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,
#2401
Christopher Hooley
#44067
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Christopher Hooley was a British mathematician, professor of mathematics at Cardiff University. He did his PhD under the supervision of Albert Ingham. He won the Adams Prize of Cambridge University in 1973. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983. He was also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
Go to Profile#2402
Lou van den Dries
#26778
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Laurentius Petrus Dignus "Lou" van den Dries is a Dutch mathematician working in model theory. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Education Van den Dries began his undergraduate studies in 1969 at Utrecht University, and in 1978 completed his PhD there under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen with a dissertation entitled Model Theory of Fields.
Go to Profile#2403
Barbara Kaltenbacher
#47032
Overall Influence
Barbara Kaltenbacher is an Austrian mathematician whose research concerns inverse problems, regularization, and PDE-constrained optimization, with applications including the mathematical modeling of piezoelectricity and nonlinear acoustics. She is a Professor of Applied Analysis at the University of Klagenfurt, a member of the Executive Committee of the European Mathematical Society and editor in chief of the Journal of the European Mathematical Society.. Barbara Kaltenbacher has published more than 130 scientific papers and is author of four monographs.
Go to Profile#2404
Frits Beukers
#46515
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Frits Beukers is a Dutch mathematician, who works on number theory and hypergeometric functions. In 1979 Beukers received his PhD at Leiden University under the direction of Robert Tijdeman with thesis The generalized Ramanujan–Nagell Equation, published in Acta Arithmetica, vol. 38, 1980/1981. From 1979 to 1980 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. He became a professor in Leiden and in the 2000s at Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#2405
Vance Faber
#46032
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Vance Faber is a mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics, applied linear algebra and image processing. Faber received his Ph.D. in 1971 from Washington University in St. Louis. His advisor was Franklin Tepper Haimo.
Go to Profile#2406
Steve Vickers
#18300
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Steve Vickers is a British mathematician and computer scientist. In the early 1980s, he wrote ROM firmware and manuals for three home computers, the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, and Jupiter Ace. The latter was produced by Jupiter Cantab, a short-lived company Vickers formed together with Richard Altwasser, after the two had left Sinclair Research. Since the late 1980s, Vickers has been an academic in the field of geometric logic, writing over 30 papers in scholarly journals on mathematical aspects of computer science. His book Topology via Logic has been influential over a range of fields . In October 2018, he retired as senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham.
Go to Profile#2407
Rouben V. Ambartzumian
#46424
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Rouben V. Ambartzumian is an Armenian mathematician and Academician of National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He works in Stochastic Geometry and Integral Geometry where he created a new branch, combinatorial integral geometry. The subject of combinatorial integral geometry received support from mathematicians K. Krickeberg and D. G. Kendall at the 1976 Sevan Symposium which was sponsored by Royal Society of London and The London Mathematical Society. In the framework of the later theory he solved a number of classical problems in particular the solution to the Buffon Sylvester problem as well as the Hilbert's fourth problem in 1976.
Go to Profile#2408
Patrick X. Gallagher
#26176
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Patrick Ximenes Gallagher was an American mathematician who pioneered large sieve theory and invented the larger sieve. Biography Early life Patrick Ximenes Gallagher was born on January 2, 1935, in Elizabeth, New Jersey to school superintendent Ralph P. Gallagher and elementary school teacher Natalie Forcheimer Gallagher. Gallagher graduated from Bound Brook High School and received a scholarship from the Harvard Club of New Jersey to attend Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2409
Heinz-Otto Kreiss
#41761
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Heinz-Otto Kreiss was a German mathematician in the fields of numerical analysis, applied mathematics, and what was the new area of computing in the early 1960s. Born in Hamburg, Germany, he earned his Ph.D. at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan in 1959. Over the course of his long career, Kreiss wrote a number of books in addition to the purely academic journal articles he authored across several disciplines. He was professor at Uppsala University, California Institute of Technology and University of California, Los Angeles . He was also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. At the time of his death, Kreiss was a Swedish citizen, living in Stockholm.
Go to Profile#2410
Carolyn Mahoney
#46583
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Carolyn Ray Boone Mahoney is an American mathematician who served as president of Lincoln University of Missouri. Her research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, and matroids. Early life and education Carolyn Mahoney was born the sixth of thirteen children in 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee to Stephen and Myrtle Boone. Her grandmother cared for the children while her mother worked. Mahoney attended Catholic schools, where she was encouraged in her interest in mathematics by the nuns. As a teenager, Mahoney's parents separated due to her father's drinking and gambling and the family was...
Go to Profile#2411
David Arnold
#48638
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David M. Arnold was an American mathematician, formerly the Ralph and Jean Storm Professor of Mathematics at Baylor University, and also a published author of 10 books, currently held in 1,886 libraries.
Go to Profile#2412
Wally Smith
#34481
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Walter Laws Smith was a British-born American mathematician, known for his contributions to applied probability theory. Biography Smith was born in London on November 12, 1926. Smith received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University, having gained First Class in the Mathematical Tripos Part 1 and Part 2. He then received an M.A. and Ph.D from Cambridge. His dissertation was entitled Stochastic Sequences of Events advised by Henry Daniels and D. R. Cox, with whom he published the book Queues and also published with in his early years. He became a professor of statistics at The Univ...
Go to Profile#2413
Tatiana Toro
#40575
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Tatiana Toro is a Colombian-American mathematician at the University of Washington. Her research is "at the interface of geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis and partial differential equations". Toro was appointed director of the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute for 2022–2027.
Go to Profile#2414
David G. Cantor
#49911
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
David Geoffrey Cantor was an American mathematician, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. The Cantor–Zassenhaus algorithm for factoring polynomials is named after him; he and Hans Zassenhaus published it in 1981.
Go to Profile#2415
Shoshana Kamin
#17622
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Shoshana Kamin , born Susanna L'vovna Kamenomostskaya , is a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician, working on the theory of parabolic partial differential equations and related mathematical physics problems.
Go to Profile#2416
W. Wesley Peterson
#10572
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
William Wesley Peterson was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He was best known for designing the cyclic redundancy check , for which research he was awarded the Japan Prize in 1999.
Go to Profile#2417
Thomas S. Ferguson
#28528
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Thomas Shelburne Ferguson is an American mathematician and statistician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education and career Ferguson was born in Oakland, California and was raised nearby in Alameda, California. He majored in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1956. His dissertation had two separately-titled parts, On Existence of Linear Regression in Linear Structural Relations and A Method of Generating Best Asymptotically Normal Estimates with Application to the Esti...
Go to Profile#2418
Andrzej Alexiewicz
#55348
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
Andrzej Alexiewicz was a Polish mathematician, a disciple of the Lwow School of Mathematics. Alexiewicz was an expert at functional analysis and continued and edited the work of Stefan Banach. See also Alexiewicz norm
Go to Profile#2419
Brooke Shipley
#42855
Overall Influence
Brooke Elizabeth Shipley is an American mathematician. She works as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was head of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science from 2014 to 2022. Her research concerns homotopy theory and homological algebra.
Go to Profile#2420
Jacques Neveu
#39764
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Jacques Jean-Pierre Neveu was a Belgian mathematician, specializing in probability theory. He is one of the founders of the French school of probability and statistics. Education and career Jacques Neveu received in 1955 from the Sorbonne his doctorate in mathematics under Robert Fortet with dissertation Étude des semi-groupes de Markov.
Go to Profile#2421
Jean Dhombres
#48217
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean Guy Dhombres is a French mathematician, historian of mathematics and the mathematical sciences, and biographer of Lazare Carnot. Biography Dhombres graduated from the École Polytechnique in the class of 1962. He received in 1970 his doctorate in mathematics from Pierre and Marie Curie University , which is now part of Sorbonne University. He was from 1964 to 1971 a maître de conférences at the École nationale supérieure d'ingénieurs de constructions aéronautiques and from 1965 to 1972 an attaché de recherche en mathématiques at CNRS. At the University of Nantes he was from 1972 to 1978 ...
Go to Profile#2422
Eilon Solan
#38811
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Eilon Solan is an Israeli mathematician and professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on game theory, stochastic processes, and measure theory. Biography Solan obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989, and an M.Sc. in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He completed his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998 under the supervision of Abraham Neyman, with a dissertation on stochastic games.
Go to Profile#2423
Stephen Bigelow
#45097
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Stephen John Bigelow is an Australian mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is known for his proof that braid groups are linear, concurrently with and independently of another proof by Daan Krammer.
Go to Profile#2424
Steve Crocker
#1501
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen D. Crocker is an Internet pioneer. In 1969, he created the ARPA "Networking Working Group" and the Request for Comments series. He served as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2011 through 2017.
Go to Profile#2425
Walter Borho
#54867
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Walter Borho is a German mathematician, who works on algebra and number theory. Borho received his PhD in 1973 from the University of Hamburg under the direction of Ernst Witt with thesis Wesentliche ganze Erweiterungen kommutativer Ringe. He is a professor at the University of Wuppertal.
Go to Profile#2426
Franco Brezzi
#41906
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Franco Brezzi is an Italian mathematician. Education Brezzi graduated in 1967 at the Università di Pavia under the supervision of Enrico Magenes. He was full professor of Mathematical Analysis at the Politecnico di Torino from 1976 to 1977 and then from 1977 to 2006 at the Università di Pavia. He was a professor of Numerical Analysis at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori in Pavia from 2006 until his retirement in 2015. Presently he is Emeritus Professor at IUSS and Associate Researcher at IUSS of Italian CNR
Go to Profile#2427
Gerard Laman
#44977
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Gerard Laman was a Dutch mathematician who worked on graph theory. Early life He completed high school studies at the Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden in 1942. His study of Mathematics at Leiden University was delayed by a period in hiding to evade enforced labor during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He completed a degree in Mathematics with a minor in Mechanics in 1952. From 1949 onwards, he was a scientific assistant to J. Haantjes.
Go to Profile#2428
Claude Mutafian
#31834
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Armen Z. Moutafian is a French mathematician and a historian who specializes in Armenian history. He is a Foreign Member of Armenian Academy of Sciences. He is the son of Zareh Mutafian. Biography Born in 1942 in Clamart, France, Claude Mutafian is an associate professor of mathematics and senior lecturer from the Paris 13 University in Villetaneuse. Following the publication of several books on algebra, Mutafian devoted himself to Armenian history since 1980, particularly to the relations of Armenia with its various neighbors over time. Ph.D. in history from Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne Univer...
Go to Profile#2429
Joseph O'Rourke
#24040
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is computational geometry.
Go to Profile#2430
Heather Harrington
#39860
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Heather A. Harrington is an applied mathematician interested in applied algebra and geometry, dynamical systems, chemical reaction network theory, topological data analysis, and systems biology. Since 2020, she is professor of mathematics and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, where she heads the Algebraic Systems Biology group. In 2023, she became a director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, where she is also leading the interinstitutional Center for Systems Biology Dresden together with partners fr...
Go to Profile#2431
Chelsea Walton
#46241
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Chelsea Walton is a mathematician whose research interests include noncommutative algebra, noncommutative algebraic geometry, symmetry in quantum mechanics, Hopf algebras, and quantum groups. She is an associate professor at Rice University and a Sloan Research Fellow.
Go to Profile#2432
Norman Routledge
#37410
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Norman Arthur Routledge was a British mathematician and schoolteacher. He was a personal friend of fellow mathematician Alan Turing . Life and career Norman Routledge was born near Alexandra Park, north London, England. He was about to begin secondary education at Glendale County School, Wood Green, in 1939, when the outbreak of World War II intervened. He was evacuated with his mother, going to live in Letchworth with an aunt, and attending Letchworth Grammar School, where he was taught mathematics by George Braithwaite.
Go to Profile#2433
Jens Marklof
#25361
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Jens Marklof FRS is a German mathematician working in the areas of quantum chaos, dynamical systems, equidistribution, modular forms and number theory. He will be president of the London Mathematical Society in the period 2023-2024.
Go to Profile#2434
Rifkat Bogdanov
#38614
Overall Influence
1950 - 2013 (63 years)
Rifkat Ibragimovich Bogdanov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for contributions to nonlinear dynamical systems, bifurcation theory, and differential geometry. He was an ethnic Tatar. In his work on bifurcations of limit cycles and versal deformations of singular points of vector fields , he described a bifurcation of co-dimension 2, which has become known in the literature as the Bogdanov–Takens bifurcation.
Go to Profile#2435
Yuri Kondratiev
#43880
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Yuri Kondratiev was a Ukrainian mathematician and a professor at the Bielefeld University in Germany. Kondratiev died on 5 September 2023, at the age of 69.His research interests included functional analysis, mathematical physics and stochastic calculus.Kondratiev was a member of the Kyiv school of functional analysis founded by M. Krein and led, for many years, by Y. Berezansky.His interests in mathematical physics were inspired by cooperation with the Moscow seminar in statistical Physics . Yuri's collaboration with A. Skorokhod has influenced most of his subsequent papers on stochastics.
Go to Profile#2436
Gabriel Carroll
#24063
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Gabriel Drew Carroll is a Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto. He was born to tech industry worker parents in Oakland. He graduated from Harvard University with B.A. in mathematics and linguistics in 2005 and received his doctorate in economics from MIT in 2012. He was recognized as a child prodigy and received numerous awards in mathematics while a student.
Go to Profile#2437
Mark Embree
#42597
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Mark Embree is professor of computational and applied mathematics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Until 2013, he was a professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Go to Profile#2438
Ebadollah S. Mahmoodian
#29504
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ebadollah S. Mahmoodian is a retired professor of mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Department of Sharif University of Technology. He received his Bachelor of Science in 1965 at University of Tehran and his master's degree in 1968 at Shiraz University. He got a Master's and a PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 and 1975, respectively. His thesis advisor were Albert Nijenhuis and Herbert Wilf. He was a professor of mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Department of Sharif University of Technology since 1983. He co-edited Combinatorics Advances.
Go to Profile#2439
Rafe Mazzeo
#53263
Overall Influence
Rafe Roys Mazzeo is an American mathematician working in differential geometry, microlocal analysis, and partial differential equations. He is currently a professor of mathematics. He served as the department chair at Stanford University from 2007 to 2010 and 2019–2022.
Go to Profile#2440
Tom Snijders
#13414
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Tom A. B. Snijders is professor of Statistics in the Social Sciences at Nuffield College, Oxford, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford . He is also professor of Methodology at the University of Groningen, a position he has held for more than twenty years.
Go to Profile#2441
Arnold Ross
#35890
Overall Influence
1906 - 2002 (96 years)
Arnold Ephraim Ross was a mathematician and educator who founded the Ross Mathematics Program, a number theory summer program for gifted high school students. He was born in Chicago, but spent his youth in Odesa, Ukraine, where he studied with Samuil Shatunovsky. Ross returned to Chicago and enrolled in University of Chicago graduate coursework under E. H. Moore, despite his lack of formal academic training. He received his Ph.D. and married his wife, Bee, in 1931.
Go to Profile#2442
Friedrich Götze
#49332
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Friedrich Götze is a German mathematician, specializing in probability theory, mathematical statistics, and number theory. Education and career Götze studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen and the University of Bonn by means of a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. In 1978 he received his doctorate from the University of Cologne with thesis Asymptotic Expansions in the Central Limit Theorem in Banach Spaces under the supervision of Johann Pfanzagl. At the University of Cologne, Götze was an assistant, interrupted by a year as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#2443
Alexander Kirillov Jr.
#53789
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Kirillov Jr. is a Russian-born American mathematician, working in the area of representation theory and Lie groups. He is a son of Russian mathematician Alexandre Kirillov. Biography Kirillov received his master's degree from Moscow State University in 1989 and Ph.D from Yale University in 1995. He is currently a professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Go to Profile#2444
Tamás Hausel
#46283
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Tamás Hausel is a Hungarian mathematician working in the areas of combinatorial, differential and algebraic geometry and topology. More specifically the global analysis, geometry, topology and arithmetic of hyperkähler manifolds, Yang–Mills instantons, non-Abelian Hodge theory, Geometric Langlands program, and representation theory of quiverss and Kac–Moody algebras.
Go to Profile#2445
Wolfgang Franz
#44889
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Wolfgang Franz was a German mathematician who specialised in topology particularly in 3-manifolds, which he generalized to higher dimensions. He is known for the Reidemeister–Franz torsion. He also made important contributions to the theory of lens spaces.
Go to Profile#2446
Julia Gordon
#40165
Overall Influence
Julia Gordon is a mathematician at the University of British Columbia whose research concerns algebraic geometry, including representation theory, -adic groups, motivic integration, and the Langlands program.
Go to Profile#2447
Charles Sims
#46506
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Charles Coffin Sims was an American mathematician best known for his work in group theory. Together with Donald G. Higman he discovered the Higman–Sims group, one of the sporadic groups. The permutation group software developed by Sims also led to the proof of existence of the Lyons group and the O'Nan group .
Go to Profile#2448
Andrei Polyanin
#35910
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Andrei Dmitrievich Polyanin is a Russian mathematician. He is a creator and Editor-in-Chief of EqWorld. Education Polyanin graduated with honors from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1974 . He received his Ph.D. in 1981 and D.Sc. in 1986 at the Institute for Problems in Mechanics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2449
Sema Salur
#28513
Overall Influence
Sema Salur is a Turkish-American mathematician, currently serving as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rochester. She was awarded the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize for 2014–2015, a prize intended to give a recently promoted associate professor a year-long fellowship at Cornell University; and has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation Research Award beginning in 2017. She specialises in the "geometry and topology of the moduli spaces of calibrated submanifolds inside Calabi–Yau, G2 and Spin manifolds", which are important to certain aspects of string theory and M-th...
Go to Profile#2450
Jonathan Lazare Alperin
#53583
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jonathan Lazare Alperin is an American mathematician specializing in the area of algebra known as group theory. He is notable for his work in group theory which has been cited over 500 times according to the Mathematical Reviews. The Alperin–Brauer–Gorenstein theorem is named after him.
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