erich Neuwirth
#25692
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Erich Neuwirth is a professor emeritus of statistics and computer science at the University of Vienna. Research Neuwirth studied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vienna and received the doctorate in 1974. He started teaching at the University of Vienna in 1969 and was promoted to professor in 1987. He was employed at the Department for Statistics and Decision Support Systems at the faculty of mathematics and the faculty of computer science.
Go to Profile#1736
Cheryl Praeger
#25456
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is an Australian mathematician. Praeger received BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Queensland , and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1973 under direction of Peter M. Neumann. She has published widely and has advised 27 PhD students . She is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She is best known for her works in group theory, algebraic graph theory and combinatorial designs.
Go to Profile#1737
William Kruskal
#22027
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
William Henry Kruskal was an American mathematician and statistician. He is best known for having formulated the Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance , a widely used nonparametric statistical method.
Go to Profile#1738
Nikolay Konstantinov
#24761
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Konstantinov was a leading Soviet and Russian mathematical educator and organizer of numerous mathematics competitions for high school students. He is best known as the creator of the system of math schools and math classes and as the creator and chief organizer of the Tournament of the Towns. For his work he was awarded the Paul Erdős award in 1992.
Go to Profile#1739
Paola Loreti
#34480
Overall Influence
Paola Loreti is an Italian mathematician, and a professor of mathematical analysis at Sapienza University of Rome. She is known for her research on Fourier analysis, control theory, and non-integer representations. The Komornik–Loreti constant, the smallest non-integer base for which the representation of 1 is unique, is named after her and Vilmos Komornik.
Go to Profile#1740
Audrey Terras
#34751
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Audrey Anne Terras is an American mathematician who works primarily in number theory. Her research has focused on quantum chaos and on various types of zeta functions. Early life and education Audrey Terras was born September 10, 1942, in Washington, D.C. She received a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1964, and MA and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1966 and 1970 respectively. She was married to fellow UMD alumnus Riho Terras. She stated in a 2008 interview that she chose to study mathematics because "The U.S. government paid me! And not much! It...
Go to Profile#1741
John N. Mather
#22423
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
John Norman Mather was a mathematician at Princeton University known for his work on singularity theory and Hamiltonian dynamics. He was descended from Atherton Mather , a cousin of Cotton Mather. His early work dealt with the stability of smooth mappings between smooth manifolds of dimensions n and p . He determined the precise dimensions for which smooth mappings are stable with respect to smooth equivalence by diffeomorphisms of the source and target .
Go to Profile#1742
Haruzo Hida
#39792
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Haruzo Hida is a Japanese mathematician, known for his research in number theory, algebraic geometry, and modular forms. Hida received from Kyoto University a B.A. in 1975, an M.A. in 1977, and a Ph.D. in 1980 with thesis On Abelian Varieties with Complex Multiplication as Factors of the Jacobians of Shimura Curves, although he left Kyoto University in 1977. He was from 1977 to 1984 an assistant professor and from 1984 to 1987 an associate professor at Hokkaidō University. Since 1987 he has been a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1979 to 1981 he was a visiting scho...
Go to Profile#1743
Krystyna Kuperberg
#32997
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Krystyna M. Kuperberg is a Polish-American mathematician who currently works as a professor of mathematics at Auburn University, where she was formerly an Alumni Professor of Mathematics. Early life and family Her parents, Jan W. and Barbara H. Trybulec, were pharmacists and owned a pharmacy in Tarnów. Her older brother is Andrzej Trybulec. Her husband Włodzimierz Kuperberg and her son Greg Kuperberg are also mathematicians, while her daughter Anna Kuperberg is a photographer.
Go to Profile#1744
Stevo Todorčević
#17065
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stevo Todorčević , is a Yugoslavian mathematician specializing in mathematical logic and set theory. He holds a Canada Research Chair in mathematics at the University of Toronto, and a director of research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.
Go to Profile#1745
Mark S. Joshi
#28263
Overall Influence
1969 - 2017 (48 years)
Mark Suresh Joshi was British researcher and consultant in mathematical finance. His last position was a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research focused on derivatives pricing and interest rate derivatives in particular. He was the author of numerous research articles and seven books; his popular guides, "On becoming a quant" and "How to Get a Quant Job in Finance", are widely read.
Go to Profile#1746
Jessica Fridrich
#10402
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jessica Fridrich is a professor at Binghamton University, who specializes in data hiding applications in digital imagery. She is also known for documenting and popularizing the CFOP method , one of the most commonly used methods for speedsolving the Rubik's Cube, also known as speedcubing. She is considered one of the pioneers of speedcubing, along with Lars Petrus. Nearly all of the fastest speedcubers have based their methods on Fridrich's, usually referred to as CFOP, that is, .
Go to Profile#1747
Emil Horozov
#33751
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Emil Horozov is a Bulgarian mathematician known for his work in dynamical systems theory and mathematical physics and work related to Hilbert's sixteenth problem. Education Horozov obtained Master's degree from Sofia University in 1972 and then got his Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1978, where he was under the supervision of V. I. Arnold and Y. V. Egorov. His thesis was Bifurcations of symmetric vectorfields on the plane. In 1990, Horozov obtained his D.Sc. degree, this time from Sofia University, after completing his thesis, which was titled Hamiltonian systems and Abelian integrals.
Go to Profile#1748
Timur Eneev
#29298
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Timur Magomedovich Eneev was a Russian mathematician specializing in mechanics and control processes. A minor planet Eneev discovered in 1978 is named after him. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Cosmic Research. He was a member of the Balkar ethnic group.
Go to Profile#1749
Peter M. Gruber
#33631
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Peter Manfred Gruber was an Austrian mathematician working in geometric number theory as well as in convex and discrete geometry. Biography Gruber obtained his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1966, under the supervision of Nikolaus Hofreiter. From 1971, he was Professor at the University of Linz, and from 1976, at the TU Wien. He was a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Go to Profile#1750
James R. Norris
#26817
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
James Ritchie Norris is a mathematician working in probability theory and stochastic analysis. He is the Professor of Stochastic Analysis in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He has made contributions to areas of mathematics connected to probability theory and mathematical analysis, including Malliavin calculus, heat kernel estimates, and mathematical models for coagulation and fragmentation. He was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1997.
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