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,
#1801
Gustave Malécot
#20289
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Gustave Malécot was a French mathematician whose work on heredity had a strong influence on population genetics. Biography Malécot grew up in L'Horme, a small village near St. Étienne in the Loire département, the son of a mine engineer.
Go to Profile#1802
Julius Anatolyevich Schrader
#8686
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Julius Anatolyevich Schreider, OP [Yu. A. Schreider] was a mathematician, cyberneticist, philosopher, and a convert to Roman Catholicism. Education and research work Schrader was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Union. In 1946, he graduated from the renowned Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University. He completed his doctoral work in 1949 and in 1950 completed his postdoctoral dissertation on functional analysis.
Go to Profile#1803
Tudor Ratiu
#29613
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tudor Stefan Rațiu is a Romanian-American mathematician who has made contributions to geometric mechanics and dynamical systems theory. Education His father, Mircea Ratiu, an engineer, was the younger brother of Ion Rațiu, a well-known Romanian politician, while his mother, Rodica Bucur, was a piano professor at the Conservatory of Music in Timișoara. Ratiu did his undergraduate studies at the University of Timișoara, completing his B.Sc. in 1973 and his M.S. in 1974.
Go to Profile#1804
Arif Salimov
#40049
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Arif Salimov is an Azerbaijani/Soviet mathematician, Honored Scientist of Azerbaijan, known for his research in differential geometry. He earned his B.Sc. degree from Baku State University, Azerbaijan, in 1978, a PhD and Doctor of Sciences degrees in geometry from Kazan State University, Russia, in 1984 and 1998, respectively. His advisor was Vladimir Vishnevskii. Salimov is Full Professor and Head of the Department Algebra and Geometry, Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Baku State University. He is an author and co-author of more than 100 articles. He is also an author of 2 monographs....
Go to Profile#1805
Rudolf Ahlswede
#16901
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Rudolf F. Ahlswede was a German mathematician. Born in Dielmissen, Germany, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, at the University of Göttingen, with the topic "Contributions to the Shannon information theory in case of non-stationary channels". He dedicated himself in his further career to information theory and became one of the leading representatives of this area worldwide.
Go to Profile#1806
Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan
#16539
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan is an Indian-American scientist. He is currently the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Physics at Harvard University. His work centers around understanding the organization of matter in space and time . Mahadevan is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#1807
Igor Pak
#39018
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Igor Pak is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in combinatorics and discrete probability. He formerly taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota, and he is best known for his bijective proof of the hook-length formula for the number of Young tableaux, and his work on random walks. He was a keynote speaker alongside George Andrews and Doron Zeilberger at the 2006 Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Conference on Enumerative Combinatorics.
Go to Profile#1808
Karl-Theodor Sturm
#35586
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Karl-Theodor "Theo" Sturm is a German mathematician working in stochastic analysis. Life and work After obtaining his Abitur from the Platen-Gymnasium Ansbach in 1980, Sturm began to study Mathematics and Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where he graduated in 1986 with the Diploma in Mathematics and the State Examination in Mathematics and Physics. In 1989, he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Heinz Bauer and in 1993 he received his habilitation. Visiting and research positions led him to the universities of Stanford, Zurich, and Bonn as well as to the MPI Leipzig. In 1994, he was awarded a Heisenberg fellowship of the DFG.
Go to Profile#1809
Roland Speicher
#31607
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Roland Speicher is a German mathematician, known for his work on free probability theory. He is a professor at the Saarland University. After winning the 1979 German national competition Jugend forscht in the field of mathematics and computer science, Speicher studied physics and mathematics at the Universities of Saarbrücken, Freiburg and Heidelberg. He received in 1989 his doctorate from Heidelberg University under the supervision of Wilhelm Freiherr von Waldenfels with thesis Quantenstochastische Prozesse auf der Cuntz-Algebra . From 2000 to 2010 Speicher was a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
Go to Profile#1810
Antonio Ambrosetti
#41111
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Antonio Ambrosetti was an Italian mathematician who worked in the fields of partial differential equations and calculus of variations. Scientific activity Ambrosetti studied at the University of Padua and was professor of mathematics at the International School for Advanced Studies. He is known for his basic work on topological methods in the calculus of variations. These provide tools aimed at establishing the existence of solutions to variational problems when classical direct methods of the calculus of variations cannot be applied. In particular, the so-called mountain pass theorem he esta...
Go to Profile#1811
Tamás Erdélyi
#38656
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Tamás Erdélyi is a Hungarian-born mathematician working at Texas A&M University. His main areas of research are related to polynomials and their approximations, although he also works in other areas of applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#1812
Caterina Consani
#38155
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Caterina Consani is an Italian mathematician specializing in arithmetic geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. Contributions Consani is the namesake of the Consani–Scholten quintic, a quintic threefold that she described with Jasper Scholten in 2001, and of the Connes–Consani plane connection, a relationship between the field with one element and certain group actionss on projective spaces investigated by Consani with Alain Connes. She is also known for her work with Matilde Marcolli on Arakelov theory and noncommutative geometry.
Go to Profile#1813
Hans-Joachim Bremermann
#9127
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
Hans-Joachim Bremermann was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.
Go to Profile#1814
Timothy Browning
#37697
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Timothy Browning is a mathematician working in number theory, examining the interface of analytic number theory and Diophantine geometry. Browning is currently a Professor of number theory at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg, Austria.
Go to Profile#1815
Victor S. Miller
#17383
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Victor Saul Miller is an American mathematician as a Principal Computer Scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1968, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. He was an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1973 to 1978. In 1978 he joined the IBM 801 project in the Computer Science Department of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and moved to the Mathematics Department in 1984. From 1993-2...
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Deryk Osthus
#26659
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Deryk Osthus is the Professor of Graph Theory at the School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham. He is known for his research in combinatorics, predominantly in extremal and probabilistic graph theory.
Go to Profile#1817
Rostislav Grigorchuk
#34453
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rostislav Ivanovich Grigorchuk is a mathematician working in different areas of mathematics including group theory, dynamical systems, geometry and computer science. He holds the rank of Distinguished Professor in the Mathematics Department of Texas A&M University. Grigorchuk is particularly well known for having constructed, in a 1984 paper, the first example of a finitely generated group of intermediate growth, thus answering an important problem posed by John Milnor in 1968. This group is now known as the Grigorchuk group and it is one of the important objects studied in geometric group theory, particularly in the study of branch groups, automaton groups and iterated monodromy groups.
Go to Profile#1818
John Chambers
#19272
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S. Early life Chambers received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963. He received a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD degree in 1966, both in statistics, from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1819
Maryanthe Malliaris
#30558
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Maryanthe Elizabeth Malliaris is a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, a specialist in model theory. Early life and education Malliaris is the daughter of Anastasios G. Malliaris, an economist at Loyola University Chicago, and Mary E. Malliaris, Professor of Information Systems at Loyola.
Go to Profile#1820
Chitikila Musili
#41084
Overall Influence
Chitikila Musili was an Indian mathematician at the University of Hyderabad who developed standard monomial theory in collaboration with his PhD supervisor C. S. Seshadri. Publications
Go to Profile#1821
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#245
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the creator of Transcendental Meditation and leader of the worldwide organization that has been characterized in multiple ways, including as a new religious movement and as non-religious. He became known as Maharishi and Yogi as an adult.
Go to Profile#1822
Nils Aall Barricelli
#5931
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Nils Aall Barricelli was a Norwegian-Italian mathematician. Barricelli's early computer-assisted experiments in symbiogenesis and evolution are considered pioneering in artificial life research. Barricelli, who was independently wealthy, held an unpaid residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1953, 1954, and 1956. He later worked at the University of California, Los Angeles, at Vanderbilt University , in the Department of Genetics of the University of Washington, Seattle and then at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Oslo. Barricelli published in ...
Go to Profile#1823
Peter Ozsváth
#36818
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Peter Steven Ozsváth is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. He created, along with Zoltán Szabó, Heegaard Floer homology, a homology theory for 3-manifolds. Education Ozsváth received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1994 under the supervision of John Morgan; his dissertation was entitled On Blowup Formulas For SU Donaldson Polynomials.
Go to Profile#1824
Shmuel Winograd
#5867
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Shmuel Winograd was an Israeli-American computer scientist, noted for his contributions to computational complexity. He has proved several major results regarding the computational aspects of arithmetic; his contributions include the Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm and an algorithm for the fast Fourier transform which transforms it into a problem of computing convolutions which can be solved with another Winograd's algorithm.
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Neena Gupta
#25054
Overall Influence
Neena Gupta is a professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute , Kolkata. Her primary fields of interest are commutative algebra and affine algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#1826
Peter Teichner
#40115
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Peter Teichner is a German mathematician and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. His main areas of work are topology and geometry. Life In 1988, Peter Teichner graduated from the University of Mainz with a degree in mathematics. After graduating, he worked for one year in Canada, funded by the "Government of Canada Award", at McMaster University in Hamilton . From 1989 to 1990 he was affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. From 1990 to 1992 he worked at the University of Mainz as a research assistant, and in 1992 he received his doctorate with Matthias Kreck as his advisor.
Go to Profile#1827
Gilberto Calvillo Vives
#17359
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gilberto Calvillo Vives is the president of the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics . He obtained a BSc in physics and mathematics at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional , a MSc in science, and a PhD in Operations Research at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Go to Profile#1828
Lai-Sang Young
#28175
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lai-Sang Lily Young is a Hong Kong-born American mathematician who holds the Henry & Lucy Moses Professorship of Science and is a professor of mathematics and neural science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Her research interests include dynamical systems, ergodic theory, chaos theory, probability theory, statistical mechanics, and neuroscience. She is particularly known for introducing the method of Markov returns in 1998, which she used to prove exponential correlation delay in Sinai billiards and other hyperbolic dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#1829
Menachem Magidor
#10305
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Menachem Magidor is an Israeli mathematician who specializes in mathematical logic, in particular set theory. He served as president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was president of the Association for Symbolic Logic from 1996 to 1998 and as president of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science from 2016 to 2019. In 2016 he was elected an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he received the Solomon Bublick Award.
Go to Profile#1830
Carl Adam Petri
#4925
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Carl Adam Petri was a German mathematician and computer scientist. Life and work Petri created his major scientific contribution, the concept of the Petri net, in 1939 at the age of 13, for the purpose of describing chemical processes. In 1941, his father told him about Konrad Zuse's work on computing machines and Carl Adam started building his own analog computer.
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Lisa Jeffrey
#38168
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lisa Claire Jeffrey FRSC is a Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. In her research, she uses symplectic geometry to provide rigorous proofs of results in quantum field theory.
Go to Profile#1832
Gerald Sacks
#13452
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Gerald Enoch Sacks was a logician whose most important contributions were in recursion theory. Named after him is Sacks forcing, a forcing notion based on perfect sets and the Sacks Density Theorem, which asserts that the partial order of the recursively enumerable Turing degrees is dense. Sacks had a joint appointment as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University starting in 1972 and became emeritus at M.I.T. in 2006 and at Harvard in 2012.
Go to Profile#1833
Jean-Paul Benzécri
#10419
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Jean-Paul Benzécri was a French mathematician and statistician. He studied at École Normale Supérieure and was professor at Université de Rennes and later for most of his career at the Paris Institute of Statistics , Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris. He is most known for his specific inductive approach to data analysis which led to the creation of Correspondence analysis, a statistical technique for analyzing contingency tables and for the invention of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm for agglomerative hierarchical clustering.
Go to Profile#1834
Sander Greenland
#35507
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sander Greenland is an American statistician and epidemiologist with many contributions to statistical and epidemiologic methods including Bayesian and causal inference, bias analysis, and meta-analysis. His focus has been the extensions, limitations, and misuses of statistical methods in nonexperimental studies, especially in postmarketing surveillance of drugs, vaccines, and medical devices. He received honors Bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Regent's and National Science Foundation Fellow in Mathematics, and then recei...
Go to Profile#1835
Maria Reiche
#6720
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Maria Reiche Grosse-Neumann was a German-born Peruvian mathematician, archaeologist, and technical translator. She is known for her research into the Nazca Lines, which she first saw in 1941 together with American historian Paul Kosok. Known as the "Lady of the Lines", Reiche made the documentation, preservation and public dissemination of the Nazca Lines her life's work.
Go to Profile#1836
Ian Grojnowski
#40493
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ian Grojnowski is a mathematician working at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge. Awards and honours Grojnowski was the first recipient of the Fröhlich Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2004 for his work in representation theory and algebraic geometry. The citation reads
Go to Profile#1837
Mei-Chi Shaw
#33868
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mei-Chi Shaw is a professor of mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. Her research concerns partial differential equations. Life and career Shaw was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1955. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1977. Shaw received her PhD from Princeton University four years later in 1981, working with Joseph Kohn. She then took a postdoctoral position at Purdue University During this time, she married her husband, Hsueh-Chia Chang. In 1983, Shaw took a tenure-track position at Texas A&M University, moving to University of H...
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Crispin Nash-Williams
#33458
Overall Influence
1932 - 2001 (69 years)
Crispin St John Alvah Nash-Williams FRSE was a British mathematician. His research interest was in the field of discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. Biography Nash-Williams was born on 19 December 1932 in Cardiff, Wales. His father, Victor Erle Nash-Williams , was an archaeologist at University College Cardiff, and his mother had studied classics at Oxford. As a small boy, Nash-Williams attended Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, which was then headed by Wilfrid Oldaker. A biographer has said that Oldaker was a formative influence on Nash-Williams.
Go to Profile#1839
Mihail Zervos
#16714
Overall Influence
Mihail Zervos is a Greek financial mathematician. He is Professor of Financial Mathematics at the London School of Economics. Curriculum Zervos received his MSc and PhD degrees from Imperial College London in 1995. After completing his PhD, he was a lecturer at the Department of Statistics, University of Newcastle, where he stayed until 2000. He then joined King's College London, initially as a lecturer and then as a reader in the Department of Mathematics. In 2006 he was appointed to the Chair in Financial Mathematics at the London School of Economics where he was tasked with founding a new R...
Go to Profile#1840
César Camacho
#34839
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
César Leopoldo Camacho Manco , better known as simply César Camacho, is a Peruvian-born Brazilian mathematician and former director of the IMPA. His area of research is dynamical systems theory. Camacho earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971 under the supervision of Stephen Smale.
Go to Profile#1841
Emilio Gagliardo
#39579
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Emilio Gagliardo was an Italian mathematician working in the field of Analysis. Life He did his PhD in Algebraic Geometry at the University of Genoa with Eugenio Togliatti and graduated in 1953.He then became an assistant of Guido Stampacchia and started to study partial differential equations. In 1959 he got his Habilitation and spend some time abroad with Nachman Aronszajn at the University of Kansas and with Jacques-Louis Lions in Nancy. In 1961 he became Professor in Genoa. From 1968 to 1975 he was at the University of Oregon and since 1975 at the University of Padua.
Go to Profile#1842
Scott W. Williams
#33707
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Scott Williams is a professor of mathematics at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree. Education Raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Williams attended Morgan State University and earned his bachelor degree of Science in mathematics.
Go to Profile#1843
Samuel Kotz
#20904
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Samuel Kotz was a professor and research scholar in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science at The George Washington University since 1997 until his death on March 16, 2010. He was an author or editor of several standard reference works in statistics and probability theory.
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Gábor J. Székely
#32470
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gábor J. Székely is a Hungarian-American statistician/mathematician best known for introducing energy statistics . Examples include: the distance correlation, which is a bona fide dependence measure, equals zero exactly when the variables are independent; the distance skewness, which equals zero exactly when the probability distribution is diagonally symmetric; the E-statistic for normality test; and the E-statistic for clustering.
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Hans Weinberger
#35383
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Hans F. Weinberger was an Austrian-American mathematician, known for his contributions to variational methods for eigenvalue problems, partial differential equations, and fluid dynamics. He obtained an M.S. in physics from Carnegie Institute of Technology where he also got his Sc.D. on the thesis Fourier Transforms of Moebius Series advised by Richard Duffin . He then worked at the institute for Fluid Dynamics at University of Maryland, College Park , and as professor at University of Minnesota where he was department head and now is Professor Emeritus . Weinberger was the first director of Institute for Mathematics and its Applications .
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Grzegorz Rozenberg
#9881
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Grzegorz Rozenberg is a Polish and Dutch computer scientist. His primary research areas are natural computing, formal language and automata theory, graph transformations, and concurrent systems. He is referred to as the guru of natural computing, as he was promoting the vision of natural computing as a coherent scientific discipline already in the 1970s, gave this discipline its current name, and defined its scope.
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Peter Diggle
#36838
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Peter John Diggle, is a British statistician. He holds concurrent appointments with the Faculty of Health and Medicine at Lancaster University, and the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. From 2004 to 2008 he was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow. He is one of the founding co-editors of the journal Biostatistics.
Go to Profile#1848
Gunther Uhlmann
#29762
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gunther Alberto Uhlmann Arancibia is a mathematician whose research focuses on inverse problems and imaging, microlocal analysis, partial differential equations and invisibility. Education and career Uhlmann studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, gaining his Licenciatura degree in 1973. He continued his studies at MIT where he received a PhD in 1976. He held postdoctoral positions at MIT, Harvard and NYU, including a Courant Instructorship at the Courant Institute in 1977–1978. In 1980, he became Assistant Professor at MIT and then moved in 1985 to the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#1849
Oh Yong-Geun
#37931
Overall Influence
Oh Yong-Geun is a mathematician and distinguished professor at the Pohang University of Science and Technology and founding director of the IBS Center for Geometry and Physics located on that campus. His fields of study have been on symplectic topology, Floer homology, Hamiltonian mechanics, and mirror symmetry He was in the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society and has been a member of Institute for Advanced Study, Korean Mathematical Society, and National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Gokova Geometry and To...
Go to Profile#1850
David S. Moore
#27654
Overall Influence
David Sheldon Moore is an American statistician, who is known for his leadership of statistics education for many decades. Biography David S. Moore received his A.B. from Princeton University and the Ph.D. from Cornell University in mathematics.
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