Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#2251

Loring W. Tu

#43364

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Loring W. Tu is a Taiwanese-American mathematician working in algebraic topology and geometry. Life He was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He is the grandson of Taiwanese pharmacologist Tu Tsung-ming. He is a younger brother of Charles Tu, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

#2252

Vilmos Totik

#51368

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Vilmos Totik is a Hungarian mathematician, working in classical analysis, harmonic analysis, orthogonal polynomials, approximation theory, potential theory. He is a professor of the University of Szeged. Since 1989 he is also a part-time professor at the University of South Florida .

#2253

Panos M. Pardalos

#42046

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Panos M. Pardalos is a Greek scientist and engineer, currently a Distinguished Professor and the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Florida.

#2254

Terry Lyons

#37948

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Terence John Lyons FLSW is a British mathematician, specialising in stochastic analysis. Lyons, previously the Wallis Professor of Mathematics, is a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford and a Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. He was the director of the Oxford-Man Institute from 2011 to 2015 and the president of the London Mathematical Society from 2013 to 2015. His mathematical contributions have been to probability, harmonic analysis, the numerical analysis of stochastic differential equations, and quantitative finance. In particular he developed what is now known as the theory of rough paths.

#2255

Nikolai Georgievich Makarov

#45746

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Nikolai Georgievich Makarov is a Russian mathematician. He is known for his work in complex analysis and its applications to dynamical systems, probability theory and mathematical physics. He is currently the Richard Merkin Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Caltech, where he has been teaching since 1991.

#2256

B. Roy Frieden

#24435

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Bernard Roy Frieden is an American mathematical physicist. Frieden obtained a Ph.D. in optics from The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. His doctoral thesis advisor was Robert E. Hopkins. Frieden is now an emeritus professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona.

#2257

Ross Prentice

#40021

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ross L. Prentice is a Canadian statistician known particularly for his contributions to survival analysis and statistical methods for epidemiology. He has worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 1974 and is also a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

#2258

Richard A. Parker

Richard A. Parker

#41729

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Richard A. Parker is a mathematician and freelance computer programmer in Cambridge, England. He invented many of the algorithms for computing the modular character tables of finite simple groups. He discovered the relation between Niemeier lattices and deep holes of the Leech lattice, and constructed Parker's Moufang loop of order 213 .

#2259

Lee Albert Rubel

#43986

Overall Influence

1928 - 1995 (67 years)

Lee Albert Rubel was a mathematician known for his contributions to analog computing. Career Originally from New York, he held a Doctorate of Mathematics degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1954.

#2260

Mitio Nagumo

#31673

Overall Influence

1905 - 1995 (90 years)

Mitio Nagumo was a Japanese mathematician, who specialized in the theory of differential equations. He gave the first necessary and sufficient condition for positive invariance of closed sets under the flow induced by ordinary differential equations .

#2261

Toshiki Mabuchi

#49285

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Toshiki Mabuchi is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in complex differential geometry and algebraic geometry. In 2006 in Madrid he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Mabuchi is known for introducing the Mabuchi functional.

#2262

James Robins

#18893

Overall Influence

James M. Robins is an epidemiologist and biostatistician best known for advancing methods for drawing causal inferences from complex observational studies and randomized trials, particularly those in which the treatment varies with time. He is the 2013 recipient of the Nathan Mantel Award for lifetime achievement in statistics and epidemiology, and a recipient of the 2022 Rousseeuw Prize in Statistics, jointly with Miguel Hernán, Eric Tchetgen-Tchetgen, Andrea Rotnitzky and Thomas Richardson.

#2263

Frederick Gehring

Frederick Gehring

#36986

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Frederick William Gehring was an American mathematician who worked in the area of complex analysis . Personal life Both of Fred Gehring's parents graduated from the University of Michigan. His father, Carl Ernst Gehring, was a journalist who worked for the Ann Arbor News and a music critic. His mother, Hester Reed Gehring, was a foreign language examiner for students who needed to prove competency as a requirement for their graduate degree. She was also the daughter of John Oren Reed, a physics professor and Dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Mic...

#2264

Qaiser Mushtaq

#23986

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Qaiser Mushtaq , , is a Pakistani mathematician and academic who has made numerous contributions in the field of Group theory and Semigroup. He has been vice-chancellor of The Islamia University Bahawalpur from December 2014 to December 2018. Mushtaq is one of the leading mathematicians and educationists in Pakistan. Through his research and writings, he has exercised a profound influence on mathematics in Pakistan. Mushtaq is an honorary full professor at the Mathematics Division of the Institute for Basic Research, Florida, US.

#2265

Jan Hemelrijk

#43917

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Jan Hemelrijk was a Dutch mathematician, Professor of Statistics at the University of Amsterdam, and authority in the field of stochastic processes. Biography Hemelrijk received his PhD in 1950 at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis entitled "Symmetry Keys and other applications of the theory of Neyman and Pearson" under supervision of David van Dantzig.

#2266

James D. Murray

#20406

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

James Dickson Murray FRSE FRS, is professor emeritus of applied mathematics at University of Washington and University of Oxford. He is best known for his authoritative and extensive work entitled Mathematical Biology.

#2267

Gopal Prasad

#33815

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Gopal Prasad is an Indian-American mathematician. His research interests span the fields of Lie groups, their discrete subgroups, algebraic groups, arithmetic groups, geometry of locally symmetric spaces, and representation theory of reductive p-adic groups.

#2268

Nancy K. Stanton

Nancy K. Stanton

#48725

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Nancy Kahn Stanton is a professor emeritus of mathematics at University of Notre Dame. She is known for her research in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. Career Stanton received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 under Isadore Singer. Stanton now works at University of Notre Dame.

#2269

Robert Ammann

#35313

Overall Influence

1946 - 1994 (48 years)

Robert Ammann was an amateur mathematician who made several significant and groundbreaking contributions to the theory of quasicrystals and aperiodic tilings. Ammann attended Brandeis University, but generally did not go to classes, and left after three years. He worked as a programmer for Honeywell. After twelve years, his position was eliminated as part of a routine cutback, and Ammann ended up working as a mail sorter for a post office.

#2270

Wing Hung Wong

#36693

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Wing Hung Wong is a Chinese-American statistician, computational biologist, and Stanford University professor. Biography Wong graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 with a bachelor's degree. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he studied under renowned statistician Grace Wahba, and was awarded a PhD in Statistics in 1980. After graduation, he taught at the University of Chicago, served as an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor. In 1994 he joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Statistics. Since 1997, he taught and led his lab at the University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard University.

#2271

Dieter Puppe

#47623

Overall Influence

1930 - 2005 (75 years)

Siegmund Dieter Puppe was a German mathematician who worked in algebraic topology, differential topology and homological algebra. He is known for the Puppe sequence in algebraic topology. Life Dieter Puppe was born the son of the lawyer Siegmund Puppe. The mathematician Volker Puppe and the legal scholar Ingeborg Puppe were his siblings. From 1948 he studied physics and mathematics in University of Göttingen and from 1951 at Heidelberg University. In 1954 he received his doctorate under Herbert Seifert . From 1951 he was an assistant in Heidelberg and after his habilitation in 1957, a lecturer.

#2272

Bruce Weir

#23039

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Bruce Spencer Weir is a New Zealand biostatistician and statistical geneticist. He is Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. He was previously the William Neal Reynolds Professor of statistics and genetics and director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at North Carolina State University. He is known within academia for his research in statistical and forensic genetics, and outside academia for testifying in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995.

#2273

Julia Wolf

#26431

Overall Influence

Julia Wolf is a British mathematician specialising in arithmetic combinatorics who was the 2016 winner of the Anne Bennett Prize of the London Mathematical Society. She is currently a professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.

#2274

Kim Plofker

#27179

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Kim Leslie Plofker is an American historian of mathematics, specializing in Indian mathematics. Education and career Born in Chennai, India, Plofker received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Haverford College. She received her Ph.D. in 1995 while studying with adviser David Pingree from Brown University, where she conducted research and later joined as a guest professor.

#2275

Charles Read

#50164

Overall Influence

1958 - 2015 (57 years)

Charles John Read was a British mathematician known for his work in functional analysis. In operator theory, he is best known for his work in the 1980s on the invariant subspace problem, where he constructed operators with only trivial invariant subspaces on particular Banach spaces. He won the 1985 Junior Berwick Prize for his work on the invariant subspace problem.

#2276

Alfred H. Clifford

#40041

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Alfred Hoblitzelle Clifford was an American mathematician born in St. Louis, Missouri who is known for Clifford theory and for his work on semigroups. He did his undergraduate studies at Yale and his PhD at Caltech, and worked at MIT, Johns Hopkins , and later, in 1955, Tulane University .

#2277

Earl Taft

#41681

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Earl Jay Taft was an American mathematician specializing in abstract algebra. He is the namesake of the Taft Hopf algebra which he introduced in a 1971 publication, and he was the founding editor of the journal Communications in Algebra. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Rutgers University.

#2278

Jean-Louis Loday

#41362

Overall Influence

1946 - 2012 (66 years)

Jean-Louis Loday was a French mathematician who worked on cyclic homology and who introduced Leibniz algebras and Zinbiel algebras. He occasionally used the pseudonym Guillaume William Zinbiel, formed by reversing the last name of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

#2279

Abdul-majid Wazwaza. Wazwaz

#52757

Overall Influence

#2280

Steven Zucker

#51580

Overall Influence

1949 - 2019 (70 years)

Steven Mark Zucker was an American mathematician who introduced the Zucker conjecture, proved in different ways by Eduard Looijenga and by Leslie Saper and Mark Stern . Zucker completed his Ph.D. in 1974 at Princeton University under the supervision of Spencer Bloch. His work with David A. Cox led to the creation of the Cox–Zucker machine, an algorithm for determining if a given set of sections provides a basis for the Mordell–Weil group is isomorphic to the projective line.

#2281

Jonathan Lubin

#47828

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Jonathan Darby Lubin is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Brown University. He received an A.B. from Columbia College in 1957 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963 under the direction of John Tate. He taught at Bowdoin College from 1962–1967 and at Brown University from 1967–2000.

#2282

Laurent Clozel

#43991

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Laurent Clozel is a French mathematician and professor at Paris-Saclay University. His mathematical work is in the area of automorphic forms, including the Langlands program. Career and distinctions Clozel was a student at the École normale supérieure and later obtained a Ph.D. under Michel Duflo and Paul Gérardin.

#2283

David Crighton

#28734

Overall Influence

1942 - 2000 (58 years)

David George Crighton, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. Life Crighton was born in Llandudno, North Wales, where his mother, Violet Grace Garrison, had been sent because of the bombing of London during the Second World War. He did not become interested in mathematics until his last two years at Watford Grammar School for Boys. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1961 and started lecturing at Woolwich Polytechnic in 1964, having completed only his bachelor's degree.

#2284

Jinchao Xu

#36478

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jinchao Xu is an American-Chinese mathematician. He is currently the Verne M. Willaman Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is known for his work on multigrid methods, domain decomposition methods, finite element methods, and more recently deep neural networks.

#2285

Lynn Harold Loomis

#46270

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Lynn Harold Loomis was an American mathematician working on analysis. Together with Hassler Whitney, he discovered the Loomis–Whitney inequality. Loomis received his PhD in 1942 from Harvard University under Salomon Bochner with thesis Some Studies on Simply-Connected Riemann Surfaces: I. The Problem of Imbedding II. Mapping on the Boundary for Two Classes of Surfaces. After completing his PhD, Loomis was a professor at Radcliffe College and from 1949 at Harvard. From 1956, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#2286

Fernando Q. Gouvêa

#34413

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Fernando Quadros Gouvêa is a Brazilian number theorist and historian of mathematics who won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America in 1995 for his exposition of Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. He also won the Beckenbach Book Prize of the MAA in 2007 for his book with William P. Berlinghoff, Math through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Others . He is the Carter Professor of Mathematics at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

#2287

Hervé Moulin

#20854

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Hervé Moulin is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. He is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division. He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.

#2288

David Gieseker

#50011

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

David Arends Gieseker is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Gieseker received his bachelor's degree in 1965 from Reed College and his master's degree from Harvard University in 1967. In 1970 he received his Ph.D. under Robin Hartshorne with thesis Contributions to the Theory of Positive Embeddings in Algebraic Geometry. Gieseker became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975 and became professor emeritus in 2022.

#2289

Alberto Tognoli

Alberto Tognoli

#52911

Overall Influence

1937 - 2008 (71 years)

Alberto Tognoli was an Italian mathematician, who worked on algebraic geometry. Tognoli received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Pisa. From 1970 he became full professor at the same university, and he also taught in Cosenza, Ferrara, Paris and Tours. He was also a professor of geometry at the University of Trento from 1986 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2005.

#2290

Bojan Mohar

#38106

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Bojan Mohar is a Slovenian and Canadian mathematician, working in graph theory. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Ljubljana and the holder of a Canada Research Chair in graph theory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

#2291

John Roe

#44972

Overall Influence

1959 - 2018 (59 years)

John Roe was a British mathematician. Roe grew up in the countryside in Shropshire. He went to Rugby School, was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, and received his D.Phil. in 1985 from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Michael Atiyah. As a post-doctoral student, he was at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and then a tutor at Jesus College, Oxford. From 1998 until shortly before his death he was a professor at the Pennsylvania State University.

#2292

José-Miguel Bernardo

#33828

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

José-Miguel Bernardo Herranz is a Spanish mathematician and statistician. He is a noted Bayesian and known for introducing the concept of reference priors. Bernardo was born in Valencia, Spain. He received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Valencia in 1974, and a second PhD in statistics from University College London in 1976. Since 1978, he has been a professor of statistics at the University of Valencia.

#2293

Louis de Branges de Bourcia

Louis de Branges de Bourcia

#18687

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Louis de Branges de Bourcia is a French-American mathematician. He is the Edward C. Elliott Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is best known for proving the long-standing Bieberbach conjecture in 1984, now called de Branges's theorem. He claims to have proved several important conjectures in mathematics, including the generalized Riemann hypothesis.

#2294

Leslie Greengard

#13245

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Leslie Frederick Greengard is an American mathematician, physicist and computer scientist. He is co-inventor with Vladimir Rokhlin Jr. of the fast multipole method in 1987, recognized as one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century.

#2295

Skip Garibaldi

#36971

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Skip Garibaldi is an American mathematician doing research on algebraic groups and especially exceptional groups. Biography Garibaldi dropped out of high school to attend Purdue University, where he earned B.S. degrees in mathematics and in computer science. He then obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 1998. His doctoral thesis was on triality and algebraic groups. After holding positions at ETH Zurich and the University of California, Los Angeles, he joined the faculty at Emory University in 2002, and was eventually promoted to Winship Distinguished Research Professor.

#2296

Joseph L. Taylor

#47456

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Joseph Lawrence Taylor was an American mathematician, specializing in Banach algebras and non-commutative harmonic analysis. Education and career Taylor received from Louisiana State University in 1963 his bachelor's degree and in 1964 his Ph.D. under Pasquale Porcelli with thesis The structure of convolution measure algebras. From 1964 to 1965 he was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University. He became in 1965 an assistant professor and in 1971 a full professor at the University of Utah. In 1974 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

#2297

Yutaka Nishiyama

#34748

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Yutaka Nishiyama is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the Osaka University of Economics, where he teaches mathematics and information. He is known as the "boomerang professor". He has written nine books about the mathematics in daily life. The most recent one, The mystery of five in nature, investigates, amongst other things, why many flowers have five petals.

#2298

John R. Steel

#28920

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

John Robert Steel is an American set theorist at University of California, Berkeley . He has made many contributions to the theory of inner models and determinacy. With Donald A. Martin, he proved projective determinacy, assuming the existence of sufficient large cardinals. He earned his Ph.D. in Logic & the Methodology of Science at Berkeley in 1977 under the joint supervision of John West Addison Jr. and Stephen G. Simpson.

#2299

Antonella Grassi

#42167

Overall Influence

Antonella Grassi is an Italian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and string theory. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Education Grassi received her Ph.D. from Duke University under the supervision of David R. Morrison. Her dissertation was entitled "Minimal Models of Elliptic Threefolds."

#2300

Lee Segel

#29485

Overall Influence

1932 - 2005 (73 years)

Lee Aaron Segel was an applied mathematician primarily at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is particularly known for his work in the spontaneous appearance of order in convection, slime molds and chemotaxis.

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