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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#2201
Victor Buchstaber
#46402
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Victor Matveevich Buchstaber is a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his work on algebraic topology, homotopy theory, and mathematical physics. Work Buchstaber's first research work was in cobordism theory. He calculated the differential in the Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence in K-theory and complex cobordism theory, constructed Chern-Dold characters and the universal Todd genus in cobordism, and gave an alternative effective solution of the Milnor-Hirzebruch problem. He went on to develop a theory of double-valued formal groups that led to the calculation of cobordism rings of co...
Go to Profile#2202
Vanik Zakaryan
#46787
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Vanik Zakaryan or Zakarian was an Armenian academician, specialist on complex analysis, Member of the Presidium of the Armenian Academy of Sciences , Vice-president and then honorary vice-president of the World Chess Federation. He was awarded the Khorenatsi medal by a decree of Robert Kocharyan in the first years of the third millennium.
Go to Profile#2203
Dennis Babbage
#41905
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Dennis William Babbage OBE was an English mathematician associated with Magdalene College, Cambridge, and with codebreaking at Bletchley Park during World War II. In 1980 Babbage was President of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2204
Eitan Tadmor
#48210
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Eitan Tadmor is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, known for his contributions to the theory and computation of PDEss with diverse applications to shock wave, kinetic transport, incompressible flows, image processing, and self-organized collective dynamics.
Go to Profile#2205
Russel E. Caflisch
#30583
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Russel E. Caflisch is an American mathematician. Biography Caflisch is Director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University , and a Professor in the Mathematics Department. Russel Edward Caflisch was born in Charleston, West Virginia. He received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1975. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. His dissertation was titled "The Fluid Dynamic Limit and Shocks for a Model Boltzmann Equation." He has also held faculty positions at Stanford and NYU.
Go to Profile#2206
Sorin Popa
#42707
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sorin Teodor Popa is a Romanian American mathematician working on operator algebras. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Popa earned his PhD from the University of Bucharest in 1983 under the supervision of Dan-Virgil Voiculescu, with thesis -algebrelor. He has advised 15 doctoral students at UCLA, including Adrian Ioana.
Go to Profile#2207
Steven Haberman
#25760
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Steven Haberman is Director and Deputy Dean in Cass Business School, Professor of Actuarial Science in its Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance and is Founding Editor of the Journal of Pension, Economics and Finance.
Go to Profile#2208
Eben Matlis
#48666
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Eben Matlis was a mathematician known for his contributions to the theory of rings and modules, especially for his work with injective modules over commutative Noetherian rings, and his introduction of Matlis duality.
Go to Profile#2209
Harry Dym
#32447
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Harry Dym is a mathematician at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dym's research interests include operator theory, interpolation theory, and inverse problems. Dym earned his Ph.D. in 1965 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Henry McKean. He introduced the Dym equation, which bears his name.
Go to Profile#2210
Peter Johnstone
#38151
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Tennant Johnstone is Professor of the Foundations of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of St. John's College. He invented or developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in topos theory. His thesis, completed at the University of Cambridge in 1974, was entitled "Some Aspects of Internal Category Theory in an Elementary Topos".
Go to Profile#2211
Reiko Miyaoka
#48436
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Reiko Miyaoka is a Japanese mathematician and professor at Tohoku University, known for her research on hypersurfaces. In 2001 she won the Geometry prize of the Mathematical Society of Japan. She received her Ph.D. in 1983 from Tokyo Institute of Technology. Her husband Yoichi Miyaoka is also a mathematician.
Go to Profile#2212
Robert J. Vanderbei
#26612
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Robert J. Vanderbei is an American mathematician and Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. Biography Robert J. Vanderbei was born in Grand Rapids, MI, in 1955. He received his BS in Chemistry in 1976 and an MS in Operations Research and Statistics in 1978 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1981. In his thesis, he developed probabilistic potential theory for random fields consisting of tensor products of Brownian motions. He was postdoctoral research fellow at New...
Go to Profile#2213
Włodzimierz Kuperberg
#46803
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Włodzimierz Kuperberg is a professor of mathematics at Auburn University, with research interests in geometry and topology. Biography Although Kuperberg is Polish-American, he was born in what is now Belarus, where his parents and older siblings had traveled east to escape World War II. In 1946, the family returned to Poland, resettling in Szczecin, where Kuperberg grew up. He began his studies at the University of Warsaw in 1959, and received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1969, under the supervision of Karol Borsuk. During his time at Warsaw, he published three high school textbooks in Polish.
Go to Profile#2214
Reese Prosser
#32300
Overall Influence
1927 - 1996 (69 years)
Reese Trego Prosser was an American mathematician. He studied at Harvard University and University of California at Berkeley under John L. Kelley , while working as numerical analyst at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory . He then joined Duke University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He also worked at Lincoln Laboratory , among others contributing an early study on routing in packet switching computer networks, before becoming associate professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College and professor . He served as a research associate at Harvard University and at University of Cali...
Go to Profile#2215
David Gilbarg
#49485
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
David Gilbarg was an American mathematician, and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1941; his dissertation, titled On the Structure of the group of p-adic l-units, was written under the supervision of Emil Artin.
Go to Profile#2216
Stuart S. Antman
#45896
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Stuart Sheldon Antman is an American mathematician. He is Distinguished University Research Professor at the University of Maryland. His research involves continuum mechanics, elasticity, and nonlinear partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#2217
Numan Yunusovich Satimov
#46863
Overall Influence
1939 - 2006 (67 years)
Numan Yunusovich Satimov was a Soviet and Uzbek mathematician, Doktor Nauk in Physical and Mathematical Sciences, academician of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan , and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of UzSSR from 1979 to 2006, and a laureate of the Biruni State Prize . He was a specialist in the theory of differential equations, control theory and their applications.
Go to Profile#2218
Karen D. King
#49520
Overall Influence
1971 - 2019 (48 years)
Karen Denise King was an African-American mathematics educator, a program director at National Science Foundation, and a 2012 AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer. Early life Karen Denise King was born on July 6, 1971, in Washington, D.C. She was selected for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Women in Science and Engineering Scholars Program at Spelman College as an undergraduate and finished her degree in mathematics magna cum laude in 3 years. King next attended University of Maryland with a National Science Foundation fellowship and earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education in 1997. Her dissertation advisor was Patricia F.
Go to Profile#2219
Tanya Khovanova
#38943
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Tanya Khovanova is a Soviet-American mathematician who became the second female gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiads. She is a lecturer in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2220
Walter Knödel
#28359
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Walter Knödel was an Austrian mathematician and computer scientist. He was a computer science professor at the University of Stuttgart. Born in Vienna, Walter Knödel studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. Also in Vienna, Knödel received his PhD in 1948 for his work on number theory under the direction of Edmund Hlawka and got habilitated in 1953. In 1961, Walter Knödel became professor for mathematics at the University of Stuttgart.
Go to Profile#2221
Naum Krasner
#40269
Overall Influence
1924 - 1999 (75 years)
Naum Krasner was a Russian mathematician and economist. A former colonel in the Soviet Army, he joined Voronezh State University as a student in 1957 and, on graduating in 1961, joined the faculty there. In 1969 he became Methods of Operational Research Chair and, later, vice-dean of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics.
Go to Profile#2222
Karl Stein
#32165
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Karl Stein was a German mathematician. He is well known for complex analysis and cryptography. Stein manifolds and Stein factorization are named after him. Career Karl Stein received his doctorate with his dissertation on the topic Zur Theorie der Funktionen mehrerer komplexer Veränderlichen; Die Regularitätshüllen niederdimensionaler Mannigfaltigkeiten at the University of Münster under the supervision of Heinrich Behnke in 1937. Karl Stein was conscripted into the Wehrmacht sometime before 1942, and trained as a cryptographer to work at OKW/Chi, the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.
Go to Profile#2223
J. Michael Harrison
#30115
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John Michael Harrison is an American researcher, known for his contributions to the theory of operations research, in particular stochastic networks and financial engineering. He has authored two books and nearly 90 journal articles.
Go to Profile#2224
Zvi Arad
#8761
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Zvi Arad was an Israeli mathematician, acting president of Bar-Ilan University, and president of Netanya Academic College. Biography Zvi Arad began his academic studies in the Mathematics Department of Bar-Ilan University. He received his first degree in 1964 and after army service went on to complete a second and third degree in the Mathematics Department of Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#2225
Richard B. Lipton
#51708
Overall Influence
#2226
Charles C. Pugh
#46208
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Charles Chapman Pugh is an American mathematician who researches dynamical systems. Pugh received his PhD under Philip Hartman of Johns Hopkins University in 1965, with the dissertation The Closing Lemma for Dimensions Two and Three. He has since been a professor, now emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#2227
Ursula K. Le Guin
#300
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American ...
Go to Profile#2228
Lawrence Shepp
#28721
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Lawrence Alan Shepp was an American mathematician, specializing in statistics and computational tomography. Shepp obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1961 with a dissertation titled Recurrent Sums of Random Variables. His advisor was William Feller. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1962. He joined Rutgers University in 1997. He joined University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
Go to Profile#2229
Pavol Hell
#48109
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pavol Hell is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, born in Czechoslovakia. He is a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University. Hell started his mathematical studies at Charles University in Prague, and moved to Canada in August 1968 after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He obtained his MSc from McMaster University in Hamilton, under the joint supervision of Gert Sabidussi and Alex Rosa, and his PhD at the Universite de Montreal, with Gert Sabidussi. In his PhD research he pioneered, on the suggestion of Gert Sabidussi, the study of graph retracts. He desc...
Go to Profile#2230
W. R. Alford
#40003
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
William Robert "Red" Alford, Ph.D, J.D. was an American mathematician and lawyer, who was best known for his work in the fields of topology and number theory. Personal life Alford was born in Canton, Mississippi, to parents Clayton and Pennington Alford. After graduating high school, Alford became a member of the United States Air Force, and earned his Bachelor of Science in mathematics and physics from The Citadel . Subsequently, he earned his Ph.D in mathematics from Tulane University , and his J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law . After earning his J.D., he practiced law in Athens, Georgia, before returning to the mathematics faculty at the University of Georgia.
Go to Profile#2231
John McNamara
#21265
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John M. McNamara is an English mathematical biologist and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Biology in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. In 2013, he and Alasdair Houston jointly received the ASAB Medal, and in 2014, he received the Weldon Memorial Prize. In 2018, he was awarded the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists.
Go to Profile#2232
Nicholas Shepherd-Barron
#42269
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Nicholas Ian Shepherd-Barron, FRS , is a British mathematician working in algebraic geometry. He is a professor of mathematics at King's College London. Education and career Shepherd-Barron was a scholar of Winchester College. He obtained his B.A. at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1976, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Miles Reid in 1981.
Go to Profile#2233
Steven G. Johnson
#18789
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Steven Glenn Johnson is an American mathematician known for being a co-creator of the FFTW library for software-based fast Fourier transforms and for his work on photonic crystals. He is professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at MIT where he leads a group on Nanostructures and Computation.
Go to Profile#2234
Anand Kumar
#19324
Overall Influence
2001 - Present (23 years)
Anand Kumar is an Indian Mathematics educator, best known for his Super 30 programme, which he started with Abhayanand in Patna, Bihar in 2002, known for coaching underprivileged students for JEE- Main & JEE-Advanced, the entrance examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology . Kumar was named in Time magazine's list of Best of Asia 2010. In 2023, he was awarded the Padma Shri, country's fourth highest civilian award by the Government of India for his contributions in the field of literature and education.
Go to Profile#2235
Dietrich Stoyan
#42615
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Dietrich Stoyan is a German mathematician and statistician who made contributions to queueing theory, stochastic geometry, and spatial statistics. Education and career Stoyan studied mathematics at Technical University Dresden; applied research at Deutsches Brennstoffinstitut Freiberg, 1967 PhD, 1975 Habilitation. Since 1976 at TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Rektor of that university in 1991—1997; he became famous by his statistical research of the diffusion of euro coins in Germany and Europe after the introduction of the euro in 2002.
Go to Profile#2236
E. T. Parker
#43758
Overall Influence
1926 - 1991 (65 years)
Ernest Tilden Parker was a professor emeritus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is notable for his breakthrough work along with R. C. Bose and S. S. Shrikhande in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal latin squares. He was at that time employed in the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand, but he subsequently joined the mathematics faculty at t University of Illinois. In 1968, he and a Ph.D. student, K. B. Reid, disproved a conjecture on tournaments by Paul Erdős and Leo Moser.
Go to Profile#2237
David M. Young Jr.
#42574
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
David M. Young Jr. was an American mathematician and computer scientist who was one of the pioneers in the field of modern numerical analysis/scientific computing. Contributions Dr. Young is best known for establishing the mathematical framework for iterative methods . These algorithms are now used in computer software on high performance supercomputers for the numerical solution of large sparse linear systems arising from problems involving partial differential equations. See, in particular, the successive over-relaxation and symmetric successive over-relaxation methods.
Go to Profile#2238
Ralph Henstock
#37525
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Ralph Henstock was an English mathematician and author. As an Integration theorist, he is notable for Henstock–Kurzweil integral. Henstock brought the theory to a highly developed stage without ever having encountered Jaroslav Kurzweil's 1957 paper on the subject.
Go to Profile#2239
Granville Sewell
#40536
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Edward Granville Sewell is an American mathematician, university professor, and intelligent design advocate. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas, El Paso. Education Sewell received his PhD from Purdue University in 1972 and an M.S. in mechanical engineering 1977 from the University of Texas, Austin. His BS was from Harding College
Go to Profile#2240
Luis Fernando Alday
#39397
Overall Influence
Luis Fernando Alday is presently Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Mathematical Physics Group. His research interests are bootstrap approach to conformal field theories and string theory, several aspects of the AdS/CFT duality, four-dimensional N=2 super-symmetric theories and their relation to conformal field theories and exact computation of observables in super-symmetric gauge theories.
Go to Profile#2241
Geoffrey K. Martin
#45399
Overall Influence
Geoffrey K. Martin is a mathematician currently advising in the field of mathematical physics. Martin is also the Associate Professor and Chair of the mathematics department at the University of Toledo. His fields of study include differential geometry, relativity, and the foundations of physics. Martin earned his Ph.D. at the Stony Brook University in 1983. Geoffrey is the son of horticulturists Joy Lee Martin and Ernest Martin who owned Logee's Greenhouses.
Go to Profile#2242
Joseph Born Kadane
#15351
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joseph "Jay" Born Kadane is the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics, Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Kadane is one of the early proponents of Bayesian statistics, particularly the subjective Bayesian philosophy.
Go to Profile#2243
Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya
#37209
Overall Influence
1915 - 1996 (81 years)
Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya was an Indian statistician who worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in the 1930s and early 40s. He made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics, particularly for his measure of similarity between two multinomial distributions, known as the Bhattacharyya coefficient, based on which he defined a metric, the Bhattacharyya distance. This measure is widely used in comparing statistical samples in biology, physics, computer science, etc.
Go to Profile#2244
Wolfgang Hackbusch
#25869
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Wolfgang Hackbusch is a German mathematician, known for his pioneering research in multigrid methods and later hierarchical matrices, a concept generalizing the fast multipole method. He was a professor at the University of Kiel and is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig.
Go to Profile#2245
Annamalai Ramanathan
#51756
Overall Influence
1946 - 1993 (47 years)
Annamalai Ramanathan was an Indian mathematician in the field of algebraic geometry, who introduced the notion of Frobenius splitting of algebraic varieties jointly with Vikram Bhagvandas Mehta in . The notion of Frobenius splitting led to the solution of many classical problems, in particular a proof of the Demazure character formula and results on the equations defining Schubert varieties in general flag manifolds.
Go to Profile#2246
Alexander Bruno
#52103
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Alexander Dmitrievich Bruno is a Russian mathematician who has made contributions to the normal forms theory. Bruno developed a new level of mathematical analysis and called it "power geometry". He also applied it to the solution of several problems in mathematics, mechanics, celestial mechanics, and hydrodynamics. The Brjuno numbers were introduced by him in 1971, and are named after him.
Go to Profile#2247
Julian Besag
#23345
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
Julian Ernst Besag FRS was a British statistician known chiefly for his work in spatial statistics , and Bayesian inference . Early life and education Besag was born in Loughborough and was educated at Loughborough Grammar School. He began studying engineering at the University of Cambridge but moved to the University of Birmingham to study statistics, obtaining his BSc in 1968.
Go to Profile#2248
Alan Herries Wilson
#17177
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Sir Alan Herries Wilson , was a British mathematician and industrialist. He was educated at Wallasey Grammar School and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, obtaining a BA degree in mathematics in 1926. His graduate work was under the supervision of R. H. Fowler working on problems in quantum mechanics. There is now an Alan Wilson Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College.
Go to Profile#2249
W. K. Hastings
#47344
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Wilfred Keith Hastings was a Canadian statistician. He was noted for his contribution to the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm , the most commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo method . Early life and education He received his B.A. in applied mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1953, and then worked from 1955 to 1959 for the Toronto company H.S. Gellman & Co.
Go to Profile#2250
Pál Révész
#43949
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Pál Révész , anglicized as Pal Revesz, was a Hungarian mathematician known for his research in probability and mathematical statistics, including the mathematical foundations of the law of large numbers, theory of density estimation, and random walks.
Go to Profile