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).

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#2451

H. J. Woodall

#29272

Overall Influence

Herbert J. Woodall was a British mathematician. In 1925 Lt.-Col. Allan J.C. Cunningham and Woodall gathered together all that was known about the primality and factorization of such numbers and published a small book of tables. "These tables collected from scattered sources the known prime factors for the bases 2 and 10 and also presented the authors' results of thirty years' work with these and the other bases."

#2452

Idun Reiten

#38946

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Idun Reiten is a Norwegian professor of mathematics. She is considered to be one of Norway's greatest mathematicians today. Career She took her PhD degree at the University of Illinois in 1971. She was appointed as a professor at the University of Trondheim in 1982, now named the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

#2453

F. Burton Jones

#43774

Overall Influence

1910 - 1999 (89 years)

Floyd Burton Jones was an American mathematician, active mainly in topology. Jones's father was a pharmacist and local politician in Shackelford County, Texas. As the valedictorian of his high school class, Jones earned a Regents' Scholarship to The University of Texas, intending to study law eventually. Jones soon discovered that he had a poor memory for dates and history, and thus changed his major to chemistry.

#2454

Valentin Poénaru

Valentin Poénaru

#28879

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Valentin Alexandre Poénaru is a Romanian–French mathematician. He was a Professor of Mathematics at University of Paris-Sud, specializing in low-dimensional topology. Life and career Born in Bucharest, Romania, he did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bucharest. In 1962, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm, Sweden. While at the congress, Poénaru defected, subsequently leaving for France. He arrived in mid-September 1962 at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette; the IHÉS decided to support him, and he h...

#2455

Agata Smoktunowicz

#45275

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Agata Smoktunowicz FRSE is a Polish mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is in abstract algebra. Contributions Smoktunowicz's contributions to mathematics include constructing noncommutative nil rings, solving a "famous problem" formulated in 1970 by Irving Kaplansky. She proved the Artin–Stafford gap conjecture according to which the Gelfand–Kirillov dimension of a graded domain cannot fall within the open interval . She also found an example of a nil ideal of a ring R that does not lift to a nil ideal of the polynomial ring R[X], disproving a c...

#2456

Gianni Dal Maso

Gianni Dal Maso

#56246

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Gianni Dal Maso is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of partial differential equations, calculus of variations and applied mathematics. Scientific activity Dal Maso studied at Scuola Normale Superiore under the guidance of Ennio De Giorgi and is professor of mathematics at the International School for Advanced Studies at Trieste, where he also serves as deputy director. Dal Maso has dealt with a number of questions related to partial differential equations and calculus of variations, covering a range of topics going from lower semicontinuity problems for multiple integrals ...

#2457

Vitaly Bergelson

Vitaly Bergelson

#49785

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Vitaly Bergelson is a mathematical researcher and professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. His research focuses on ergodic theory and combinatorics. Bergelson received his Ph.D in 1984 under Hillel Furstenberg at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006 in Madrid. Among Bergelson's best known results is a polynomial generalization of Szemerédi's theorem. The latter provided a positive solution to the famous Erdős–Turán conjecture from 1936 stating that any set of integers of positive upper density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.

#2458

Thomas Forster

#39917

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Thomas Edward Forster is a British set theorist and philosopher. His work has focused on Quine's New Foundations, the theory of well-quasi-orders and better-quasi-orders, and various topics in philosophy.

#2459

Endre Süli

#29228

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Endre Süli is a mathematician. He is Professor of Numerical Analysis in the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Mathematics at Worcester College, Oxford and Adjunct Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He was educated at the University of Belgrade and, as a British Council Visiting Student, at the University of Reading and St Catherine's College, Oxford. His research is concerned with the mathematical analysis of numerical algorithms for nonlinear partial differential equations.

#2460

Ted Harris

#9810

Overall Influence

1919 - 2005 (86 years)

Theodore Edward Harris was an American mathematician known for his research on stochastic processes, including such areas as general state-space Markov chains , the theory of branching processes and stochastic models of interacting particle systems such as the contact process. The Harris inequality in statistical physics and percolation theory is named after him.

#2461

Stephen Shing-Toung Yau

#42170

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Stephen Shing-Toung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently teaches at Tsinghua University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Mathematical Society.

#2462

Catherine Goldstein

Catherine Goldstein

#39410

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Catherine Goldstein is a French number theorist and historian of mathematics who works as a director of research at the . She was president of L'association femmes et mathématiques in 1991. Education and career Goldstein studied at the Ecole normale supérieure from 1976 to 1980, earning an agrégation in mathematics in 1978. She completed a doctorate of the third cycle in 1981, with a dissertation on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory supervised by John H. Coates.

#2463

Alain Chenciner

Alain Chenciner

#47236

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Alain Chenciner is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems with applications to celestial mechanics. Chenciner studied from 1963 to 1965 at the École polytechnique and did research from 1966 for CNRS at the École Polytechnique . In 1971 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris XI under Jean Cerf with thesis Sur la géométrie des strates de petites codimensions de l'espace des fonctions différentiables réelles sur une variété . Chenciner became a maître de conférences at the University of Paris XI, then in 1973 at the University of Paris VII, and in 1975 at the University of Nice.

#2464

Josip Pečarić

#25948

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Josip Pečarić is a Croatian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics in the Faculty of Textile Technology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and is a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has written and co-authored over 1,200 mathematical publications. He has also published a number of works on history and politics that have been described as comprising historical negationism or Holocaust denial.

#2465

Rafael Artzy

#53524

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Rafael Artzy was an Israeli mathematician specializing in geometry. Education and emigration Artzy was born July 23, 1912, in Königsberg, Germany. His father was Edward I. Deutschlander and his mother Ida Freudenheim. Rafael studied at Königsberg University from 1930 to 1933. He transferred to Hebrew University and obtained a master’s degree in 1934. He married Elly Iwiansky on October 12, 1934. Rafael continued his studies at Hebrew University under Theodore Motzkin, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1945. Elly and Rafael raised three children: Ehud, Michal, and Barak. Ehud and Barak died before their father.

#2466

Josef Teichmann

Josef Teichmann

#45779

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Josef Teichmann is an Austrian mathematician and professor at ETH Zürich working on mathematical finance. After studying mathematics at the University of Graz, he pursued his PhD at the University of Vienna. The title of his dissertation in 1999 under the supervision of Peter W. Michor was "The Theory of Infinite-Dimensional Lie Groups from the Point of View of Functional Analysis".

#2467

Thomas M. Liggett

#40972

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Thomas Milton Liggett was a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. He worked in probability theory, specializing in interacting particle systems. Early life Thomas Milton Liggett was born on March 29, 1944, in Danville, Kentucky. Liggett moved at the age of two with his missionary parents to Latin America, where he was educated in Bueno Aires, Argentina and San Juan, Puerto Rico. He graduated from Oberlin College with a Bachelor of Arts in 1965, where he was influenced towards probability by Samuel Goldberg , an ex-student of William Feller. He moved to Stanford, taking c...

#2468

Stanley A. Lemeshow

#56592

Overall Influence

#2469

Michel Ledoux

#46707

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Michel Ledoux is a French mathematician, specializing in probability theory. He is a professor at the University of Toulouse. Ledoux received in 1985 his PhD from the University of Strasbourg with thesis Propriétés limites des variables aléatoires vectorielles which was made under the supervision of Xavier Fernique.

#2470

Jason P. Miller

#36047

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jason Peter Miller is an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory. After graduating from Okemos High School, Miller matriculated in 2002 at the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 2006 with a B.S. with joint majors in mathematics, computer science, and economics. In 2006 he became a graduate student in mathematics at Stanford University. In 2011 he graduated there with a PhD supervised by Amir Dembo with dissertation random surfaces . Miller was a summer intern in 2009 at Microsoft Research and in 2010 at D.E. Shaw & Co. He was a postdoctoral researcher from Septe...

#2471

Andrew Sutherland

Andrew Sutherland

#25534

Overall Influence

Andrew Victor Sutherland is an American mathematician and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on computational aspects of number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is known for his contributions to several projects involving large scale computations, including the Polymath project on bounded gaps between primes, the L-functions and Modular Forms Database, the sums of three cubes project, and the computation and classification of Sato-Tate distributions.

#2472

Douglas Northcott

#47849

Overall Influence

1916 - 2005 (89 years)

Douglas Geoffrey Northcott, FRS was a British mathematician who worked on ideal theory. Early life and career Northcott was born Douglas Geoffrey Robertson in Kensington on 31 December 1916 to Clara Freda and her first husband Geoffrey Douglas Spence Robertson . His mother remarried in 1919 to Arthur Hugh Kynaston Northcott . In 1935, he legally adopted his step-father's surname.

#2473

Vahid Tarokh

#10798

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Vahid Tarokh is an Iranian–American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor. Since 2018, he has served as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Professor of Mathematics, and the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Microsoft Data Science Investigator at Microsoft Innovation Hub at Duke University. Tarokh works with complex datasets and uses machine learning algorithms to predict catastrophic events.

#2474

Nikolay Krasovsky

#20064

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Nikolay Nikolayevich Krasovsky was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who worked in the mathematical theory of control, the theory of dynamical systems, and the theory of differential games. He was the author of Krasovskii-LaSalle principle and the chief of the Ural scientific school in mathematical theory of control and the theory of differential games.

#2475

Kathryn Mann

#28156

Overall Influence

Kathryn Mann is a mathematician who has won the Rudin Award, Birman Prize, Duszenko Award, and Sloan Fellowship for her research in geometric topology and geometric group theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University.

#2476

Stephen Wiggins

#44758

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Stephen Ray Wiggins is a Cherokee-American applied mathematics researcher and distinguished educator, also of British heritage, best known for his contributions in nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory and nonlinear phenomena. His wide contributions include Lagrangian aspects of fluid dynamics and reaction dynamics in theoretical chemistry.

#2477

Peter Lancaster

#45566

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Peter Lancaster is a British–Canadian mathematician. He is professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, where he has worked since 1962. His research focuses on matrix analysis and related fields, motivated by problems from vibration theory, numerical analysis, systems theory, and signal processing.

#2478

Jan Hogendijk

#37364

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jan Pieter Hogendijk is a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Since 2005, he is professor of history of mathematics at the University of Utrecht. Hogendijk became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.

#2479

Christopher Budd

#32103

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Christopher John Budd is a British mathematician known especially for his contribution to non-linear differential equations and their applications in industry. He is currently Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, and was Professor of Geometry at Gresham College from 2016 to 2020.

#2480

George Casella

#41544

Overall Influence

1951 - 2012 (61 years)

George Casella was a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida. He died from multiple myeloma. Academic career Casella completed his undergraduate education at Fordham University and graduate education at Purdue University. He served on the faculty of Rutgers University, Cornell University, and the University of Florida. His contributions focused on the area of statistics including Monte Carlo methods, model selection, and genomic analysis. He was particularly active in Bayesian and empirical Bayes methods, with works connecting with the Stein phenom...

#2481

Phillip Colella

Phillip Colella

#46475

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Phillip Colella is an American applied mathematician and a member of the Applied Numerical Algorithms Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has also worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is known for his fundamental contributions in the development of mathematical methods and numerical tools used to solve partial differential equations, including high-resolution and adaptive mesh refinement schemes. Colella is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

#2482

Nalini Anantharaman

Nalini Anantharaman

#36161

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Nalini Anantharaman is a French mathematician who has won major prizes including the Henri Poincaré Prize in 2012. Life Nalini Florence Anantharaman was born in Paris in 1976 to two mathematicians. Her father and her mother are Professors at the University of Orléans. She entered Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1994. She completed her PhD in Paris under the supervision of François Ledrappier in 2000 at Université Pierre et Marie Curie .

#2483

Harry Pitt

#28193

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

Sir Harry Raymond Pitt FRS was a British mathematician. Harry Raymond Pitt was born in West Bromwich in 1914, the son of Harry and Harriet Pitt. He attended King Edward's School, Stourbridge, before going up to Peterhouse, Cambridge.

#2484

Winnie Li

#49144

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Wen-Ch'ing Li is a Taiwanese-American mathematician and a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. She is a number theorist, with research focusing on the theory of automorphic forms and applications of number theory to coding theory and spectral graph theory. In particular, she has applied her research results in automorphic forms and number theory to construct efficient communication networks called Ramanujan graphs and Ramanujan complexes.

#2485

Rüdiger Thiele

#30360

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Rolf-Rüdiger Thiele is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics, known for his historical research on Hilbert's twenty-fourth problem. Education and career Thiele studied mathematics, physics, and psychology at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and received his promotion there in 1973. He then worked in the publishing business in Leipzig for B. G. Teubner Verlag and Salomon Hirzel Verlag. From 1986 to 2008 he worked at the Karl-Sudhoff-Institut für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften at the University of Leipzig. He has held visiting positions at the...

#2486

Karine Chemla

#30954

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Karine Chemla is a French historian of mathematics and sinologist who works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique . She is also a senior fellow at the New York University Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

#2487

Jack Kenneth Hale

#56911

Overall Influence

#2488

Hajnal Andréka

#44137

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Hajnal Ilona Andréka is a Hungarian mathematician specializing in algebraic logic. She is a research professor emeritus at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

#2489

Judith Roitman

#32832

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Judith "Judy" Roitman is a mathematician, a retired professor at the University of Kansas. She specializes in set theory, topology, Boolean algebras, and mathematics education. Biography Roitman was born in 1945 in New York City. She attended Oberlin College, followed by Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1966 with a degree in English literature. Next, she became interested in mathematical linguistics. As she had little formal mathematical education, Roitman started taking mathematics classes at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. She had enjoyed mathematics as a high school student and found her interest renewed.

#2490

John C. Gittins

#26116

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

John Charles Gittins is a researcher in applied probability and operations research, who is a professor and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford University. He is renowned as the developer of the "Gittins index", which is used for sequential decision-making, especially in research and development in the pharmaceutical industry. He has research interests in applied probability, decision analysis and optimal decisions, including optimal stopping and stochastic optimization.

#2491

Léon Bottou

#9407

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Léon Bottou is a researcher best known for his work in machine learning and data compression. His work presents stochastic gradient descent as a fundamental learning algorithm. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology , and the maintainer of DjVuLibre, the open source implementation of DjVu. He is the original developer of the Lush programming language.

#2492

Robert Kottwitz

#55368

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert Edward Kottwitz is an American mathematician. Kottwitz studied at the University of Washington and then went to Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 under the supervision of Phillip Griffiths and John T. Tate . In 1976 he was assistant professor and later professor at the University of Washington and went in 1989 as a professor to the University of Chicago.

#2493

Abigail Thompson

Abigail Thompson

#26825

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Abigail A. Thompson is an American mathematician. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology. Education and career Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979, and earned her Ph.D. in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L. Shaneson. After visiting positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the University of California Davis faculty in 1988. Thompson had a postdoctoral fel...

#2494

Hans Hermes

#14283

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Hans Hermes was a German mathematician and logician, who made significant contributions to the foundations of mathematical logic. Personal life Hermes was born in Neunkirchen. From 1931, he studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and philosophy at the University of Freiburg. In 1937, he passed the state examination in Münster and was attending there in 1938 when the physicist Adolf Kratzer was present. After that, he went on a scholarship to the University of Göttingen and then became an assistant at the University of Bonn. During World War II, he was a soldier on the Channel Island of Jersey until 1943 and then on to the Chemical Physics Institute of the Navy in Kiel.

#2495

Mileva Prvanović

#45581

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Mileva Prvanović was a Serbian differential geometer. She is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Novi Sad and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Education and career Prvanović was born in Knjaževac on July 16, 1929, the daughter of mathematics professor Stanko Prvanović . After studying at the University of Belgrade, she earned a doctorate in 1955 from the University of Zagreb under the supervision of Danilo Blanuša, with a dissertation concerning differential geometry. In doing so, she became the first student in Serbia to earn a doctorate in geometry.

#2496

William A. Dembski

William A. Dembski

#2774

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Trained as a mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, William Albert “Bill” Dembski is a writer, editor, and researcher whose books and articles range over mathematics, engineering, philosophy, theology, and education. A past philosophy professor, he retired from teaching in 2013. A prominent proponent of intelligent design (ID), specifically for developing rigorous methods of design detection, he was a senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture until 2016 and is currently a member of Discovery’s Institute’s governing board. He has secured the rights from Cambridg...

#2497

Mark Sapir

#50275

Overall Influence

1957 - 2022 (65 years)

Mark Sapir was a U.S. and Russian mathematician working in geometric group theory, semigroup theory and combinatorial algebra. He was a Centennial Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University.

#2498

Hanfried Lenz

#24432

Overall Influence

1916 - 2013 (97 years)

Hanfried Lenz was a German mathematician, who is mainly known for his work in geometry and combinatorics. Hanfried Lenz was the eldest son of Fritz Lenz an influential German geneticist, who is associated with Eugenics and hence also with the Nazi racial policies during the Third Reich. He was also the older brother of Widukind Lenz, a geneticist. He started to study mathematics and physics at the University of Tübingen, but interrupted his studies from 1935 to 1937 to do a military service. After that he continued to study in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig. In 1939 when World War II broke out i...

#2499

Patrick Cousot

#9763

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Patrick Cousot is a French computer scientist, currently Silver Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, USA. Before he was Professor at the École Normale Supérieure , Paris, France, the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France and the University of Metz, France and a Research Scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research at the Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France.

#2500

Thomas Ward

#47885

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Thomas Ward is a British mathematician who works in ergodic theory and dynamical systems and its relations to number theory. Education Ward was the fourth child of the physicist Alan Howard Ward and Elizabeth Honor Ward, a physics teacher. He attended Woodlands Primary School in Lusaka, Zambia, Waterford Kamhlaba United World College in Swaziland, and the Thomas Hardye School in Dorchester, England. He studied mathematics at the University of Warwick from 1982, gaining an MSc with dissertation entitled "Automorphisms of solenoids and p-adic entropy" in 1986 and a PhD with dissertation entitl...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions