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,
#1951
Aner Shalev
#36224
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Aner Shalev is a professor at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a writer. Biography Shalev was born in Kibbutz Kinneret and grew up in Beit Berl. He moved to Jerusalem at 18 to study mathematics and philosophy at the Hebrew University, and since then, excluding some years abroad, he has been living mainly in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#1952
Tomaž Pisanski
#20687
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Tomaž Pisanski is a Slovenian mathematician working mainly in discrete mathematics and graph theory. He is considered by many Slovenian mathematicians to be the "father of Slovenian discrete mathematics."
Go to Profile#1953
James H. Ellis
#6646
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
James Henry Ellis was a British engineer and cryptographer. Born in Australia but raised and educated in Britain, Ellis joined GCHQ in 1952. He worked on a number of cryptographic projects, but is credited with some of the original thinking that developed into the field of Public Key Cryptography .
Go to Profile#1954
Alan C. Newell
#31493
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Alan C. Newell is an Irish/American mathematician and Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and in 2004 the John von Neumann Lecture for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He was a Senior Scientist Humboldt Fellow in 1988–1989 and was elected a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009.
Go to Profile#1955
Adolph P. Yushkevich
#31326
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Adolph-Andrei Pavlovich Yushkevich was a Soviet historian of mathematics, leading expert in medieval mathematics of the East and the work of Leonhard Euler. He is a winner of George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for a lifetime of scholarly achievement.
Go to Profile#1956
J. Richard Landis
#34188
Overall Influence
J. Richard Landis is an American biostatistician and Emeritus Professor of Biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the senior vice chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, director of the Biostatistics Unit within the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and faculty Director of the Clinical Research Computing Unit.
Go to Profile#1957
Guido Zappa
#30336
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Guido Zappa was an Italian mathematician and a noted group theorist: his other main research interests were geometry and also the history of mathematics. Zappa was particularly known for some examples of algebraic curves that strongly influenced the ideas of Francesco Severi.
Go to Profile#1958
David Kinderlehrer
#38540
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Samuel Kinderlehrer is an American mathematician, who works on partial differential equations and related mathematics applied to materials in biology and physics. Kinderlehrer received in 1963 his bachelor's degree from MIT and in 1968 his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under Hans Lewy with thesis Minimal surfaces whose boundaries contain spikes. He became in 1968 an instructor and in 1975 a full professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. For the academic year 1971–1972 he was a visiting professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 2003 he beca...
Go to Profile#1959
Peter Rousseeuw
#18980
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Peter J. Rousseeuw is a statistician known for his work on robust statistics and cluster analysis. He obtained his PhD in 1981 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, following research carried out at the ETH in Zurich, which led to a book on influence functions. Later he was professor at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Next he was a senior researcher at Renaissance Technologies. He then returned to Belgium as professor at KU Leuven, until becoming emeritus in 2022. His former PhD students i...
Go to Profile#1960
Lê Văn Thiêm
#14784
Overall Influence
1918 - 1991 (73 years)
Lê Văn Thiêm was a Vietnamese scientist. Together with Hoàng Tụy, he is considered the father of Vietnam Mathematics society. He was the first director of the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics, and the first Headmaster of Hanoi National University of Education and Hanoi University of Science.
Go to Profile#1961
Irit Dinur
#18070
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Irit Dinur is an Israeli computer scientist. She is professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research is in foundations of computer science and in combinatorics, and especially in probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation.
Go to Profile#1962
Eric Katz
#42795
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Eric Katz is a mathematician working in combinatorial algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at The Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#1963
Maciej Zworski
#43846
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Maciej Zworski is a Polish-Canadian mathematician, currently a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His mathematical interests include microlocal analysis, scattering theory, and partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#1964
Leonard E. Baum
#5089
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Leonard Esau Baum was an American mathematician, known for the Baum–Welch algorithm and Baum–Sweet sequence. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University in 1953, and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1958, with a dissertation titled Derivations in Commutative Semi-Simple Banach Algebras.
Go to Profile#1965
Miroslav Krstić
#28767
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Miroslav Krstić is an American control theorist and Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego . Krstić is also the director of the Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at UCSD and a Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research.
Go to Profile#1966
Zvezdelina Stankova
#39970
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Zvezdelina Entcheva Stankova is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at Mills College and a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, and an expert in the combinatorial enumeration of permutations with forbidden patterns.
Go to Profile#1967
Charles Royal Johnson
#33947
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Charles Royal Johnson is an American mathematician specializing in linear algebra. He is a Class of 1961 professor of mathematics at College of William and Mary. The books Matrix Analysis and Topics in Matrix Analysis, co-written by him with Roger Horn, are standard texts in advanced linear algebra.
Go to Profile#1968
Walter Benz
#40287
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Walter Benz was a German mathematician, an expert in geometry. Benz studied at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and received his doctoral degree in 1954, with Robert Furch as his advisor. After a position at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, he served as a professor at Ruhr University Bochum, University of Waterloo, and University of Hamburg. Benz was honoured with the degree of a Dr. h.c.
Go to Profile#1969
William Minicozzi
#37571
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
William Philip Minicozzi II is an American mathematician. He was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1967. Career Minicozzi graduated from Princeton University in 1990 and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1994 under the direction of Richard Schoen. After graduating he spent a year at the Courant Institute of New York University as a visiting member where he began working with Tobias Colding on harmonic functions on Riemannian manifolds, work he was later invited to present at the Geometry Festival. In 1995, he went to the Johns Hopkins University, with a National Science Foundati...
Go to Profile#1970
Henk Zijm
#10521
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Willem Hendrik Maria Zijm is a Dutch mathematician, and Professor Production and Supply Chain Management and Emeritus Rector Magnificus at the University of Twente. Biography Born in Driehuizen, Texel, Zijm received both his BSc in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1977, and his MSc cum laude in applied mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. In 1982 he received his Phd in operations research at the Eindhoven University of Technology under supervision of Jaap Wessels and Gerhard Willem Veltkamp with a thesis entitled "Nonnegative Matrices in Dynamic Programming."
Go to Profile#1971
José F. Escobar
#43581
Overall Influence
1954 - 2004 (50 years)
José Fernando "Chepe" Escobar was a Colombian mathematician known for his work on differential geometry and partial differential equations. He was professor at Cornell University. He completed his mathematical undergraduate program at Universidad del Valle, Colombia. He received a scholarship that permitted him to do a master in science studies in the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Go to Profile#1972
Michele Mosca
#12406
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Michele Mosca is co-founder and deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, researcher and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and professor of mathematics in the department of Combinatorics & Optimization at the University of Waterloo. He has held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computation since January 2002, and has been a scholar for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since September 2003. Mosca's principal research interests concern the design of quantum algorithms, but he is also known for his early work on NMR quantum computation together with Jonathan A.
Go to Profile#1973
Robert Brown Gardner
#44705
Overall Influence
1939 - 1998 (59 years)
Robert Brown Gardner was an American mathematician who worked on differential geometry. Biography Gardner graduated from Princeton University in 1959, earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1960, and completed his PhD in 1965 from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern.
Go to Profile#1974
David Heath
#19171
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
David Clay Heath was an American probabilist known for co-inventing the Heath–Jarrow–Morton framework to model the evolution of the interest rate curve. Biography Early life He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to W. Curtis and Margaret Wasson Heath. He graduated from Elkhart High School in 1960 and earned his bachelor's degree from Kalamazoo College in 1964.
Go to Profile#1975
Arthur Rubin
#28937
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Arthur Leonard Rubin is an American mathematician and aerospace engineer. He was named a Putnam Fellow on four consecutive occasions from 1970 to 1973. Life and career Rubin's mother was Jean E. Rubin, a professor of mathematics at Purdue University, and his father was Herman Rubin, a professor of statistics at the same university. Arthur co-authored his first paper with his mother in 1969 at the age of 13. He earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1978, under the direction of Alexander S. Kechris.
Go to Profile#1976
Gerald Folland
#44892
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gerald Budge Folland is an American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. He is the author of several textbooks on mathematical analysis. His areas of interest include harmonic analysis , differential equations, and mathematical physics. The title of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton University is "The Tangential Cauchy-Riemann Complex on Spheres".
Go to Profile#1977
Peter Landin
#2269
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Peter John Landin was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics.
Go to Profile#1978
Leon Ehrenpreis
#42207
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Eliezer 'Leon' Ehrenpreis was a mathematician at Temple University who proved the Malgrange–Ehrenpreis theorem, the fundamental theorem about differential operators with constant coefficients. He previously held tenured positions at Yeshiva University and at the Courant Institute at New York University.
Go to Profile#1979
Jeffrey Shallit
#15611
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jeffrey Outlaw Shallit is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is an active number theorist and a noted critic of intelligent design. He is married to Anna Lubiw, also a computer scientist.
Go to Profile#1980
Ruth Charney
#42770
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ruth Michele Charney is an American mathematician known for her work in geometric group theory and Artin groups. Other areas of research include K-theory and algebraic topology. She holds the Theodore and Evelyn G. Berenson Chair in Mathematics at Brandeis University. She was in the first group of mathematicians named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. She was in the first group of mathematicians named Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics during 2013–2015, and served as president of the American Mat...
Go to Profile#1981
Paul Biran
#39188
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Paul Ian Biran is an Israeli mathematician. He holds a chair at ETH Zurich. His research interests include symplectic geometry and algebraic geometry. Education Born in Romania in 1969, Biran's family moved to Israel in 1971. He attended Tel Aviv University, where he earned his Bachelor's degree in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1997 under supervision of Leonid Polterovich .
Go to Profile#1982
David Williams
#26372
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David Williams FRS is a Welsh mathematician who works in probability theory. Early life and education David Williams was born at Gorseinon, near Swansea, Wales. He was educated at Gowerton Grammar School, winning a mathematics scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, and went on to obtain a DPhil under the supervision of David George Kendall and Gerd Edzard Harry Reuter, with a thesis titled Random time substitution in Markov chains.
Go to Profile#1983
Cedric Smith
#18360
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Cedric Austen Bardell Smith was a British statistician and geneticist. Smith was born in Leicester. He was the younger son of John Bardell Smith , a mechanical engineer, and Ada . He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys until 1929, when the family moved to London. His education continued at Bec School, Tooting, for three years, then at University College School, London. In 1935, although having failed his Higher School Certificate, he was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in the Mathematical Tripos, with a First in Part II in 1937 and a Distinction in Part III in 1938.
Go to Profile#1984
Katalin Marton
#26969
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Katalin Marton was a Hungarian mathematician, born in Budapest. Education and career Marton obtained her PhD from Eötvös Loránd University in 1965 and worked at the Department of Numerical Mathematics, Central Research Institute for Physics, Budapest from 1965 to 1973. Important influences on her early career were her attendance at the combinatorics seminar organised by Alfréd Rényi from 1966, meeting Roland Dobrushin in Debrecen in 1967 , and her collaboration with Imre Csiszár which began in 1972. From 1973 she worked at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of ...
Go to Profile#1985
Patricia E. Bauman
#38195
Overall Influence
Patricia E. Bauman is an American mathematician who studies partial differential equations that model the behavior of liquid crystals and superconductors. She is a professor of mathematics at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#1986
John C. Oxtoby
#36452
Overall Influence
1910 - 1991 (81 years)
John C. Oxtoby was an American mathematician. In 1936, he graduated with a Master of Science in Mathematics from Harvard University. He was professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania from 1939 until his retirement in 1979.
Go to Profile#1987
Václav E. Beneš
#21363
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Václav Edvard "Vic" Beneš is a Czech-American, a mathematician known for his contributions to the theory of stochastic processes, queueing theory and control theory, as well as the design of telecommunications switches.
Go to Profile#1988
Philip Saffman
#37998
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Philip Geoffrey Saffman FRS was a mathematician and the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Applied Mathematics and Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. Education and early life Saffman was born to a Jewish family in Leeds, England, and educated at Roundhay Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge which he entered aged 15. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953, studied for Part III of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos in 1954 and was awarded his PhD in 1956 for research supervised by George Batchelor.
Go to Profile#1989
Eric Charles Milner
#38527
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Eric Charles Milner, FRSC was a mathematician who worked mainly in combinatorial set theory. Biography Born into a South East London working-class family, Milner was sent to a Reading boarding school for the war but, hating it, ran away and roamed the streets of London. Eventually, another school was found for him; Milner attended King's College London starting in 1946, where he competed as a featherweight boxer. He graduated in 1949 as the best mathematics student in his year, and received a master's degree in 1950 under the supervision of Richard Rado and Charles Coulson. Partial deafness p...
Go to Profile#1990
Linda Keen
#27354
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Linda Jo Goldway Keen is a mathematician and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Since 1965, she has been a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman College of the City University of New York and a Professor of Mathematics at Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#1991
Frank Kelly
#30451
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Francis Patrick Kelly, CBE, FRS is Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He served as Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 2006 to 2016.
Go to Profile#1992
William Jaco
#35928
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
William "Bus" H. Jaco is an American mathematician who is known for his role in the Jaco–Shalen–Johannson decomposition theorem and efficient triangulations of 3-manifolds. He retired from Oklahoma State University in 2021 as Regents Professor Emeritus and appointed Adjunct Professor at Rice University in 2021.
Go to Profile#1993
Charles George Broyden
#28850
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Charles George Broyden was a mathematician who specialized in optimization problems and numerical linear algebra. While a physicist working at English Electric Company from 1961–1965, he adapted the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula to solving some nonlinear systems of equations that he was working with, leading to his widely cited 1965 paper, "A class of methods for solving nonlinear simultaneous equations". He was a lecturer at UCW Aberystwyth from 1965–1967. He later became a senior lecturer at University of Essex from 1967–1970, where he independently discovered the Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno method.
Go to Profile#1994
Janet Barnett
#34319
Overall Influence
Janet Heine Barnett is a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University–Pueblo, interested in set theory, mathematical logic, the history of mathematics, women in mathematics, and mathematics education.
Go to Profile#1995
Joseph Gallian
#30183
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Joseph A. Gallian is an American mathematician, the Morse Alumni Distinguished University Professor of Teaching in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Go to Profile#1996
Ross Honsberger
#42132
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Ross Honsberger was a Canadian mathematician and author on recreational mathematics. Life Honsberger studied mathematics at the University of Toronto, with a bachelor's degree, and then worked for ten years as a teacher in Toronto, before continuing his studies at the University of Waterloo . Since 1964 he had been on the faculty of mathematics, where he later became a professor emeritus. He dealt with combinatorics and optimization, especially with mathematics education. He developed education courses, for example, on combinatorial geometry, frequently held lectures for students and math teachers, and was editor of the Ontario Secondary School Mathematics Bulletin.
Go to Profile#1997
Selman Akbulut
#31600
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Selman Akbulut is a Turkish mathematician, specializing in research in topology, and geometry. He was a professor at Michigan State University until February 2020. Career In 1975 he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley as a student of Robion Kirby. In topology, he has worked on handlebody theory, low-dimensional manifolds, symplectic topology, G2 manifolds. In the topology of real-algebraic setss, he and Henry C. King proved that every compact piecewise-linear manifold is a real-algebraic set; they discovered new topological invariants of real-algebraic sets.
Go to Profile#1998
Yuri Mikhailovich Smirnov
#46066
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Yuri Mikhailovich Smirnov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, specializing in topology. Biography Yuri M. Smirnov was born in a family of clerical employees. His mother was imprisoned in 1937 for anti-Soviet activity and, as later revealed, was executed by gun shot. While studying at school, Yuri M. Smirnov was interested in mathematics and astronomy and after completing undergraduate study in 1939 entered the astronomy department of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. However, soon under the influence of A. N. Kolmogorov, he transferred to the mathematica...
Go to Profile#1999
Alan M. Frieze
#26312
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alan M. Frieze is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1966, and obtained his PhD from the University of London in 1975. His research interests lie in combinatorics, discrete optimisation and theoretical computer science. Currently, he focuses on the probabilistic aspects of these areas; in particular, the study of the asymptotic properties of random graphs, the average case analysis of algorithms, and randomised algorithms. His recent work has included approximate countin...
Go to Profile#2000
George Frederick James Temple
#28715
Overall Influence
1901 - 1992 (91 years)
Dom George Frederick James Temple FRS OSB was an English mathematician, recipient of the Sylvester Medal in 1969. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in the years 1951–1953. Temple took his first degree as an evening student at Birkbeck College, London, between 1918 and 1922, and also worked there as a research assistant. In 1924 he moved to Imperial College as a demonstrator, where he worked under the direction of Sydney Chapman. After a period spent with Eddington at Cambridge, he returned to Imperial as reader in mathematics. He was appointed professor of mathematics at Kin...
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