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,
#201
John H. Coates
#4190
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
John Henry Coates was an Australian mathematician who was the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2012. Early life and education Coates was born the son of J. H. Coates and B. L. Lee on 26 January 1945 and grew up in Possum Brush in New South Wales, Australia. Coates Road in Possum Brush is named after the family farm on which he grew up. Before university he spent a summer working for BHP in Newcastle, New South Wales, though he was not successful in gaining a university scholarship with the company. Coates attended Aus...
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Alan Edelman
#1328
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society , Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , and Association for Computing Machine...
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David Kazhdan
#3520
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
David Kazhdan , born Dmitry Aleksandrovich Kazhdan , is a Soviet and Israeli mathematician known for work in representation theory. Kazhdan is a 1990 MacArthur Fellow. Biography Kazhdan was born on 20 June 1946 in Moscow, USSR. His father is Alexander Kazhdan. He earned a doctorate under Alexandre Kirillov in 1969 and was a member of Israel Gelfand's school of mathematics. He is Jewish, and emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975. He changed his name from Dmitri Aleksandrovich to David and became an Orthodox Jew around that time.
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Fritz John
#3168
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Fritz John was a German-born mathematician specialising in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems. His early work was on the Radon transform and he is remembered for John's equation. He was a 1984 MacArthur Fellow.
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Solomon Feferman
#1484
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Solomon Feferman was an American philosopher and mathematician who worked in mathematical logic. In addition to his prolific technical work in proof theory, recursion theory, and set theory, he was known for his contributions to the history of logic and as a vocal proponent of the philosophy of mathematics known as predicativism, notably from an anti-platonist stance.
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Haïm Brezis
#5012
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Haïm Brezis is a French mathematician, who mainly works in functional analysis and partial differential equations. Biography Born in Riom-ès-Montagnes, Cantal, France. Brezis is the son of a Romanian immigrant father, who came to France in the 1930s, and a Jewish mother who fled from the Netherlands. His wife, Michal Govrin, a native Israeli, works as a novelist, poet, and theater director. Brezis received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1972 under the supervision of Gustave Choquet. He is currently a professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a visiting distinguished professor at Rutgers University.
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Robert Moody
#5194
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Vaughan Moody, is a Canadian mathematician. He is the co-discover of Kac–Moody algebra, a Lie algebra, usually infinite-dimensional, that can be defined through a generalized root system. "Almost simultaneously in 1967, Victor Kac in the USSR and Robert Moody in Canada developed what was to become Kac–Moody algebra. Kac and Moody noticed that if Wilhelm Killing's conditions were relaxed, it was still possible to associate to the Cartan matrix a Lie algebra which, necessarily, would be infinite dimensional." - A. J. Coleman
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Bertram Kostant
#3958
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Bertram Kostant was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry, and mathematical physics. Early life and education Kostant grew up in New York City, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1945. He went on to obtain an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1950. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954, under the direction of Irving Segal, where he wrote a dissertation on representations of Lie groups.
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Ky Fan
#3756
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Ky Fan was a Chinese-born American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Fan was born in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, China. His father, named Fan Qi , served in the district courts of Jinhua and Wenzhou. Ky Fan went to Jinhua with his father when he was eight years old and studied at several middle schools in Zhejiang, including the Jinhua High School , Hangzhou Zongwen High School , and Wenzhou High School. Fan obtained his secondary diploma from the Jinhua High School.
Go to Profile#210
Wolfgang Haken
#3611
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Wolfgang Haken was a German American mathematician who specialized in topology, in particular 3-manifolds. Biography Haken was born on June 21, 1928, in Berlin, Germany. His father was Werner Haken, a physicist who had Max Planck as a doctoral thesis advisor. In 1953, Haken earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and married Anna-Irmgard von Bredow, who earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the same university in 1959. In 1962, they left Germany so he could accept a position as visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....
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Pierre-Louis Lions
#2197
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Pierre-Louis Lions is a French mathematician. He is known for a number of contributions to the fields of partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. He was a recipient of the 1994 Fields Medal and the 1991 Prize of the Philip Morris tobacco and cigarette company.
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Francis Joseph Murray
#3864
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Francis Joseph Murray was a mathematician, known for his foundational work on functional analysis, and what subsequently became known as von Neumann algebras. He received his BA from Columbia College in 1932 and PhD from Columbia University in 1936. He taught at Duke University.
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Michel Raynaud
#4819
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Michel Raynaud was a French mathematician working in algebraic geometry and a professor at Paris-Sud 11 University. Early life and education He was born in Riom, France as a single son to a modest household. His father was a carpenter and his mother cleaned houses. He attended the local primary school at Châtel Guyon and Riom, and attended high school at the boarding school in Clermont-Ferrand.
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James Lighthill
#1504
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Sir Michael James Lighthill was a British applied mathematician, known for his pioneering work in the field of aeroacoustics and for writing the Lighthill report which pessimistically stated that "In no part of the field have the discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised" contributing to the gloomy climate of AI winter.
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Bruno Buchberger
#4168
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Bruno Buchberger is Professor of Computer Mathematics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. In his 1965 Ph.D. thesis, he created the theory of Gröbner bases, and has developed this theory throughout his career. He named these objects after his advisor Wolfgang Gröbner. Since 1995, he has been active in the Theorema project at the University of Linz.
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Simon P. Norton
#4000
Overall Influence
1952 - 2019 (67 years)
Simon Phillips Norton was a mathematician in Cambridge, England, who worked on finite simple groups. Education Simon Norton was born into a Sephardi family of Iraqi descent, the youngest of three brothers.
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Doug Altman
#4321
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Douglas Graham Altman FMedSci was an English statistician best known for his work on improving the reliability and reporting of medical research and for highly cited papers on statistical methodology. He was professor of statistics in medicine at the University of Oxford, founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group, and co-founder of the international Equator Network for health research reliability.
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David Eisenbud
#5157
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Eisenbud is an American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and former director of the then Mathematical Sciences Research Institute , now known as Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute . He served as Director of MSRI from 1997 to 2007, and then again from 2013 to 2022.
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Herbert Federer
#5987
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Herbert Federer was an American mathematician. He is one of the creators of geometric measure theory, at the meeting point of differential geometry and mathematical analysis. Career Federer was born July 23, 1920, in Vienna, Austria. After emigrating to the US in 1938, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning the Ph.D. as a student of Anthony Morse in 1944. He then spent virtually his entire career as a member of the Brown University Mathematics Department, where he eventually retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.
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Joseph H. Silverman
#5716
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Joseph Hillel Silverman is a professor of mathematics at Brown University working in arithmetic geometry, arithmetic dynamics, and cryptography. Biography Joseph Silverman received an Sc.B. from Brown University in 1977 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 under the direction of John Tate. He taught at M.I.T. and at Boston University before taking a position at Brown in 1988.
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Lennart Carleson
#3495
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Lennart Axel Edvard Carleson is a Swedish mathematician, known as a leader in the field of harmonic analysis. One of his most noted accomplishments is his proof of Lusin's conjecture. He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2006 for "his profound and seminal contributions to harmonic analysis and the theory of smooth dynamical systems."
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Shou-Wu Zhang
#4604
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Shou-Wu Zhang is a Chinese-American mathematician known for his work in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Biography Early life Shou-Wu Zhang was born in Hexian, Ma'anshan, Anhui, China on October 9, 1962. Zhang grew up in a poor farming household and could not attend school until eighth grade due to the Cultural Revolution. He spent most of his childhood raising ducks in the countryside and self-studying mathematics textbooks that he acquired from sent-down youth in trades for frogs. By the time he entered junior high s...
Go to Profile#223
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#324
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
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Bernd Sturmfels
#2940
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Bernd Sturmfels is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig since 2017.
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Leon Henkin
#1948
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Leon Albert Henkin was an American logician, whose works played a strong role in the development of logic, particularly in the theory of types. He was an active scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he made great contributions as a researcher, teacher, as well as in administrative positions. At this university he directed, together with Alfred Tarski, the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science, from which many important logicians and philosophers emerged. He had a strong sense of social commitment and was a passionate defensor of his pacifist and progressive ideas. H...
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Donald Rubin
#2465
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Donald Bruce Rubin is an Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, where he chaired the department of Statistics for 13 years. He also works at Tsinghua University in China and at Temple University in Philadelphia.
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László Babai
#2852
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
László "Laci" Babai is a Hungarian professor of computer science and mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on computational complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics, and finite groups, with an emphasis on the interactions between these fields.
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Lars Gårding
#5652
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Lars Gårding was a Swedish mathematician. He made notable contributions to the study of partial differential equations and partial differential operators. He was a professor of mathematics at Lund University in Sweden 1952–1984. Together with Marcel Riesz, he was a thesis advisor for Lars Hörmander.
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Sergiu Klainerman
#4679
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sergiu Klainerman is a mathematician known for his contributions to the study of hyperbolic differential equations and general relativity. He is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, where he has been teaching since 1987.
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Morris Kline
#2421
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Morris Kline was a professor of mathematics, a writer on the history, philosophy, and teaching of mathematics, and also a popularizer of mathematical subjects. Education and career Kline was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn and resided in Jamaica, Queens. After graduating from Boys High School in Brooklyn, he studied mathematics at New York University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1930, a master's degree in 1932, and a doctorate in 1936. He continued at NYU as an instructor until 1942.
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Jean-Louis Koszul
#4242
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Jean-Louis Koszul was a French mathematician, best known for studying geometry and discovering the Koszul complex. He was a second generation member of Bourbaki. Biography Koszul was educated at the in Strasbourg before studying at the Faculty of Science University of Strasbourg and the Faculty of Science of the University of Paris. His Ph.D. thesis, titled Homologie et cohomologie des algèbres de Lie, was written in 1950 under the direction of Henri Cartan.
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Marc Yor
#4238
Overall Influence
1949 - 2014 (65 years)
Marc Yor was a French mathematician well known for his work on stochastic processes, especially properties of semimartingales, Brownian motion and other Lévy processes, the Bessel processes, and their applications to mathematical finance.
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Philip J. Davis
#2473
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Philip J. Davis was an American academic applied mathematician. Davis was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was known for his work in numerical analysis and approximation theory, as well as his investigations in the history and philosophy of mathematics. He earned his degrees in mathematics from Harvard University , and his final position was Professor Emeritus at the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
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Don Zagier
#5213
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Don Bernard Zagier is an American-German mathematician whose main area of work is number theory. He is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. He was a professor at the Collège de France in Paris from 2006 to 2014. Since October 2014, he is also a Distinguished Staff Associate at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics .
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André Lichnerowicz
#2991
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
André Lichnerowicz was a French differential geometer and mathematical physicist. He is considered the founder of modern Poisson geometry. Biography His grandfather Jan fought in the Polish resistance against the Prussians. Forced to flee Poland in 1860, he finally settled in France, where he married a woman from Auvergne, Justine Faure. Lichnerowicz's father, Jean, held agrégation in classics and was secretary of the Alliance française, while his mother, a descendant of paper makers, was one of the first women to earn the agrégation in mathematics. Lichnerowicz's paternal aunt, Jeanne, was a...
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William Browder
#4686
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
William Browder is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Browder was one of the pioneers with Sergei Novikov, Dennis Sullivan and C. T. C. Wall of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society until 1990.
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Sheldon Axler
#5788
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sheldon Jay Axler is an American mathematician and textbook author. He is a professor of mathematics and the Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University. He graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High School in Miami, Florida in 1967. He obtained his AB in mathematics with highest honors at Princeton University and his PhD in mathematics, under professor Donald Sarason, from the University of California, Berkeley" in 1975. As a postdoc, he was a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Klaus Roth
#3129
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Klaus Friedrich Roth was a German-born British mathematician who won the Fields Medal for proving Roth's theorem on the Diophantine approximation of algebraic numbers. He was also a winner of the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Alexander Givental
#5467
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alexander Givental is a Russian-American mathematician who is currently Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His main contributions have been in symplectic topology and singularity theory, as well as their relation to topological string theories.
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Heinz-Otto Peitgen
#2329
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Heinz-Otto Peitgen is a German mathematician and was President of Jacobs University from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2013. Peitgen contributed to the study of fractals, chaos theory, and medical image computing, as well as helping to introduce fractals to the broader public.
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George E. Collins
#5391
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
George E. Collins was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is the inventor of garbage collection by reference counting and of the method of quantifier elimination by cylindrical algebraic decomposition.
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Nick Katz
#5764
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nicholas Michael Katz is an American mathematician, working in arithmetic geometry, particularly on p-adic methods, monodromy and moduli problems, and number theory. He is currently a professor of Mathematics at Princeton University and an editor of the journal Annals of Mathematics.
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Anatol Rapoport
#659
Overall Influence
1911 - 2007 (96 years)
Anatol Rapoport was an American mathematical psychologist. He contributed to general systems theory, to mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion.
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Pierre Cartier
#4812
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Pierre Émile Cartier is a French mathematician. An associate of the Bourbaki group and at one time a colleague of Alexander Grothendieck, his interests have ranged over algebraic geometry, representation theory, mathematical physics, and category theory.
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Daniel Kleitman
#4332
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Daniel J. Kleitman is an American mathematician and professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research. Biography Kleitman was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, the younger of Bertha and Milton Kleitman's two sons. His father was a lawyer who after WWII became a commodities trader and investor. In 1942 the family moved to Morristown, New Jersey, and he graduated from Morristown High School in 1950.
Go to Profile#246
Igor Frenkel
#5378
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Igor Borisovich Frenkel is a Russian-American mathematician at Yale University working in representation theory and mathematical physics. Frenkel emigrated to the United States in 1979. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1980 with a dissertation on the "Orbital Theory for Affine Lie Algebras". He held positions at the IAS and MSRI, and a tenured professorship at Rutgers University, before taking his current job of tenured professor at Yale University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Dmitry Fuchs
#5429
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dmitry Borisovich Fuchs is a Russian-American mathematician, specializing in the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and in topology. Education and career Fuchs received in 1964 his Russian candidate degree under Albert S. Schwarz at Moscow State University, where he taught thereafter. Schwarz conducted a seminar on algebraic topology with Mikhail Postnikov and Vladimir Boltyanski. Fuchs participated in the seminar and, as a student, published papers with Schwarz, as did Askold Ivanovich Vinogradov a few years earlier. Fuchs received his Russian doctorate in 1987 at Tbilisi State University.
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John B. Conway
#6318
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Bligh Conway is an American mathematician. He is currently a professor emeritus at the George Washington University. His specialty is functional analysis, particularly bounded operators on a Hilbert space.
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Alberto Calderón
#4210
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Alberto Pedro Calderón was an Argentinian mathematician. His name is associated with the University of Buenos Aires, but first and foremost with the University of Chicago, where Calderón and his mentor, the analyst Antoni Zygmund, developed the theory of singular integral operators. This created the "Chicago School of Analysis" .
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Manuel Blum
#1115
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
