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,
#1901
Olga Kharlampovich
#39197
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Olga Kharlampovich is a Russian-Canadian mathematician working in the area of group theory. She is the Mary P. Dolciani Professor of Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College. Contributions Kharlampovich is known for her example of a finitely presented 3-step solvable group with unsolvable word problem and for the solution together with A. Myasnikov of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first-order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups and decidability of this common theory.
Go to Profile#1902
James A. Wilson
#30024
Overall Influence
James Arthur Wilson is a mathematician working on special functions and orthogonal polynomials who introduced Wilson polynomials, Askey–Wilson polynomials and the Askey–Wilson beta integral.
Go to Profile#1903
Alberto Bressan
#33245
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alberto Bressan is an Italian mathematician at Penn State University. His primary field of research is mathematical analysis including hyperbolic systems of conservation lawss, impulsive control of Lagrangian systems, and non-cooperative differential games.
Go to Profile#1904
Arthur Geoffrey Walker
#12591
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
Prof Arthur Geoffrey Walker FRS FRSE was a British mathematician who made important contributions to physics and physical cosmology. Although he was an accomplished geometer, he is best remembered today for two important contributions to general relativity.
Go to Profile#1905
Gisbert Wüstholz
#39108
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Gisbert Wüstholz is a German mathematician internationally known for his fundamental contributions to number theory and arithmetic geometry. Early life and education Gisbert Wüstholz was born in 1948 in Tuttlingen and studied from 1967 to 1973 at the University of Freiburg where he finished his PhD under the supervision of Theodor Schneider in 1978.
Go to Profile#1906
Adrian Smith
#9226
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sir Adrian Frederick Melhuish Smith, PRS is a British statistician who is chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute and president of the Royal Society. Early life and education Smith was born on 9 September 1946 in Dawlish. He was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and University College London, where his PhD supervisor was Dennis Lindley.
Go to Profile#1907
Alain-Sol Sznitman
#35622
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alain-Sol Sznitman is a French and Swiss mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at ETH Zurich. His research concerns probability theory and mathematical physics. Within the field of percolation theory, Sznitman introduced the study of random interlacements.
Go to Profile#1908
Anatoly Dorodnitsyn
#23073
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Anatoly Alekseyevich Dorodnitsyn 19 November , 2 December , 1910 – 7 June 1994, Moscow Dorodnitsyn was a Full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences ,and a professor at the department of physical and mathematical sciences , majoring in geophysics.
Go to Profile#1909
Richard Arratia
#37886
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Alejandro Arratia is a mathematician noted for his work in combinatorics and probability theory. Contributions Arratia developed the ideas of interlace polynomials with Béla Bollobás and Gregory Sorkin, found an equivalent formulation of the Stanley–Wilf conjecture as the convergence of a limit, and was the first to investigate the lengths of superpatterns of permutations.
Go to Profile#1910
Aleksei Sveshnikov
#35020
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Aleksei Georgievich Sveshnikov was a Russian mathematical physicist. Biography Born in Saratov as the son of Georgy Nikolaevich Sveshnikov and Vera Konstantinovna Sveshnikova , A. G. Sveshnikov graduated from a Moscow high school in 1941. As an artillery soldier and platoon commander in WWII, he was in April 1945 seriously wounded on the 4th Ukrainian Front. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star , the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st Degree , the Medal for Victory over Germany and many jubilee medals.
Go to Profile#1911
Jean Bénabou
#34068
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Jean Bénabou was a French mathematician, known for his contributions to category theory. He directed the Research Seminar in Category Theory at the Institut Henri Poincaré and Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu from 1969 to 2001.
Go to Profile#1912
Alan D. Taylor
#29492
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alan Dana Taylor is an American mathematician who, with Steven Brams, solved the problem of envy-free cake-cutting for an arbitrary number of people with the Brams–Taylor procedure. Taylor received his Ph.D. in 1975 from Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#1913
George Fix
#34868
Overall Influence
1939 - 2002 (63 years)
George J. Fix was an American mathematician who collaborated on several seminal papers and books in the field of finite element method. In addition to his work in mathematics, Fix was a beer and homebrewing enthusiast and educator, as well as the author of several books about brewing. He died of cancer in 2002.
Go to Profile#1914
Ari Laptev
#34302
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ari Laptev is a mathematician working on the spectral theory of partial differential equations. His PhD was obtained in 1978 at Leningrad State University under the supervision of Michael Solomyak. He is currently Professor at both the KTH in Stockholm and Imperial College London. From 2001 to 2003 Laptev served as the President of the Swedish Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#1915
Eleny Ionel
#29827
Overall Influence
Eleny-Nicoleta Ionel is a Romanian mathematician whose research concerns symplectic geometry, including the study of the Gromov–Witten invariants and Gopakumar–Vafa invariant. Among her most significant results are the construction of relative Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic manifolds, and the proof of the vanishing in codimension at least g of the tautological ring of the moduli space of genus-g curves.
Go to Profile#1916
William W. Cooper
#45269
Overall Influence
#1917
Hiroshi Fujita
#39017
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
is a retired Japanese mathematician who worked in partial differential equations. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo, under the supervision of Tosio Kato. Mathematical contributions His most widely cited paper, published in 1966, studied the partial differential equationand showed that there is a "threshold" value for which implies the existence of nonconstant solutions which exist for all positive and all real values of the variables. By contrast, if is between and then such solutions cannot exist. This paper initiated the study of similar and analogous phenomena for various parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#1918
Harold R. Parks
#40965
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Harold Raymond Parks is an American mathematician and is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Oregon State University. Parks obtained his Ph.D. in 1974 from Princeton University, under the supervision of Frederick J. Almgren, Jr. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#1919
Henk Barendregt
#5621
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hendrik Pieter Barendregt is a Dutch logician, known for his work in lambda calculus and type theory. Life and work Barendregt studied mathematical logic at Utrecht University, obtaining his master's degree in 1968 and his PhD in 1971, both cum laude, under Dirk van Dalen and Georg Kreisel. After a postdoctoral position at Stanford University, he taught at Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#1920
Daina Taimiņa
#23649
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Daina Taimiņa is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for developing a way of modeling hyperbolic geometry with crocheted objects.
Go to Profile#1921
Jeff Paris
#19164
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jeffrey Bruce Paris is a British mathematician and Professor of Logic in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. Education Paris gained his doctorate supervised by Robin Gandy at Manchester in 1969 with a dissertation on Large Cardinals and the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis.
Go to Profile#1922
Bill Chen
#22976
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
William Chen is an American quantitative analyst, poker player, software designer, and badminton player. Biography Chen holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis triple-majoring in Physics, Math, and Computer Science, and was also a research intern in Washington University's Computer Science SURA Program where he co-wrote a technical report inventing an Argument Game. He heads the Statistical arbitrage department at Susquehanna International Group.
Go to Profile#1923
Keith Geddes
#18925
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Keith Oliver Geddes is a professor emeritus in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. He is a former director of the Symbolic Computation Group in the School of Computer Science. He received a BA in Mathematics at the University of Saskatchewan in 1968; he completed both his MSc and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#1924
Albert Hibbs
#3558
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Albert Roach Hibbs was an American mathematician and physicist affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory . He was known as "The Voice of JPL" due to his gift for explaining advanced science in simple terms. He helped establish JPL's Space Science Division in 1960 and later served as its first chief. He was the systems designer for Explorer 1, the USA's first satellite, and helped establish the framework for exploration of the Solar System through the 1960s. Hibbs qualified as an astronaut in 1967 and was slated to be a crew member of Apollo 25, but he ultimately did not go to the Moon du...
Go to Profile#1925
Pan Chengdong
#38435
Overall Influence
1934 - 1997 (63 years)
Pan Chengdong was a Chinese mathematician who made numerous contributions to number theory, including progress on Goldbach's conjecture. He was vice president of Shandong University and took the role of president from 1986 to 1997.
Go to Profile#1926
Samuel Gitler Hammer
#25011
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Samuel Carlos Gitler Hammer was a Mexican mathematician. He was an expert in Yang–Mills theory and is known for the Brown–Gitler spectrum. Born to a Jewish family in Mexico City, Gitler studied civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, graduating in 1956. He then did his graduate studies in mathematics at Princeton University with Norman Steenrod, earning a doctorate in 1960. He taught briefly at Brandeis University and then returned to Mexico, where he was one of the founders of the mathematics department of CINVESTAV.
Go to Profile#1927
Phillip Griffith
#41707
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Phillip Alan Griffith is a mathematician and professor emeritus at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who works on commutative algebra and ring theory. He received his PhD from the University of Houston in 1968. Griffith is the editor-in-chief of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics In 1971, Griffith received a Sloan Fellowship.
Go to Profile#1928
Ayşe Soysal
#13274
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ayşe Soysal is a Turkish mathematician. She was the president of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul during 2004 to 2008. Life and career Born in 1948, she received her high school diploma in 1967 from the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She received her bachelor's degrees with high honors in Mathematics and Physics from Boğaziçi University formerly in 1971.
Go to Profile#1929
Seán Dineen
#34474
Overall Influence
Seán Dineen is an Irish mathematician specialising in complex analysis. His academic career was spent, in the main, at University College Dublin where he was Professor of Mathematics, serving as Head of Department and as Head of the School of Mathematical Sciences before retiring in 2009.
Go to Profile#1930
George G. Lorentz
#37663
Overall Influence
1910 - 2006 (96 years)
George Gunter Lorentz was a Russian-American mathematician. Biography Lorentz was born in St. Petersburg. His father, Rudolf Fedorovich Lorentz, was a German railway engineer and his mother Milena Nikolayevna Chegodayev came from the Russian nobility. Since his father refused in 1906 to suppress a strike, he was no longer allowed to work on the state railway, so he worked for private railway companies in the Caucasus. The family survived the revolutionary turmoil and civil war near Sochi and then moved to Tbilisi, where he began studying at the Technical University in 1926. From 1928 he studi...
Go to Profile#1931
Dinesh Thakur
#38754
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Dinesh S. Thakur is an Indian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at University of Rochester. Before moving to Rochester, Thakur was a professor at University of Arizona. His main research interest is number theory.
Go to Profile#1932
James Milne
#35107
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
James S. Milne is a New Zealand mathematician working in arithmetic geometry. Life Milne attended the High School in Invercargill in New Zealand until 1959, and then studied at the University of Otago in Dunedin and Harvard University . From then to 1969 he was a lecturer at University College London. After that he was at the University of Michigan, as Assistant Professor , Associate Professor , Professor , and Professor Emeritus . He has also been a visiting professor at King's College London, at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques in Paris , at the Mathematical Sciences Research...
Go to Profile#1933
Svetlana Jitomirskaya
#26112
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Svetlana Yakovlevna Jitomirskaya is a Soviet-born American mathematician working on dynamical systems and mathematical physics. She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech and UC Irvine. She is best known for solving the ten martini problem along with mathematician Artur Avila.
Go to Profile#1934
Susan P. Holmes
#23136
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Susan P. Holmes is an American statistician and professor at Stanford University. She is noted for her work in applying nonparametric multivariate statistics, bootstrapping methods, and data visualization to biology.
Go to Profile#1935
Ronen Eldan
#39866
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Ronen Eldan is an Israeli mathematician. Eldan is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science working on probability theory, mathematical analysis, theoretical computer science and the theory of machine learning. He received the 2018 Erdős Prize, the 2022 Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists and the 2023 New Horizons Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He was a speaker at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Go to Profile#1936
János Aczél
#25752
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
János Dezső Aczél , also known as John Aczel, was a Hungarian-Canadian mathematician, who specialized in functional equations and information theory. Professional career Aczél earned a doctorate in mathematical analysis from the University of Budapest, and held positions at the University of Cologne, Kossuth University, University of Miskolc, and University of Szeged. He joined the University of Waterloo faculty in 1965, eventually becoming Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1937
Ian Sneddon
#21591
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Prof Ian Naismith Sneddon FRS FRSE FIMA OBE was a Scottish mathematician who worked on analysis and applied mathematics. Life Sneddon was born in Glasgow on 8 December 1919, the son of Mary Ann Cameron and Naismith Sneddon. He was educated at Hyndland School in Glasgow.
Go to Profile#1938
Monique Jeanblanc
#32332
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Monique Jeanblanc-Picqué is a French mathematician known for her work in mathematical finance; other topics in her research have included control theory and probability theory. She is a professor emerita at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne.
Go to Profile#1939
Moon Duchin
#32079
Overall Influence
Moon Duchin is an American mathematician who works as a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Her mathematical research concerns geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory. She has done significant research on the mathematics of redistricting and gerrymandering, and founded a research group, MGGG Redistricting Lab, to advance these mathematical studies and their nonpartisan application in the real world of US politics. She is also interested in the cultural studies, philosophy, and history of science. Duchin is one of the core faculty members and serv...
Go to Profile#1940
Pierre Lelong
#24717
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Pierre Lelong was a French mathematician who introduced the Poincaré–Lelong equation, the Lelong number and the concept of plurisubharmonic functions. Career Lelong earned his doctorate in 1941 from the École Normale Supérieure, under the supervision of Paul Montel. On 5 June 1981 Lelong received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.
Go to Profile#1941
Mihajlo D. Mesarovic
#7061
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Mihajlo D. Mesarovic is a Serbian scientist, who is a professor of Systems Engineering and Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University. Mesarovic has been a pioneer in the field of systems theory, he was UNESCO Scientific Advisor on Global change and also a member of the Club of Rome.
Go to Profile#1942
Gloria Conyers Hewitt
#31930
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gloria Conyers Hewitt is an American mathematician. She was the fourth African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her main research interests were in group theory and abstract algebra. She is the first African American woman to chair a math department in the United States.
Go to Profile#1943
Abbas Edalat
#7044
Overall Influence
Abbas Edalat is a British-Iranian academic who is a professor of computer science and mathematics at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London and a political activist. In a 2018 letter to The Guardian, 129 experts in computer science, mathematics and machine learning described him as "a prominent academic, making fundamental contributions to mathematical logic and theoretical computer science" Edalat also founded SAF and CASMII, a campaign against sanctions and military intervention in Iran.
Go to Profile#1944
Shahar Mozes
#38688
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Shahar Mozes is an Israeli mathematician. Mozes received in 1991, his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with thesis Actions of Cartan subgroups under the supervision of Hillel Fürstenberg. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mozes became in 1993 a senior lecturer, in 1996 associate professor, and in 2002 a full professor.
Go to Profile#1945
Oscar Lanford
#31906
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Oscar Erasmus Lanford III was an American mathematician working on mathematical physics and dynamical systems theory. Professional career Born in New York, Lanford was awarded his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1966 under the supervision of Arthur Wightman. He has served as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a professor of physics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France . Since 1987, he was with the department of mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich till his retirement.
Go to Profile#1946
Andrei Bolibrukh
#31910
Overall Influence
1950 - 2003 (53 years)
Andrei Andreevich Bolibrukh was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He was known for his work on ordinary differential equations especially Hilbert's twenty-first problem . Bolibrukh was the author of about a hundred research articles on theory of ordinary differential equations including Riemann–Hilbert problem and Fuchsian system.
Go to Profile#1947
Henry Daniels
#22469
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Henry Ellis Daniels FRS was a British statistician. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society , and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1984, following a silver medal in 1947. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1980. The Parry-Daniels map is named after him .
Go to Profile#1948
Richard Schwartz
#37381
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Richard Evan Schwartz is an American mathematician notable for his contributions to geometric group theory and to an area of mathematics known as billiards. Geometric group theory is a relatively new area of mathematics beginning around the late 1980s which explores finitely generated groups, and seeks connections between their algebraic properties and the geometric spaces on which these groups act. He has worked on what mathematicians refer to as billiards, which are dynamical systems based on a convex shape in a plane. He has explored geometric iterations involving polygons, and he has been credited for developing the mathematical concept known as the pentagram map.
Go to Profile#1949
Hans Werner Ballmann
#39507
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Hans Werner Ballmann is a German mathematician. His area of research is differential geometry with focus on geodesic flows, spaces of negative curvature as well as spectral theory of Dirac operators
Go to Profile#1950
Leonid Polterovich
#35041
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Leonid Polterovich is a Russian-Israeli mathematician at Tel Aviv University. His research field includes symplectic geometry and dynamical systems. A native of Moscow, Polterovich earned his undergraduate degree at Moscow State University in 1984. He moved to Israel after the collapse of communism, earning his doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 1990. In 1996, he was awarded the EMS Prize, and in 1998 the Erdős Prize. In 1998, he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago.
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