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,
#2101
Shu Shien-Siu
#10857
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Shu Shien-Siu , also known as S. S. Shu, was a Chinese/Taiwanese mathematician, engineer and educator. Biography Shu was born in Yongjia, Wenzhou, Zhejiang on 12 Sep 1912. Shu studied at Wenzhou High School. In 1935, Shu graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Tsinghua University in Beijing and obtained B.S. in mathematics. He worked as a teaching assistant at the department after his graduation.
Go to Profile#2102
Bharath Sriraman
#16401
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Bharath Sriraman is an Indian-born Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Montana – Missoula and an academic editor, known for his interdisciplinary contributions at the nexus of math-science-arts, theory development in mathematics education, creativity research, and gifted education.
Go to Profile#2103
Terry Speed
#25847
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Terence Paul "Terry" Speed , FAA FRS is an Australian statistician. A senior principal research scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, he is known for his contributions to the analysis of variance and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.
Go to Profile#2104
Alexander Kuznetsov
#25853
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Alexander Gennadyevich Kuznetsov is a Russian mathematician working at the Steklov Mathematical Institute and the Interdisciplinary Scientific Center J.-V. Poncelet, Moscow, and head of the Laboratory of Algebraic Geometry and its Applications of the Higher School of Economics. He graduated from Moscow State School 57 in 1990. He received a Ph.D. in 1998 under the supervision of . Kuznetsov is known for his research in algebraic geometry, mostly concerning derived categories of coherent sheaves and their semiorthogonal decompositions.
Go to Profile#2105
Kit Fine
#6859
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kit Fine is a British philosopher, currently university professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. Prior to joining the philosophy department of NYU in 1997, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan and UCLA. The author of several books and dozens of articles in international academic journals, he has made notable contributions to the fields of philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language and also has written on ancient philosophy, in particular on Aristotle's account of log...
Go to Profile#2106
Linda J. S. Allen
#39569
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Linda Joy Svoboda Allen is an American mathematician and mathematical biologist, the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. Education and career Allen earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1975 from the College of St. Scholastica, and a master's degree in 1978 and doctorate in 1978 from the University of Tennessee. Her dissertation, Applications of Differential Inequalities to Persistence and Extinction Problems for Reaction-Diffusion Systems, was supervised by Thomas G. Hallam.
Go to Profile#2107
Dexter Kozen
#15125
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dexter Campbell Kozen is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1974 and his PhD in computer science in 1977 from Cornell University, where he was advised by Juris Hartmanis. He advised numerous Ph.D. students.
Go to Profile#2108
Greg Lawler
#32907
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gregory Francis Lawler is an American mathematician working in probability theory and best known for his work since 2000 on the Schramm–Loewner evolution. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1979 under the supervision of Edward Nelson. He was on the faculty of Duke University from 1979 to 2001, of Cornell University from 2001 to 2006, and since 2006 is at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#2109
F. Thomas Farrell
#48001
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Francis Thomas Farrell is an American mathematician who has made contributions in the area of topology and differential geometry. Farrell is a distinguished professor emeritus of mathematics at Binghamton University. He also holds a position at the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University.
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Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach
#42430
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach is a French mathematician and professor. Education and career Kosmann-Schwarzbach obtained her doctoral degree in 1970 at the University of Paris under supervision of André Lichnerowicz on a dissertation titled Dérivées de Lie des spineurs .
Go to Profile#2111
Pierre Milman
#33788
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Pierre D. Milman , born 1945 in Odessa, is a mathematician and a professor at the University of Toronto. Milman graduated with a B.A. from the University of Moscow in 1967. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Tel Aviv in 1975 after an interlude of several years as researcher at the Institute of Chemical Physics and then Solid State Physics in Moscow.
Go to Profile#2112
Natalia Berloff
#24252
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Natalia G. Berloff is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Her research includes the use of polaritons to simulate structures such as the classical XY model. Early life and education Berloff grew up in Russia. She earned her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1996, under the supervision of Louis Norberg Howard.
Go to Profile#2113
Iván Gutman
#41487
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Iván Gutman is a Serbian chemist and mathematician. Life and work Gutman was born in Sombor, Yugoslavia in a Bunjevac family. In 1970 he graduated chemistry from the University of Belgrade where he worked a short time as an assistant at the chemistry department. From 1971 until 1976 he worked as research assistant and senior research assistant at Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, department of physical chemistry. In 1973 he received M.Sc. degree from the University of Zagreb, in the area of theoretical organic chemistry. In the same year he received a doctorate degree in chemistry from the University of Zagreb.
Go to Profile#2114
István Juhász
#45421
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
István Juhász is a Hungarian mathematician, working in set theory. He works at the Rényi Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Career Juhász graduated from Eötvös University, Budapest in 1966 and worked there until 1974 when he moved to the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he is currently a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#2115
Emily Riehl
#37709
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Emily Riehl is an American mathematician who has contributed to higher category theory and homotopy theory. Much of her work, including her PhD thesis, concerns model structures and more recently the foundations of infinity-categories. She is the author of two textbooks and serves on the editorial boards of three journals.
Go to Profile#2116
Edmond Bonan
#35943
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Edmond Bonan is a French mathematician, known particularly for his work on special holonomy. Biography After completing his undergraduate studies at the École polytechnique, Bonan went on to write his 1967 University of Paris doctoral dissertation in Differential geometry under the supervision of André Lichnerowicz. From 1968 to 1997, he held the post of lecturer and then professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, where he currently holds the title of professor emeritus. Early in his career, from 1969 to 1981, he also lectured at the École Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#2117
Verena Huber-Dyson
#20507
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Verena Esther Huber-Dyson was a Swiss-American mathematician, known for her work on group theory and formal logic. She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician", who did research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory. At the time of her death, she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.
Go to Profile#2118
Annette Werner
#44572
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Annette Werner is a German mathematician. Her research interests include diophantine geometry and the algebraic geometry of non-Archimedean ordered fields, including the study of buildings, Berkovich spaces, and tropical geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Go to Profile#2119
Robert Wayne Thomason
#44708
Overall Influence
1952 - 1995 (43 years)
Robert Wayne Thomason was an American mathematician who worked on algebraic K-theory. His results include a proof that all infinite loop space machines are in some sense equivalent, and progress on the Quillen–Lichtenbaum conjecture.
Go to Profile#2120
Neithalath Mohan Kumar
#49289
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Neithalath Mohan Kumar is an Indian mathematician who specializes in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Kumar is a full professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1994, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India in the mathematical sciences category. Kumar has made profound and original contributions to commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. He is well known for his contribution settling the Eisenbud-Evans conjecture proposed by David Eisenbud. His work on rational double points on rational surfaces ...
Go to Profile#2121
Siegfried Bosch
#46045
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Siegfried Bosch is a German mathematician working in arithmetic geometry, focusing in particular on nonarchimedean analytic geometry. He completed his Ph.D. in 1967 at the University of Göttingen with a dissertation entitled Endliche analytische Homomorphismen , and received his habilitation degree in 1972. Since 1974 he has been a professor at the University of Münster.
Go to Profile#2122
Naum Meiman
#23932
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Naum Natanovich Meiman was a Soviet mathematician, and dissident. He is known for his work in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics, as well as for his dissident activity, in particular, for being a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
Go to Profile#2123
George W. Hart
#29108
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
George William Hart is an American sculptor and geometer. Before retiring, he was an associate professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York City and then an interdepartmental research professor at Stony Brook University. His work includes both academic and artistic approaches to mathematics.
Go to Profile#2124
Robert Almgren
#28342
Overall Influence
Robert F. Almgren is an applied mathematician, academic, and businessman focused on market microstructure and order execution. He is the son of Princeton mathematician Frederick J. Almgren, Jr. With Neil Chriss, he wrote the seminal paper "Optimal execution of portfolio transactions," which Institutional Investor said "helped lay the groundwork for arrival-price algorithms being developed on Wall Street." In 2008 with Christian Hauff, he cofounded Quantitative Brokers, a financial technology company providing agency algorithmic execution in futures and interest rate markets. He is currently C...
Go to Profile#2125
Nick Trefethen
#31321
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen is an American mathematician, professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. Education Trefethen was born 30 August 1955 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of mechanical engineer Lloyd M. Trefethen and codebreaker, poet, teacher and editor Florence Newman Trefethen. Trefethen attended Phillips Exeter Academy.
Go to Profile#2126
Martin Wilk
#34094
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Martin Bradbury Wilk, was a Canadian statistician, academic, and the former Chief Statistician of Canada. In 1965, together with Samuel Shapiro, he developed the Shapiro–Wilk test, which can indicate whether a sample of numbers would be unusual if it came from a Gaussian distribution. With Ramanathan Gnanadesikan he developed a number of important graphical techniques for data analysis, including the Q–Q plot and P–P plot.
Go to Profile#2127
Étienne Pardoux
#29844
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Étienne Pardoux is a French mathematician working in the field of Stochastic analysis, in particular Stochastic partial differential equations. He is currently Professor at Aix-Marseille University.
Go to Profile#2128
Victor Pan
#17212
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Victor Yakovlevich Pan is a Soviet and American mathematician and computer scientist, known for his research on algorithms for polynomials and matrix multiplication. Education and career Pan earned his Ph.D. at Moscow University in 1964, under the supervision of Anatoli Georgievich Vitushkin, and continued his work at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. During that time, he published a number of significant papers and became known informally as "polynomial Pan" for his pioneering work in the area of polynomial computations. In late 1970s, he immigrated to the United States and held positions at several institutions including IBM Research.
Go to Profile#2129
Edward H. Simpson
#5501
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Edward Hugh Simpson CB was a British codebreaker, statistician and civil servant. He was best known for describing Simpson's paradox along with Udny Yule. Contributions to the field of statistics Edward Hugh Simpson was introduced to the thinking of mathematical statistics as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park . He wrote the paper "The Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables" while a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge in 1946 with Maurice Bartlett as his tutor; and published it in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1951 at Bartlett's request because Bartlett wanted to refer to it.
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Alice T. Schafer
#30976
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Alice Turner Schafer was an American mathematician. She was one of the founding members of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971. Early life Alice Elizabeth Turner was born on June 18, 1915, in Richmond, Virginia. She received a full scholarship to study at the University of Richmond. She was the only female mathematics major. At the time, women were not allowed in the campus library. She was a brilliant student and won the department's James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year. She completed her B.A. degree in mathematics in 1936.
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Gerald James Whitrow
#20197
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Gerald James Whitrow was a British mathematician, cosmologist and science historian. Biography Whitrow was born on 9 June 1912 at Kimmeridge in Dorset, the elder son of William and Emily Whitrow. After completing school at Christ's Hospital, he obtained a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford in 1930, earning his first degree in 1933; he was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1935 to 1937, taking his MA in 1937, and was awarded his PhD in 1939. At Oxford he worked on an alternative theory of relativity with Professor Edward Arthur Milne. During World War II, he worked as a scientific officer for the Ministry of Supply.
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Richard Schelp
#40146
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Richard H. Schelp was an American mathematician. Schelp received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Central Missouri and his master's degree and doctorate in mathematics from Kansas State University. The adviser from his thesis was Richard Joseph Greechie. He was an associate mathematician and missile scientist at Johns Hopkins University for five years. He then became an instructor of mathematics at Kansas State University for four years. Finally in 1970 he became a professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Memphis.
Go to Profile#2133
Harvey Goldstein
#16601
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Harvey Goldstein was a British statistician known for his contributions to multilevel modelling methodology, statistical software, social statistics, and for applying this to educational assessment and league tables.
Go to Profile#2134
James Hyman
#40758
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
James Macklin "Mac" Hyman is an applied mathematician formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory and currently at Tulane University in the United States. He received his undergraduate degree from Tulane University and his PhD in 1976 from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences under Peter Lax with thesis The method of lines solution of partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#2135
Maurice Auslander
#43015
Overall Influence
1926 - 1994 (68 years)
Maurice Auslander was an American mathematician who worked on commutative algebra, homological algebra and the representation theory of Artin algebras . He proved the Auslander–Buchsbaum theorem that regular local rings are factorial, the Auslander–Buchsbaum formula, and, in collaboration with Idun Reiten, introduced Auslander–Reiten theory and Auslander algebras.
Go to Profile#2136
Ann S. Almgren
#36701
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ann S. Almgren is an American applied mathematician who works as a senior scientist and group leader of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her primary research interests are in computational algorithms for solving PDE's for fluid dynamics in a variety of application areas. Her current projects include the development and implementation of new multiphysics algorithms in high-resolution adaptive mesh codes that are designed for the latest multicore architectures.
Go to Profile#2137
Mathukumalli V. Subbarao
#33606
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Mathukumalli Venkata Subbarao was an Indo-Canadian mathematician, specialising in number theory. He was a long-time resident of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Subbarao was born in the small village of Yazali, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India. He received his master's degree from Presidency College, Madras in 1941. He went on to complete a doctorate in functional analysis, advised by Ramaswamy S. Vaidyanathaswamy. He worked at Presidency College, Madras, Sri Venkateswara University, and the University of Missouri, before moving in 1963 to the University of Alberta, where he spent the rest of his pr...
Go to Profile#2138
Thomas William Körner
#43232
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Thomas William Körner is a British pure mathematician and the author of three books on popular mathematics. He is titular Professor of Fourier Analysis in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He is the son of the philosopher Stephan Körner and of Edith Körner.
Go to Profile#2139
Roy M. Anderson
#19353
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases. He is the author, with Robert May, of the most highly cited book in this field, entitled Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. His early work was on the population ecology of infectious agents before focusing on the epidemiology and control of human infections. His published research includes studies of the major viral, bacterial and parasitic infections of humans, wildlife and livestock. This has included major studies on HIV, SARS, foot and mouth disease, bov...
Go to Profile#2140
G. Peter Scott
#44677
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Godfrey Peter Scott, known as Peter Scott, was a British-American mathematician, known for the Scott core theorem. Scott received his PhD in 1969 from the University of Warwick under Brian Joseph Sanderson. Scott was a professor at the University of Liverpool and later at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#2141
Stanisław Radziszowski
#33710
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stanisław P. Radziszowski is a Polish-American mathematician and computer scientist, best known for his work in Ramsey theory. Radziszowski was born in Gdańsk, Poland, and received his PhD from the Institute of Informatics of the University of Warsaw in 1980. His thesis topic was "Logic and Complexity of Synchronous Parallel Computations". From 1976 to 1980 he worked as a visiting professor in various universities in Mexico City. In 1984, he moved to the United States, where he took up a position in the Department of Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2142
Edward B. Curtis
#46390
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Edward Baldwin Curtis is an American mathematician. Life and career Edward Curtis received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1954. After graduate study from 1958 to 1959 at the University of Oxford, he returned to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. there in 1962. His thesis The Lower Central Series for Free Group Complexes was supervised by Raoul Bott. Curtis became an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , assistant professor , and associate professor . In 1970 he became a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he remained until his retirement ...
Go to Profile#2143
Peter Schröder
#17861
Overall Influence
Peter Schröder is an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at California Institute of Technology. Schröder is known for his contributions to discrete differential geometry and digital geometry processing. He is also a world expert in the area of wavelet based methods for computer graphics. In 2015, Schröder was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "contributions to computer graphics and geometry processing.".
Go to Profile#2144
Vasudevan Srinivas
#48211
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Vasudevan Srinivas is an Indian mathematician working in algebraic geometry. He is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Mathematics Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. Srinivas is an elected Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences, American Mathematical Society, Indian National Science Academy, and the Indian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2145
Adrian Raftery
#41341
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Adrian E. Raftery is an Irish and American statistician and sociologist. He is the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology, and founding Director of the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States.
Go to Profile#2146
Mark Jerrum
#10009
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mark Richard Jerrum is a British computer scientist and computational theorist. Jerrum received his Ph.D. in computer science 'On the complexity of evaluating multivariate polynomials' in 1981 from University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Leslie Valiant. He is professor of pure mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London.
Go to Profile#2147
Nina Uraltseva
#43588
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Nina Nikolaevna Uraltseva is a Russian mathematician, a professor of mathematics and head of the department of mathematical physics at Saint Petersburg State University, and the editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the St. Petersburg Mathematical Society. Her specialty is the study of nonlinear partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#2148
Albert Marden
#42491
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Albert Marden is an American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry. Education and career Marden received his PhD in 1962 from Harvard University with thesis advisor Lars Ahlfors. Marden has been a professor at the University of Minnesota since the 1970s, where he is now professor emeritus. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in the academic year 1969–70, Fall 1978, and Fall 1987.
Go to Profile#2149
Fritz Ursell
#44598
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Fritz Joseph Ursell FRS was a British mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics, especially in the area of wave-structure interactions. He held the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester from 1961 to 1990, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972 and retired in 1990.
Go to Profile#2150
David P. Williamson
#24979
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
David Paul Williamson is a professor of operations research at Cornell University, and the editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Michel Goemans, and is best known for his work with Goemans on approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming, for which they won the Fulkerson Prize in 2000. He also received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize in 2013. In 2022 he received the AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research.
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