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,
#2001
Mina Teicher
#41234
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mina Teicher is an Israeli mathematician at Bar-Ilan University, specializing in algebraic geometry. Teicher earned bachelor's, masters, and doctoral degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1974, 1976, and 1981 respectively. Her dissertation, Birational Transformation Between 4-folds, was supervised by Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro. Since 1999, she has directed the Emmy Noether Research Institute for Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University. In 2001–2002 she was the inaugural Emmy Noether Visiting professor at the University of Göttingen, where she lectured about braid groups.
Go to Profile#2002
Nikita Moiseyev
#22371
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Nikita Nikolayevich Moiseyev was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, full member of the Soviet and Russian Academies of Sciences and of the International Academy of Science, Munich. Biography Moiseyev studied in Moscow State University, and received his doctor's degree from the Steklov Institute. He taught in Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Rostov State University after the war, and was appointed professor in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and became its dean in the department of applied mathematics. His fields of study included applied mathematics, solid state dyna...
Go to Profile#2003
Herbert Clemens
#41359
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Charles Herbert Clemens Jr. is an American mathematician specializing in complex algebraic geometry. Biography Clemens received in 1961 his bachelor's degree from College of the Holy Cross and in 1966 his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, under Phillip Griffiths with thesis Picard–Lefschetz Theorem for Families of Algebraic Varieties Acquiring Certain Singularities. In 1970 he became an assistant professor at Columbia University and went on to become an associate professor before leaving in 1975 to become an associate professor at the University of Utah where he became a full professor in 1976 and a Distinguished Professor in 2001.
Go to Profile#2004
Robert Gompf
#44585
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Robert Ernest Gompf is an American mathematician specializing in geometric topology. Gompf received a Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Robion Kirby . He is now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#2005
Allen Tannenbaum
#30146
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Allen Robert Tannenbaum is an American applied mathematician who is presently the Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics & Statistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is also Visiting Investigator of Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He has held a number of other positions in the United States, Israel, and Canada including the Bunn Professorship of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interim Chair, and Senior Scientist at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He received his B.A.
Go to Profile#2006
Katrin Wehrheim
#41908
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Katrin Wehrheim is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Wehrheim's research centers around symplectic topology and gauge theory, and they are known for work on pseudoholomorphic quilts. With Dusa McDuff, they have challenged the foundational rigor of a classic proof in symplectic geometry.
Go to Profile#2007
Hans Wilhelm Alt
#40027
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Hans Wilhelm Alt is a German mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations and their applications. Alt received his Abitur in 1965 from the prestigious secondary school Helmholtz-Gymnasium Hilden. In 1971 he received his PhD from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen under Erhard Heinz with thesis Verzweigungspunkte von H-Flächen Alt became a professor at the Institute for Applied Mathematics at the University of Bonn, where he retired as professor emeritus in 2010. In 2011 he was made an honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich.
Go to Profile#2008
Raghu Raj Bahadur
#21466
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Raghu Raj Bahadur was an Indian statistician considered by peers to be "one of the architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics". Biography Bahadur was born in Delhi, India, and received his BA and MA in mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi . He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina under Herbert Robbins in 1950 after which he joined University of Chicago. He worked as a research statistician at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta from 1956 to 1961. He spent the remainder of his academic career in the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#2009
Ofer Zeitouni
#30808
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ofer Zeitouni is an Israeli mathematician, specializing in probability theory. Biography Zeitouni received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1980 from the Technion. He obtained in 1986 his doctorate in electrical engineering under the supervision of Moshe Zakai with the thesis Bounds on the Conditional Density and Maximum a posteriori Estimators for the Nonlinear Filtering Problem. As a postdoc he was a visiting assistant professor at Brown University and at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. He joined the Technion in 1989 as senior lecturer, and w...
Go to Profile#2010
Jean Bertoin
#39654
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jean Bertoin is a French mathematician, specializing in probability theory and professor at the University of Zurich. Education and career Bertoin received in 1987 his doctorate from University of Paris VI under Marc Yor with Étude des processus de Dirichlet. Bertoin taught and did research there and is now a professor at the University of Zurich.
Go to Profile#2011
Julian Higgins
#33471
Overall Influence
Julian P. T. Higgins is a British biostatistician, Professor of Evidence Synthesis and Director of Research at the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Bristol. Higgins was previously Chair in Evidence Synthesis at the University of York, and Programme Leader at the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge. He is also a founding trustee and a Past-President of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.
Go to Profile#2012
Zohar Manna
#8058
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Zohar Manna was an Israeli-American computer scientist who was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Biography He was born in Haifa, Israel. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2013
Jean-Pierre Bourguignon
#33570
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Pierre Bourguignon is a French mathematician, working in the field of differential geometry. Biography Born in Lyon, he studied at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, graduating in 1969. For his graduate studies he went to Paris Diderot University, where he obtained his PhD in 1974 under the direction of Marcel Berger.
Go to Profile#2014
Helen G. Grundman
#39102
Overall Influence
Helen Giessler Grundman is an American mathematician. She is the Director of Education and Diversity at the American Mathematical Society and Research Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Grundman is noted for her research in number theory and efforts to increase diversity in mathematics.
Go to Profile#2015
Markus Rost
#45768
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Markus Rost is a German mathematician who works at the intersection of topology and algebra. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002 in Beijing, China. He is a professor at the University of Bielefeld.
Go to Profile#2016
Anatoly Samoilenko
#32405
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Anatoly Mykhailovych Samoilenko was a Ukrainian mathematician, an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine , the Director of the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine .
Go to Profile#2017
Shmuel Weinberger
#35063
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
The mathematician Shmuel Aaron Weinberger is an American topologist. He completed a PhD in mathematics in 1982 at New York University under the direction of Sylvain Cappell. Weinberger was, from 1994 to 1996, the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, and he is currently the Andrew MacLeish Professor of Mathematics and chair of the Mathematics department at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#2018
Mari-Jo P. Ruiz
#32936
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mari-Jo P. Ruiz was a Filipina mathematician and professor of mathematics at Ateneo de Manila University. Ruiz specialized in graph theory and operations research. Education and career Ruiz grew up in Manila, and was educated at College of the Holy Spirit Manila. She graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in New York City in 1963, and soon afterward completed a master's degree at New York University. She joined the Ateneo de Manila faculty in 1965, eight years before the school began accepting women as students. She chose academia over a competing job offer from industry because at the time it paid slightly better.
Go to Profile#2019
James Turrell
#3153
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
James Turrell is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory; and for his series of skyspaces, enclosed spaces that frame the sky.
Go to Profile#2020
Michael T. Anderson
#45990
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michael T. Anderson is an American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research concerns differential geometry including Ricci curvature and minimal surfaces.
Go to Profile#2021
Kengo Hirachi
#21898
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Kengo Hirachi is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in CR geometry and mathematical analysis. Hirachi received from Osaka University his B.S. in 1987, his M.S. in 1989, and his Dr.Sci., advised by Gen Komatsu, in 1994 with dissertation The second variation of the Bergman kernel for ellipsoids. He was a research assistant from 1989 to 1996 and a lecturer from 1996 to 2000 at Osaka University. He was an associate professor from 2000 to 2010 and a full professor from 2010 to the present at the University of Tokyo. He was a visiting professor at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute fr...
Go to Profile#2022
Jesús A. De Loera
#24881
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jesús Antonio De Loera is a Mexican-American mathematician at the University of California, Davis, specializing in discrete mathematics and discrete geometry. Education De Loera did his undergraduate studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, earning a B.S. in mathematics in 1989. After earning a master's degree from Western Michigan University a year later, and another master's degree in 1993 from Cornell University, he finished his doctorate from Cornell in 1995 under the supervision of Bernd Sturmfels.
Go to Profile#2023
Mary Celine Fasenmyer
#31515
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Mary Celine Fasenmyer, RSM was an American mathematician and Catholic religious sister. She is most noted for her work on hypergeometric functions and linear algebra. Biography Fasenmyer grew up in Pennsylvania's oil country, and displayed mathematical talent in high school. For ten years after her graduation she taught and studied at Mercyhurst College in Erie, where she joined the Sisters of Mercy. She pursued her mathematical studies in Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, obtaining her doctorate in 1946 under the direction of Earl Rainville, with a dissertation entitled Some General...
Go to Profile#2024
Leslie Kish
#21262
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Leslie Kish was a Hungarian-American statistician and survey methodologist. Life and career Kish emigrated with his family to the USA in 1925. His father soon died, and Kish helped support the family by working while continuing his studies in the evenings. In 1937 he volunteered for the International Brigade to fight against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He saw action in a Hungarian battalion, was wounded, and returned to the United States in 1939. In 1939, he finished his baccalaureate in mathematics at the City College of New York.
Go to Profile#2025
Ralph B. Sr. D’agostino
#47631
Overall Influence
#2026
Gaetano Fichera
#34345
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Gaetano Fichera was an Italian mathematician, working in mathematical analysis, linear elasticity, partial differential equations and several complex variables. He was born in Acireale, and died in Rome.
Go to Profile#2027
Indranil Biswas
#43117
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Indranil Biswas is an Indian mathematician. He is professor of mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He is known for his work in the areas of algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and deformation quantization.
Go to Profile#2028
Robert Ghrist
#26574
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Robert W. Ghrist is an American mathematician, known for his work on topological methods in applied mathematics. Life and Work Ghrist received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Toledo in 1991, and in 1994 his master's degree and in 1995 his PhD from Cornell University under Philip Holmes with thesis The link of periodic orbits of a flow. From 1996 to 1998, he was R. H. Bing Instructor at the University of Texas and from 1998 an assistant professor and then from 2002 an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2002 he became an associate professor and in 2004 a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#2029
Helmut H. Schaefer
#42581
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Helmut Heinrich Schaefer was a German mathematician, who worked primarily in functional analysis. His two best known scientific monographs are titled Topological Vector Spacess and Banach Lattices and Positive Operators . The first of these was subsequently translated into Spanish and Russian. The second made him an internationally recognized and leading scholar in this particular field of mathematics.
Go to Profile#2030
Jonathan Mock Beck
#46243
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Jonathan Mock Beck was an American mathematician, who worked on category theory and algebraic topology. Career Beck received his PhD in 1967 under Samuel Eilenberg at Columbia University. Beck was a faculty member of the mathematics department of Cornell University and of the University of Puerto Rico. He is known for the eponymous Beck's tripleableness theorem and the Beck–Chevalley condition.
Go to Profile#2031
Isabelle Gallagher
#38689
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Isabelle Gallagher is a French mathematician. Her research concerns partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations, the wave equation, and the Schrödinger equation, as well as harmonic analysis of the Heisenberg group.
Go to Profile#2032
V. Kumar Murty
#38226
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Vijaya Kumar Murty is an Indo-Canadian mathematician working primarily in number theory. He is a professor at the University of Toronto and is the Director of the Fields Institute. Early life and education V. Kumar Murty is the brother of mathematician M. Ram Murty.
Go to Profile#2033
Mkhitar Djrbashian
#37882
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Mkhitar Djrbashian was a notable Armenian mathematician, who made significant contributions to the constructive theory of functions, harmonic analysis, theory of analytic functions and a fundamental contribution to the classical theory of univalent analytic functions. He was born in Yerevan in a family of refugees from the town Van of Western Armenia escaping from the Armenian genocide of 1915 in Turkey. Mkhitar Djrbashian created some well-known mathematical theories and did everything possible for the development of Armenian Mathematical School to the high international standards in many b...
Go to Profile#2034
Eberhard Knobloch
#35315
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eberhard Knobloch is a German historian of science and mathematics. Career From 1962 to 1967 Knobloch studied classics and mathematics at the University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin, after which he passed his state examination as a high school teacher and even as a high school teacher in ancient languages at Goethe began high school in Berlin before 1970 as a research assistant in the history of science back to the TU Berlin was, where he in 1972 with a thesis on Leibniz's combinatorial in Scriba, Christoph received his doctorate.
Go to Profile#2035
Mary W. Gray
#15921
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Mary Lee Wheat Gray is an American mathematician, statistician, and lawyer. She is the author of books and papers in the fields of mathematics, mathematics education, computer science, applied statistics, economic equity, discrimination law, and academic freedom. She is currently on the Board of Advisers for POMED and is the chair of the Board of Directors of AMIDEAST .
Go to Profile#2036
Ravi Agarwal
#43415
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ravi P. Agarwal is an Indian mathematician, Ph.D. sciences, professor, professor & chairman, Department of Mathematics Texas A&M University-Kingsville, Kingsville, U.S. Agarwal is the author of over 1000 scientific papers as well as 30 monographs. He was previously a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Florida Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2037
Djairo Guedes de Figueiredo
#31882
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Djairo Guedes de Figueiredo is a Brazilian mathematician noted for his researches on differential equations, elliptic operators, and calculus of variations. He is considered the greatest analyst from Brazil. He was the president of the Brazilian Mathematical Society from 1977 to 1979.
Go to Profile#2038
Jean-Pierre Demailly
#38616
Overall Influence
1957 - 2022 (65 years)
Jean-Pierre Demailly was a French mathematician who worked in complex geometry. He was a professor at Université Grenoble Alpes and a permanent member of the French Academy of Sciences. Early life and education Demailly was born on 25 September 1957 in Péronne, France. He attended the Lycée de Péronne from 1966 to 1973 and the Lycée Faidherbe from 1973 to 1975. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1975, where he received his agrégation in 1977 and graduated in 1979. During this time, he received an undergraduate licence degree from Paris Diderot University in 1976 and a diplôme d'études approfondies under Henri Skoda at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1979.
Go to Profile#2039
Paul Zeitz
#42994
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Paul Zeitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of The Art and Craft of Problem Solving, and a co-author of Statistical Explorations with Excel. Biography In 1974 Paul Zeitz won the USA Mathematical Olympiad and was a member of the first American team to participate in the International Mathematical Olympiad . The following year he graduated from Stuyvesant High School.
Go to Profile#2040
Alexander Bogomolny
#25449
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Alexander Bogomolny was a Soviet-born Israeli-American mathematician. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Iowa, and formerly research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, senior instructor at Hebrew University and software consultant at Ben Gurion University. He wrote extensively about arithmetic, probability, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and mathematical games.
Go to Profile#2041
Vadim G. Vizing
#41548
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Vadim Georgievich Vizing was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician known for his contributions to graph theory, and especially for Vizing's theorem stating that the edges of any simple graph with maximum degree Δ can be colored with at most Δ + 1 colors.
Go to Profile#2042
Anupam Saikia
#31980
Overall Influence
Anupam Saikia is an Indian mathematician and at present professor in the Department of Mathematics at IIT Guwahati, India. He is known for his work related to arithmetic number theory, in particular applications to Iwasawa Theory and p-adic measures. He has also published articles in mathematical cryptography.
Go to Profile#2043
James H. Bramble
#41175
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
James Henry Bramble was an American mathematician known for his fundamental contributions in the development of the finite element methods, including the Bramble–Hilbert lemma, domain decomposition methods, and multigrid methods. During his career, he taught at Cornell University and Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#2044
Christina Eubanks-Turner
#40754
Overall Influence
Christina Eubanks-Turner is a professor of mathematics in the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University . Her academic areas of interest include graph theory, commutative algebra, mathematics education, and mathematical sciences diversification. She is also the Director of the Master's Program in Teaching Mathematics at LMU.
Go to Profile#2045
Wolfgang Lück
#23276
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Wolfgang Lück is a German mathematician who is an internationally recognized expert in algebraic topology. Life and work After receiving his Abitur from the Ravensberger Gymnasium in Herford in 1975, he studied at the University of Göttingen where he obtained his Diplom in 1981 and his doctoral degree under Tammo tom Dieck in 1984. His thesis was entitled Eine allgemeine Beschreibung für Faserungen auf projektiven Klassengruppen und Whiteheadgruppen.
Go to Profile#2046
Sherry Gong
#35002
Overall Influence
Sherry Gong is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology and known as one of the most successful female competitors at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#2047
Dipak K. Dey
#17057
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dipak Kumar Dey is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian methodologies. He is currently the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. Dey has an international reputation as a statistician as well as a data scientist. Since he earned a Ph.D. degree in statistics from Purdue University in 1980, Dey has made tremendous contributions to the development of modern statistics, especially in Bayesian analysis, decision science and model selection. Dey has published more than 10 books and edited volumes, and over 260 research articles in peer-refereed national and international journals.
Go to Profile#2048
Louis Auslander
#38050
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Louis Auslander was a Jewish American mathematician. He had wide-ranging interests both in pure and applied mathematics and worked on Finsler geometry, geometry of solvmanifolds and nilmanifolds, locally affine spaces, many aspects of harmonic analysis, representation theory of solvable Lie groups, and multidimensional Fourier transforms and the design of signal sets for communications and radar. He is the author of more than one hundred papers and ten books.
Go to Profile#2049
Richard A. Brualdi
#42032
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Richard Anthony Brualdi is a professor emeritus of combinatorial mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brualdi received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1964; his advisor was H. J. Ryser. Brualdi is an Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. He has over 200 publications in several mathematical journals. According to current on-line database of Mathematics Genealogy Project, Richard Brualdi has 37 Ph.D. students and 48 academic descendants. The concept of incidence coloring was introduced in 1993 by Brualdi and Massey.
Go to Profile#2050
Hari Mohan Srivastava
#48130
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
