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,
#2051
Alice Guionnet
#35922
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Alice Guionnet is a French mathematician known for her work in probability theory, in particular on large random matrices. Biography Guionnet entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1989. She earned her PhD in 1995 under the supervision of Gérard Ben Arous at University of Paris-Sud. Focuses of her academic research can be viewed in her thesis, Dynamique de Langevin d'un verre de spins .
Go to Profile#2052
Jacques Stern
#19378
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jacques Stern is a cryptographer, currently a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. He received the 2006 CNRS Gold medal. His notable work includes the cryptanalysis of numerous encryption and signature schemes, the design of the Pointcheval–Stern signature algorithm, the Naccache–Stern cryptosystem and Naccache–Stern knapsack cryptosystem, and the block ciphers CS-Cipher, DFC, and xmx. He also contributed to the cryptanalysis of the SFLASH signature scheme.
Go to Profile#2053
Joseph H. Sampson
#36745
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Joseph Harold Sampson Jr. was an American mathematician known for his work in mathematical analysis, geometry and topology, especially his work about harmonic maps in collaboration with James Eells. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 under the supervision of Salomon Bochner.
Go to Profile#2054
Mary Lee Woods
#8389
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.
Go to Profile#2055
Abu al-Jud
#32200
Overall Influence
Abū al-Jūd Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. al-Layth was an Iranian mathematician who lived during 10th century and was a contemporary of al-Biruni. He used conics to solve quartic and cubic equations, a century before the more famous work of Omar Khayyam, although his solution did not deal with all the cases.
Go to Profile#2056
Victor Vasiliev
#44536
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Victor Anatolyevich Vassiliev or Vasilyev , is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is best known for his discovery of the Vassiliev invariants in knot theory , which subsume many previously discovered polynomial knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. He also works on singularity theory, topology, computational complexity theory, integral geometry, symplectic geometry, partial differential equations , complex analysis, combinatorics, and Picard–Lefschetz theory.
Go to Profile#2057
Henri Darmon
#41069
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Henri Rene Darmon is a French-Canadian mathematician. He is a number theorist who works on Hilbert's 12th problem and its relation with the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. He is currently a James McGill Professor of Mathematics at McGill University.
Go to Profile#2058
Donald Samuel Ornstein
#44036
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Donald Samuel Ornstein is an American mathematician working in the area of ergodic theory. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1957 under the guidance of Irving Kaplansky. During his career at Stanford University he supervised the Ph. D. thesis of twenty three students, including David H. Bailey, Bob Burton, Doug Lind, Ami Radunskaya, Dan Rudolph, and Jeff Steif.
Go to Profile#2059
Troels Jørgensen
#39788
Overall Influence
Troels Jørgensen is a Danish mathematician at Columbia University working on hyperbolic geometry and complex analysis, who proved Jørgensen's inequality. He wrote his thesis in 1970 at the University of Copenhagen under the joint supervision of Werner Fenchel and Bent Fuglede.
Go to Profile#2060
Niky Kamran
#42624
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Niky Kamran is a Belgian and Canadian mathematician whose research concerns geometric analysis, differential geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a James McGill Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University.
Go to Profile#2061
Günter Hotz
#11073
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Günter Hotz is a German pioneer of computer science. His work includes formal languages, digital circuits and computational complexity theory. In 1987, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. In 1999 he was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal of the Gesellschaft für Informatik.
Go to Profile#2062
Piergiorgio Odifreddi
#11991
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Piergiorgio Odifreddi is an Italian mathematician, logician, student of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
Go to Profile#2063
Stefan Burr
#42052
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stefan Andrus Burr is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a retired professor of Computer Science at The City College of New York. Burr received his Ph.D. in 1969 from Princeton University under the supervision of Bernard Dwork; his thesis research involved the Waring–Goldbach problem in number theory, which concerns the representations of integers as sums of powers of prime numbers.
Go to Profile#2064
Ian Naismith Sneddon
#48391
Overall Influence
#2065
Michael Struwe
#46911
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Struwe is a German mathematician who specializes in calculus of variations and nonlinear partial differential equations. He won the 2012 Cantor medal from the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung for "outstanding achievements in the field of geometric analysis, calculus of variations and nonlinear partial differential equations".
Go to Profile#2066
Leonard Gross
#28753
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Leonard Gross is an American mathematician and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Cornell University. Gross has made fundamental contributions to mathematics and the mathematically rigorous study of quantum field theory.
Go to Profile#2067
Victor Goryunov
#43264
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Victor Vladimirovich Goryunov is a Russian mathematician born in 1956. He is a leading figure in Singularity theory, whose contributions to the subject are fundamental. He has published several books and a variety of papers in singularity theory, finite type invariants, and Legendrian knots. Many of his papers in Lagrangian and Legendrian geometry are now considered to be classical in the subject.
Go to Profile#2068
Arnold Oberschelp
#21276
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Arnold Oberschelp is a German mathematician and logician. He was for many years professor of logic and in Kiel. Life Oberschelp studied mathematics and physics at the universities of Göttingen and Münster. In Münster he received in December 1957 his doctorate in mathematical logic under Hans Hermes. In 1958 he was a research assistant at the Mathematical Institute of the Technical College of Hannover where he habilitated in mathematics in 1961. In 1968, he accepted an appointment as full professor of logic and science at the University of Kiel. Oberschelp has been emeritus professor since 1...
Go to Profile#2069
Alan Yuille
#17793
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan Yuille is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computational Cognitive Science with appointments in the departments of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Yuille develops models of vision and cognition for computers, intended for creating artificial vision systems. He studied under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University on a PhD in theoretical physics, which he completed in 1981.
Go to Profile#2070
Alexandra Bellow
#16779
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Alexandra Bellow is a Romanian-American mathematician, who has made contributions to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis. Biography Bellow was born in Bucharest, Romania, on August 30, 1935, as Alexandra Bagdasar. Her parents were both physicians. Her mother, Florica Bagdasar , was a child psychiatrist. Her father, , was a neurosurgeon. She received her M.S. in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1957, where she met and married her first husband, mathematician Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea. She accompanied her husband to the United States in 1957 and received her Ph.D.
Go to Profile#2071
Sylvia Wiegand
#33556
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sylvia Margaret Wiegand is an American mathematician. Early life and education Wiegand was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of mathematician Laurence Chisholm Young and through him the grand-daughter of mathematicians Grace Chisholm Young and William Henry Young. Her family moved to Wisconsin in 1949, and she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1966 after three years of study. In 1971 Wiegand earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation was titled Galois Theory of Essential Expansions of Modules and Vanishing Tensor Powers.
Go to Profile#2072
Sigurður Helgason
#44460
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Sigurdur Helgason is an Icelandic mathematician whose research has been devoted to the geometry and analysis on symmetric spaces. In particular, he has used new integral geometric methods to establish fundamental existence theorems for differential equations on symmetric spaces as well as some new results on the representations of their isometry groups. He also introduced a Fourier transform on these spaces and proved the principal theorems for this transform, the inversion formula, the Plancherel theorem and the analog of the Paley–Wiener theorem.
Go to Profile#2073
Alexander D. Wentzell
#38878
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Alexander Dmitrievich Wentzell is a Russian-American mathematician. Wentzell graduated from Moscow State University in 1958 and received in 1964 his Russian candidate degree from the Steklov Institute in Moscow with advisor Eugene Dynkin. He taught from 1961 as a docent at Moscow State University and from 1966 to 1991 as an assistant professor. In 1984 he received his Russian doctorate from Moscow State University. For the academic year 1991–1992 he was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland and for the academic year 1992–93 at the University of Minnesota. Since 1993 he has be...
Go to Profile#2074
Michael Golomb
#35920
Overall Influence
1909 - 2008 (99 years)
Michael Golomb was an American mathematician and educator who was affiliated with Purdue University for over half a century. He was a student of Erhard Schmidt and Adolf Hammerstein, and received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1933. However, as a Jew, he had to leave Germany shortly afterwards to avoid Nazi persecution. After a short period in Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia, Michael Golomb arrived in the U.S. in 1939, when he turned to applied mathematics. He was one of the first mathematicians to apply normed vector spaces in numerical analysis. He taught mathematics at Pur...
Go to Profile#2075
Richard Kenyon
#43222
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Richard W. Kenyon is an American mathematician known for his contributions in combinatorics and probability theory. He is the Erastus L. DeForest Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Kenyon graduated from Rice University and then earned his PhD under supervision of William Thurston at Princeton University. He won the Rollo Davidson Prize in 2001 and the Loève Prize in 2007. In 2014 Kenyon was chosen as a Simons Investigator and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro.
Go to Profile#2076
Juncheng Wei
#36395
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Juncheng Wei is a Chinese mathematician working in the area of nonlinear partial differential equations, nonlinear analysis and mathematical biology. Since 1994, he has over 470 published articles in top journals, including Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, and Duke Mathematical Journal.
Go to Profile#2077
Clarence F. Stephens
#27590
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Clarence Francis Stephens was the ninth African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. He is credited with inspiring students and faculty at SUNY Potsdam to form the most successful United States undergraduate mathematics degree programs in the past century. Stephens was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree.
Go to Profile#2078
Vera Pless
#34021
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Vera Pless was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory. She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Biography Vera Stepen was born on Chicago's west side to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a teenager, she was more interested in playing the cello than in mathematics, but she left high school two years early to go to the University of Chicago, and finished her studies there in three years.
Go to Profile#2079
M. T. Cheng
#26710
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
M. T. Cheng or Cheng Minde was a Chinese mathematician. He was the main founder of Peking University Mathematical Research Institute, and longtime head of the Department of Mathematics of Peking University.
Go to Profile#2080
Arieh Iserles
#29381
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Arieh Iserles is a computational mathematician, currently Professor of the Numerical Analysis of Differential Equations at the University of Cambridge and a member of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#2081
Hadley Wickham
#17381
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit, PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.
Go to Profile#2082
Amos Fiat
#15035
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Amos Fiat is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in cryptography, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory. Biography Fiat earned his Ph.D. in 1987 from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Adi Shamir. After postdoctoral studies with Richard Karp and Manuel Blum at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Israel, taking a faculty position at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#2083
Olivier Debarre
#44600
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Olivier Debarre is a French mathematician who specializes in complex algebraic geometry. From 1977 to 1981, Olivier Debarre attended the École Normale Supérieure and he studied under Phillip Griffiths at Harvard University in 1981–1982. In 1987, he received his Ph.D. in a two-part thesis from the University of Paris XI. His "Thèse d´Etat", under Arnaud Beauville, was entitled Variétés de Prym, conjecture de la trisécante et ensembles d'Andreotti et Mayer and his "Seconde Thèse", under Michael Robert Herman, was entitled Conjugaison analytique à des rotations des difféomorphismes analytiques...
Go to Profile#2084
Yael Karshon
#40227
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Yael Karshon is an Israeli and Canadian mathematician who has been described as "one of Canada's leading experts in symplectic geometry". She works as a professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Tel Aviv University .
Go to Profile#2085
Peter B. Andrews
#14839
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter Bruce Andrews is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the creator of the mathematical logic Q0. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1964 under the tutelage of Alonzo Church. He received the Herbrand Award in 2003. His research group designed the TPS automated theorem prover. A subsystem ETPS of TPS is used to help students learn logic by interactively constructing natural deduction proofs.
Go to Profile#2086
Richard E. Barlow
#33802
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Richard Eugene Barlow is an American mathematician and mathematical statistician, who is considered with Frank Proschan as the founder of modern reliability theory. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1963 until his retirement in 1999.
Go to Profile#2087
William T. Trotter
#33563
Overall Influence
William Thomas Trotter Jr. is an American mathematician, who is on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main expertise is partially ordered sets, but he has also done significant work in other areas of combinatorics, such as the Szemerédi–Trotter theorem and Chvátal-Rödl-Szemerédi-Trotter theorem.
Go to Profile#2088
Christopher Deninger
#27604
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christopher Deninger is a German mathematician at the University of Münster. Deninger's research focuses on arithmetic geometry, including applications to L-functions. Career Deninger obtained his doctorate from the University of Cologne in 1982, under the supervision of Curt Meyer. In 1992 he shared a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize with Michael Rapoport, Peter Schneider and Thomas Zink. In 1998 he was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 in Berlin. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#2089
Gijsbert de Leve
#33017
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Gijsbert de Leve was a Dutch mathematician and operations researcher, known for his work on Markov decision process. Gijs de Leve is considered the founder of operations research in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#2090
Hu Hesheng
#25503
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Hu Hesheng is a Chinese mathematician. She served as vice-president of Chinese Mathematical Society, president of the Shanghai Mathematical Society, and is an academician of Chinese Academy of Science. She held the Noether Lecture in 2002.
Go to Profile#2091
Kapil Hari Paranjape
#18094
Overall Influence
Kapil Hari Paranjape is an Indian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. Biography He was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra near the Kabootar Khana in Dadar but grew up in New Delhi. He completed his schooling from the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in 1977. He then joined the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where he pursued a five-years integrated Master’s programme in Mathematics and graduated in 1982. He was awarded the General Proficiency Prize for Mathematics from IIT Kanpur in 1982.
Go to Profile#2092
Robert Edmund O'Malley
#36756
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Edmund O'Malley Jr. is an American mathematician. O'Malley studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of New Hampshire, where he received his baccalaureate degree in 1960 and his master's in 1961. He then studied differential equations and singular perturbations at Stanford University, where he received his doctorate in mathematics in 1966. After brief appointments at the University of North Carolina , Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Courant Institute , and the Mathematics Research Center , O'Malley returned to New York University in 1968. He remained there, do...
Go to Profile#2093
Alexis Bonnet
#34565
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alexis Bonnet is a French mathematician and investor. For his research on partial differential equations he was awarded the 1996 EMS Prize. He earned his doctorate from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1992, under supervision of Henri Berestycki.
Go to Profile#2094
Elmer Rees
#42578
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Elmer Gethin Rees, was a Welsh mathematician with publications in areas ranging from topology, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, linear algebra and Morse theory to robotics. He held the post of Director of the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research, a partnership between the University of Bristol and the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ, from its creation in 2005 until 2009.
Go to Profile#2095
Donald Geman
#14328
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Donald Jay Geman is an American applied mathematician and a leading researcher in the field of machine learning and pattern recognition. He and his brother, Stuart Geman, are very well known for proposing the Gibbs sampler and for the first proof of the convergence of the simulated annealing algorithm, in an article that became a highly cited reference in engineering . He is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and simultaneously a visiting professor at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.
Go to Profile#2096
Vladimir Zakalyukin
#43682
Overall Influence
1951 - 2011 (60 years)
Vladimir Mikhailovich Zakalyukin was a Russian mathematician known for his research on singularity theory, differential equations, and optimal control theory. He obtained his Ph.D. at Moscow State University in 1977 . His thesis advisor was Vladimir Arnold. In 2007 he won the MAIK Nauka award for best research publication in Russian. He worked at the Moscow State University, the University of Liverpool, and the Moscow Aviation Institute.
Go to Profile#2097
Kenneth A. Ross
#33248
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Kenneth Allen Ross is a mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon. He served as an associate editor for Mathematics Magazine. He was president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1995 to 1996. He is a recipient of the Charles Y. Hu Award for distinguished service to mathematics.
Go to Profile#2098
Mark Pinsky
#46068
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Mark A. Pinsky was Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University. His research areas included probability theory, mathematical analysis, Fourier Analysis and wavelets. Pinsky earned his Ph.D at Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#2099
Ernesto Lupercio
#44337
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Ernesto Lupercio is a Mexican mathematician. He was awarded the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2009, "for his outstanding contributions to algebraic topology, geometry and mathematical physics." Lupercio earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1997 under the guidance of Ralph L. Cohen. He was a member of the Global Young Academy and a member of the Third World Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2100
Larry V. Hedges
#26334
Overall Influence
Larry Vernon Hedges is a researcher in statistical methods for meta-analysis and evaluation of education policy. He is Professor of Statistics and Education and Social Policy, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. Previously, he was the Stella M. Rowley Distinguished Service Professor of Education, Sociology, Psychology, and Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Statistical Association.
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