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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.

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#2301

Colin Adams

#26234

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Colin Conrad Adams is a mathematician primarily working in the areas of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and knot theory. His book, The Knot Book, has been praised for its accessible approach to advanced topics in knot theory. He is currently Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, where he has been since 1985. He writes "Mathematically Bent", a column of math for the Mathematical Intelligencer. His nephew is popular American singer Still Woozy.

#2302

Ray Kunze

#47933

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Ray Alden Kunze was an American mathematician who chaired the mathematics departments at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Georgia. His mathematical research concerned the representation theory of groups and noncommutative harmonic analysis.

#2303

Martin I. Reiman

#35716

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Martin I. Reiman is an American engineer and Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University. Biography Reiman received his A.B. from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He began his career at Bell Labs in 1977 after graduating from Stanford. He was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs from 1998 until 2015. His research has focused on teletraffic theory and stochastic networks.

#2304

Per Enflo

#48168

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Per H. Enflo is a Swedish mathematician working primarily in functional analysis, a field in which he solved problems that had been considered fundamental. Three of these problems had been open for more than forty years:The basis problem and the approximation problem and laterthe invariant subspace problem for Banach spaces.In solving these problems, Enflo developed new techniques which were then used by other researchers in functional analysis and operator theory for years. Some of Enflo's research has been important also in other mathematical fields, such as number theory, and in computer s...

#2305

Seymour Ginsburg

#6896

Overall Influence

1928 - 2004 (76 years)

Seymour Ginsburg was an American pioneer of automata theory, formal language theory, and database theory, in particular; and computer science, in general. His work was influential in distinguishing theoretical Computer Science from the disciplines of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.

#2306

Brian Wilson

#6949

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Brian Wilson is a British systems scientist and honorary professor at Cardiff University, known for his development of soft systems methodology and enterprise modelling. Biography After graduating from University of Nottingham with a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, nuclear power engineering and control system design, Wilson joined the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority where he was concerned with the control and spatial stability of gas-cooled reactors and power plants. In 1966, he left the world of nuclear power engineering and control system design, and became a founder memb...

#2307

Harold Rosenberg

#43546

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Harold William Rosenberg is an American mathematician who works on differential geometry. Rosenberg has worked at Columbia University, at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and at the University of Paris. He currently works at the IMPA, Brazil. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963 under the supervision of Stephen P. L. Diliberto.

#2308

Jim Propp

#36799

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

James Gary Propp is a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Education and career In high school, Propp was one of the national winners of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad , and an alumnus of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics. Propp obtained his AB in mathematics in 1982 at Harvard. After advanced study at Cambridge, he obtained his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He has held professorships at seven universities, including Harvard, MIT, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

#2309

Theodore James Courant

#44910

Overall Influence

Theodore James "Ted" Courant is an American mathematician who has conducted research in the fields of differential geometry and classical mechanics. In particular, he made seminal contributions to the study of Dirac manifolds, which generalize both symplectic manifolds and Poisson manifolds, and are related to the Dirac theory of constraints in physics. Some mathematical objects in this field have since been named after him, including the Courant bracket and Courant algebroid.

#2310

John R. Stallings

John R. Stallings

#49753

Overall Influence

1935 - 2008 (73 years)

John Robert Stallings Jr. was a mathematician known for his seminal contributions to geometric group theory and 3-manifold topology. Stallings was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley where he had been a faculty member since 1967. He published over 50 papers, predominantly in the areas of geometric group theory and the topology of 3-manifolds. Stallings' most important contributions include a proof, in a 1960 paper, of the Poincaré Conjecture in dimensions greater than six and a proof, in a 1971 paper, of the Stallings theorem about...

#2311

Tadao Oda

#53375

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

is a Japanese mathematician working in the field of algebraic geometry, especially toric varieties. The field of toric varieties was developed by Demazure, Mumford, Miyake, Oda and others in the 1970s. He is also known for a book on toric varieties: Convex Bodies and Algebraic Geometry: An Introduction to the Theory of Toric Varieties.

#2312

Richard Samworth

Richard Samworth

#37191

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Richard John Samworth is the Professor of Statistical Science and the Director of the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and a Teaching Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. His main research interests are in nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics. Particular topics include shape-constrained density estimation and other nonparametric function estimation problems, nonparametric classification, clustering and regression, the bootstrap and high-dimensional variable selection problems.

#2313

Werner Hildenbrand

Werner Hildenbrand

#17867

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Werner Hildenbrand is a German economist and mathematician. He was educated at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his Diplom in mathematics, applied mathematics and physics in 1961. He continued his education at the University of Heidelberg and received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1964 and his habilitation in economics and mathematics in 1968.

#2314

Phyllis Fox

#18066

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Phyllis Ann Fox was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Early life and education Fox was born on March 13, 1923, and raised in Colorado. She did her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, earning a B.A. in mathematics in 1944.

#2315

Sundaram Thangavelu

#37261

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

S. Thangavelu is an Indian mathematician who specialised in harmonic analysis. He is a professor in the Department of Mathematics of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. After obtaining an MSc degree from Madras University in 1980, Thangavelu moved to Princeton University and obtained the PhD degree in 1987 from there under the supervision of Elias Stein. He returned to India and worked at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research until 1993 when he moved to Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore. In 2005, he shifted to Indian Institute of Science and continues there as Professor in the D...

#2316

Jeong Han Kim

#28763

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jeong Han Kim is a South Korean mathematician. He studied physics and mathematical physics at Yonsei University, and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Rutgers University. He was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs and at Microsoft Research, and was Underwood Chair Professor of Mathematics at Yonsei University. He is currently a Professor of the School of Computational Sciences at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

#2317

Horst Sachs

#30173

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Horst Sachs was a German mathematician, an expert in graph theory, a recipient of the Euler Medal . He earned the degree of Doctor of Science from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 1958. Following his retirement in 1992, he was professor emeritus at the Institute of Mathematics of the Technische Universität Ilmenau.

#2318

Marko Petkovšek

#21559

Overall Influence

1955 - 2023 (68 years)

Marko Petkovšek was a Slovenian mathematician working mainly in symbolic computation. He was a professor of discrete and computational mathematics at the University of Ljubljana. He is best known for Petkovšek's algorithm, and for the book that he coauthored with Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger, A = B.

#2319

Paul Schupp

#38332

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Paul Eugene Schupp was a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is known for his contributions to geometric group theory, computational complexity and the theory of computability.

#2320

Bill Parry

#41296

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

William Parry FRS was an English mathematician who worked in dynamical systems, and, in particular, ergodic theory. In particular, he studied subshifts of finite type nilflows. Life Bill Parry was born in Coventry in the Warwickshire , England, the sixth of seven children. Although he failed the eleven-plus exam, Parry was persuaded by his mathematics teacher at Coventry Junior Technical School, specialising in metalwork and woodwork, to aim for university. To get appropriate tuition, he had to travel to Birmingham Technical College. He won a place at University College London. Following an ...

#2321

Zhiliang Ying

#53139

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Zhiliang Ying is a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics, Columbia University. He served as co-chair of the department. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1987, with Tze Leung Lai as his doctoral advisor. He was the Director of the Institute of Statistics at Rutgers University from 1997 to 2001. His wide research interests cover Survival Analysis, Sequential Analysis, Longitudinal Data Analysis, Stochastic Processes, Semiparametric Inference, Biostatistics and Educational Statistics. He is a co-editor of Statistica Sinica and has been Associate Editor of JASA,...

#2322

Burton Wendroff

#44879

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Burton Wendroff is an American applied mathematician known for his contributions to the development of numerical methods for the solution of hyperbolic partial differential equations. The Lax–Wendroff method for the solution of hyperbolic PDE is named for Wendroff .

#2323

Stephen Altschul

#9993

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Frank Altschul is an American mathematician who has designed algorithms that are used in the field of bioinformatics . Altschul is the co-author of the BLAST algorithm used for sequence analysis of proteins and nucleotides.

#2324

Aron Simis

#37607

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Aron Simis is a mathematician born in Recife, Brazil in 1942. He is a full professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, and Class A research scholarship recipient from the Brazilian Research Council. He earned his PhD from Queen's University, Canada.

#2325

Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs

#42276

Overall Influence

1915 - 1997 (82 years)

Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs was a British mathematician specializing in complex analysis. His main area of research was Nevanlinna theory. Fuchs received his Ph.D. in 1941 from the University of Cambridge, under the direction of Albert Ingham. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1950 and spent the rest of his career there.

#2326

Yves André

#51201

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Yves André is a French mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry. Biography André received his doctorate in 1984 from Pierre and Marie Curie University with thesis advisor Daniel Bertrand and thesis Structure de Hodge, équations différentielles p-adiques, et indépendance algébrique de périodes d'intégrales abéliennes. He became at CNRS in 1985 a Researcher, in 2000 a Research Director 2nd Class, and in 2009 a Research Director 1st Class .

#2327

Nikolay Nekhoroshev

#47743

Overall Influence

1946 - 2008 (62 years)

Nikolai Nikolaevich Nekhoroshev was a prominent Soviet Russian mathematician specializing in classical mechanics and dynamical systems. His research concerned Hamiltonian mechanics, perturbation theory, celestial mechanics, integrable systems, dynamical systems, the quasiclassical approximation, and singularity theory. He proved, in particular, a stability result in KAM-theory stating that, under certain conditions, solutions of nearly integrable systems stay close to invariant tori for exponentially long times .

#2328

Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu

#49310

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu is a Taiwanese mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. Her research interests include algebraic geometry and symplectic geometry. Education Liu graduated from National Taiwan University in 1996, and earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from Harvard University under the supervision of Shing-Tung Yau.

#2329

Uffe Haagerup

#31089

Overall Influence

1949 - 2015 (66 years)

Uffe Valentin Haagerup was a mathematician from Denmark. Biography Uffe Haagerup was born in Kolding, but grew up on the island of Funen, in the small town of Fåborg. The field of mathematics had his interest from early on, encouraged and inspired by his older brother. In fourth grade Uffe was doing trigonometric and logarithmic calculations. He graduated as a student from Svendborg Gymnasium in 1968, whereupon he relocated to Copenhagen and immediately began his studies of mathematics and physics at the University of Copenhagen, again inspired by his older brother who also studied the same subjects at the same university.

#2330

Kari Karhunen

#32377

Overall Influence

1915 - 1992 (77 years)

Kari Onni Uolevi Karhunen was a Finnish probabilist and a mathematical statistician. He is best known for the Karhunen–Loève theorem and Karhunen–Loève transform. Education and career Karhunen received his master's degree in 1938 and his doctorate in 1950 from the University of Helsinki. The topic of his thesis was Über lineare Methoden in der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, in English On linear methods in probability and statistics. The advisor of his thesis was the mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna.

#2331

Ross Ihaka

#4828

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

George Ross Ihaka is a New Zealand statistician who was an associate professor of statistics at the University of Auckland until his retirement in 2017. Alongside Robert Gentleman, he is one of the creators of the R programming language. In 2008, Ihaka received the Pickering Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, for his work on R.

#2332

Evgeny Moiseev

#28101

Overall Influence

1948 - 2022 (74 years)

Evgeny Moiseev was a Russian mathematician, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dean of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University , Head of the Department of Functional Analysis and its Applications at MSU CMC, Professor, Dr.Sc.

#2333

Roger Mead

#44741

Overall Influence

1938 - 2015 (77 years)

Roger Mead was an English statistician and Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Reading. He is known for his paper with John Nelder on the widely-used Nelder–Mead method and for his work on statistical methods for agriculture and the design of experiments. He was made an Honorary Life Member of the International Biometric Society in 2014.

#2334

Gilbert Laporte

#29408

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gilbert Laporte is a full professor of operations research at HEC Montréal. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management. Laporte has been awarded the Order of Canada and the Innis-Gérin Medal.

#2335

Sucharit Sarkar

#37465

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Sucharit Sarkar is an Indian topologist and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles who works in low-dimensional topology. Education and career Sarkar attended secondary school at South Point High School in his hometown, Calcutta, India. In the International Mathematical Olympiads in 2001 and 2002, he received gold and silver medals respectively. He completed his Bachelor of Mathematics degree from the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore in 2005.

#2336

Bernard Galler

#8619

Overall Influence

1928 - 2006 (78 years)

Bernard A. Galler was an American mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Michigan who was involved in the development of large-scale operating systems and computer languages including the MAD programming language and the Michigan Terminal System operating system.

#2337

William S. Hatcher

#28089

Overall Influence

1935 - 2005 (70 years)

William S. Hatcher was a mathematician, philosopher, educator and a member of the Baháʼí Faith. He held a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. A specialist in the philosophical alloying of science and religion, for over thirty years he held university positions in North America, Europe, and Russia.

#2338

Petr Hájek

#12018

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Petr Hájek was a Czech scientist in the area of mathematical logic and a professor of mathematics. Born in Prague, he worked at the Institute of Computer Science at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and as a lecturer at the faculty of mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague and at the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague.

#2339

Jean Coulomb

#15658

Overall Influence

1904 - 1999 (95 years)

Jean Coulomb was a French geophysicist and mathematician, and one of the early members of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians. Biography From April 1935 to 1937, he was a member of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians.

#2340

Svetozar Kurepa

#38900

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Svetozar Kurepa was a Yugoslavian and Croatian mathematician whose main contributions were in the areas of functional analysis and operator theory. Kurepa published over 70 articles, 16 books, and numerous scientific reviews. He taught at the University of Zagreb, where he also served as the Dean of the College of Sciences. He taught in North America at the University of Maryland, at Georgetown University, and at the University of Waterloo. In Europe he worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and the University of Milan.

#2341

Thomas Willwacher

#48910

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Thomas Hans Willwacher is a German mathematician and mathematical physicist working as a Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, ETH Zurich. Biography Willwacher completed his PhD at ETH Zurich in 2009 with a thesis on "Cyclic Formality", under the supervision of Giovanni Felder, Alberto Cattaneo, and Anton Alekseev. He was later a Junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

#2342

Uriel Frisch

#20955

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Uriel Frisch is a French mathematical physicist known for his work on fluid dynamics and turbulence. Biography From 1959 to 1963 Frisch was a student at the École Normale Supérieure. Early in his graduate studies, he became interested in turbulence, under the mentorship of Robert Kraichnan, a former assistant to Albert Einstein. Frisch earned a Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Paris, and since then he has worked at the French National Centre for Scientific Research . He retired in 2006, and became a director of research emeritus at CNRS.

#2343

Edward Belbruno

Edward Belbruno

#21011

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Edward Belbruno is an artist, mathematician and scientist whose interests are in celestial mechanics, dynamical systems, dynamical astronomy, and aerospace engineering. His artistic media is paintings, and his artwork in the NASA collection, Charles Betlach II collection, and exhibited in Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, Minneapolis, Shanghai, WeiHai, and Princeton.

#2344

Yael Dowker

#47044

Overall Influence

1919 - 2016 (97 years)

Yael Naim Dowker was an Israeli-born english mathematician, prominent especially due to her work in the fields of measure theory, ergodic theory and topological dynamics. Biography Yael Naim was born in Tel Aviv. She left for the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1941, as a graduate student, she met Clifford Hugh Dowker, a Canadian topologist working as an instructor there. The couple married in 1944. From 1943 to 1946 they worked together at the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clifford also worked as a civilian advi...

#2345

Jaap Murre

#51170

Overall Influence

1929 - 2023 (94 years)

Jacob Pieter "Jaap" Murre was a Dutch mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. He was a professor of mathematics at Leiden University. Career Murre was born on 18 September 1929 in Baarland. At his small primary school one of his classmates and friends was later botanist . Murre studied mathematics at Leiden University and in 1957 he obtained his doctorate under Hendrik Kloosterman with a thesis titled: "Over multipliciteiten van maximaal samenhangende bossen". In 1959 he was appointed associate professor at Leiden University. In 1961 he became professor of mathematics at the same institute, with a teaching assignment in algebraic geometry.

#2346

Barbara Keyfitz

Barbara Keyfitz

#34456

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Barbara Lee Keyfitz is a Canadian-American mathematician, the Dr. Charles Saltzer Professor of Mathematics at Ohio State University. In her research, she studies nonlinear partial differential equations and associated conservation laws.

#2347

Jean Kuntzmann

#34440

Overall Influence

1912 - 1992 (80 years)

Jean Kuntzmann was a French mathematician, known for his works in applied mathematics and computer science, pushing and developing both fields at a very early time. Kuntzmann earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Paris under supervision of Georges Valiron .

#2348

Jean Lannes

#48115

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jean E. Lannes is a French mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and homotopy theory. Lannes completed his secondary studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and graduated in 1966 from the École Normale Supérieure. He received his doctorate in 1975 from the University of Paris-Saclay . Afterwards he was a professor there and at the Paris Diderot University . In 2009 he became a professor at the École polytechnique and Directeur des recherches at the Centre de mathématiques Laurent-Schwartz ; he is now professor emeritus. He was a visiting scholar at several academic institutio...

#2349

Eugène Ehrhart

#40261

Overall Influence

1906 - 2000 (94 years)

Eugène Ehrhart was a French mathematician who introduced Ehrhart polynomials in the 1960s. Ehrhart received his high school diploma at the age of 22. He was a mathematics teacher in several high schools, and did mathematics research on his own time. He started publishing in mathematics in his 40s, and finished his PhD thesis at the age of 60.

#2350

David A. Klarner

#37434

Overall Influence

1940 - 1999 (59 years)

David Anthony Klarner was an American mathematician, author, and educator. He is known for his work in combinatorial enumeration, polyominoes, and box-packing. Klarner was a friend and correspondent of mathematics popularizer Martin Gardner and frequently made contributions to Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. He edited a book honoring Gardner on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Gardner in turn dedicated his twelfth collection of mathematical games columns to Klarner.

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