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,
#251
James Colliander
#6333
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
James Ellis Colliander is an American-Canadian mathematician. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at University of British Columbia and served as Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences during 2016-2021. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and lived there until age 8 and then moved to Hastings, Minnesota. He graduated from Macalester College in 1989. He worked for two years at the United States Naval Research Laboratory on fiber optic sensors and then went to graduate school to study mathematics. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1997 and was advised by Jean Bourgain.
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Eric W. Weisstein
#3034
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Eric Wolfgang Weisstein is an American mathematician and encyclopedist who created and maintains the encyclopedias MathWorld and ScienceWorld. In addition, he is the author of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. He works for Wolfram Research.
Go to Profile#253
Ivor Grattan-Guinness
#2286
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Ivor Owen Grattan-Guinness was a historian of mathematics and logic. Life Grattan-Guinness was born in Bakewell, England; his father was a mathematics teacher and educational administrator. He gained his bachelor degree as a Mathematics Scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and an MSc in Mathematical Logic and the Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics in 1966. He gained both the doctorate in 1969, and higher doctorate in 1978, in the History of Science at the University of London. He was Emeritus Professor of the History of Mathematics and Logic at Middlesex University, and...
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Luc Illusie
#5680
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Luc Illusie is a French mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. His most important work concerns the theory of the cotangent complex and deformations, crystalline cohomology and the De Rham–Witt complex, and logarithmic geometry. In 2012, he was awarded the Émile Picard Medal of the French Academy of Sciences.
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Nicolaas Kuiper
#6403
Overall Influence
1920 - 1994 (74 years)
Nicolaas Hendrik Kuiper was a Dutch mathematician, known for Kuiper's test and proving Kuiper's theorem. He also contributed to the Nash embedding theorem. Kuiper studied at University of Leiden in 1937-41, and worked as a secondary school teacher of mathematics in Dordrecht in 1942-47. He completed his Ph.D. in differential geometry from the University of Leiden in 1946 under the supervision of Willem van der Woude. In 1947 he came to the United States at the invitation of Oscar Veblen, where he stayed at the Institute for Advanced Study for one year as Veblen's assistant, and the second yea...
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Gregory Chaitin
#827
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gregory John Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a computer-theoretic result equivalent to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He is considered to be one of the founders of what is today known as algorithmic complexity together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff. Along with the works of e.g. Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, Martin-Löf, and Leonid Levin, algorithmic information theory became a foundational part of theoretical computer science, information theory, and mathematical logic.
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James A. Yorke
#2591
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James A. Yorke is a Distinguished University Research Professor of Mathematics and Physics and former chair of the Mathematics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States, Yorke attended The Pingry School, then located in Hillside, New Jersey. Yorke is now a Distinguished University Research Professor of Mathematics and Physics with the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. In June 2013, Dr. Yorke retired as chair of the University of Maryland's Math department. He devotes his university efforts t...
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Erwin Kreyszig
#5425
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Erwin Otto Kreyszig was a German Canadian applied mathematician and the Professor of Mathematics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He was a pioneer in the field of applied mathematics: non-wave replicating linear systems. He was also a distinguished author, having written the textbook Advanced Engineering Mathematics, the leading textbook for civil, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering undergraduate engineering mathematics.
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Mikhael Gromov
#5662
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#260
Neil Robertson
#3878
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
George Neil Robertson is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor emeritus at the Ohio State University. Education Robertson earned his B.Sc. from Brandon College in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Waterloo under his doctoral advisor William Tutte.
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Harald Helfgott
#6127
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Harald Andrés Helfgott is a Peruvian mathematician working in number theory. Helfgott is a researcher at the CNRS at the Institut Mathématique de Jussieu, Paris. Early life and education Helfgott was born on 25 November 1977 in Lima, Peru. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1998 . He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003 under the direction of Henryk Iwaniec and Peter Sarnak, with the thesis Root numbers and the parity problem.
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Naum Ya. Vilenkin
#7873
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Naum Yakovlevich Vilenkin was a Soviet mathematician, an expert in representation theory, the theory of special functions, functional analysis, and combinatorics. He is best known as the author of many books in recreational mathematics aimed at middle and high school students.
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Carlos Kenig
#6774
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Carlos Eduardo Kenig is an Argentine-American mathematician and Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He is known for his work in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. He was President of the International Mathematical Union between 2019 and 2022.
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Jacques Dixmier
#4511
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Jacques Dixmier is a French mathematician. He worked on operator algebras, especially C*-algebras, and wrote several of the standard reference books on them, and introduced the Dixmier trace and the Dixmier mapping.
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Yasutaka Ihara
#6925
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Yasutaka Ihara is a Japanese mathematician and professor emeritus at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. His work in number theory includes Ihara's lemma and the Ihara zeta function. Career Ihara received his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 1967 with thesis Hecke polynomials as congruence zeta functions in elliptic modular case.
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Van H. Vu
#5562
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Van H. Vu is a Vietnamese mathematician, Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Education and career Vu was born in Hanoi in 1970. He went to special math classes for gifted children at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Hungary for his undergraduate studies, and in 1994, obtained his M.Sc in mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös University, Budapest. His thesis supervisor was Tamás Szőnyi. He received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1998 under the direction of László Lovász. He worked as a postdoc at IAS and Microsoft Research .
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Avi Wigderson
#1758
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Avi Wigderson is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, distributed computing, and neural networks. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science.
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Emmanuel Candès
#4676
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Emmanuel Jean Candès is a French statistician. He is a professor of statistics and electrical engineering at Stanford University, where he is also the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics. Candès is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.
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Michael O. Rabin
#911
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Michael Oser Rabin is an Israeli mathematician, computer scientist, and recipient of the Turing Award. Biography Early life and education Rabin was born in 1931 in Breslau, Germany , the son of a rabbi. In 1935, he emigrated with his family to Mandate Palestine. As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher.
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Victor Kolyvagin
#6145
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Victor Alexandrovich Kolyvagin is a Russian mathematician who wrote a series of papers on Euler systems, leading to breakthroughs on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, and Iwasawa's conjecture for cyclotomic fields. His work also influenced Andrew Wiles's work on Fermat's Last Theorem.
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Yakov Eliashberg
#5671
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg is an American mathematician who was born in Leningrad, USSR. Education and career Eliashberg received his PhD, entitled Surgery of Singularities of Smooth Mappings, from Leningrad University in 1972, under the direction of Vladimir Rokhlin.
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W. Hugh Woodin
#5624
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
William Hugh Woodin is an American mathematician and set theorist at Harvard University. He has made many notable contributions to the theory of inner models and determinacy. A type of large cardinals, the Woodin cardinals, bear his name. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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Nicole El Karoui
#4607
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nicole El Karoui is a French mathematician and pioneer in the development of mathematical finance, born 29 May 1944 in Paris. She is considered one of the pioneers on the French school of mathematical finance and trained many engineers and scientists in this field. She is Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Sorbonne University, and held professorship positions at the École Polytechnique and Université du Maine. Her research has contributed to the application of probability and stochastic differential equations to modeling and risk management in financial markets.
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I. J. Good
#1097
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was professor at Virginia Tech.
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Mitchell Feigenbaum
#2560
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum was an American mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants. Early life Feigenbaum was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish emigrants from Poland and Ukraine. He attended Samuel J. Tilden High School, in Brooklyn, New York, and the City College of New York. In 1964, he began his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Enrolling for graduate study in electrical engineering, he changed his area of study to physics. He completed his doctorate in 1970 for a thesis on dispersion relations, under the supervision of Professor Francis E.
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David A. Cox
#7518
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David Archibald Cox is a retired American mathematician, working in algebraic geometry. Cox graduated from Rice University with a bachelor's degree in 1970 and his Ph.D. in 1975 at Princeton University, under the supervision of Eric Friedlander . From 1974 to 1975, he was assistant professor at Haverford College and at Rutgers University from 1975 to 1979. In 1979, he became assistant professor and in 1988 professor at Amherst College.
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Oleg Viro
#7444
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Oleg Yanovich Viro is a Russian mathematician in the fields of topology and algebraic geometry, most notably real algebraic geometry, tropical geometry and knot theory. Contributions Viro developed a "patchworking" technique in algebraic geometry, which allows real algebraic varieties to be constructed by a "cut and paste" method. Using this technique, Viro completed the isotopy classification of non-singular plane projective curves of degree 7. The patchworking technique was one of the fundamental ideas which motivated the development of tropical geometry. In topology, Viro is most known f...
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James Lepowsky
#6024
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
James Lepowsky is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Previously he taught at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 where his advisors were Bertram Kostant and Sigurdur Helgason. Lepowsky graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1961, 16 years after Kostant. His current research is in the areas of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras and vertex algebras. He has written several books on vertex algebras and related topics. In 1988, in a joint work with Igor Frenkel and Arne Meurman, he constructed the monster vertex algebra .
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Tibor Gallai
#7319
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Tibor Gallai was a Hungarian mathematician. He worked in combinatorics, especially in graph theory, and was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Paul Erdős. He was a student of Dénes Kőnig and an advisor of László Lovász. He was a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences .
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Michael I. Jordan
#544
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. Jordan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 for contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning.
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Larry Guth
#6929
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
#282
James Munkres
#7235
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
James Raymond Munkres is a Professor Emeritus of mathematics at MIT and the author of several texts in the area of topology, including Topology , Analysis on Manifolds, Elements of Algebraic Topology, and Elementary Differential Topology. He is also the author of Elementary Linear Algebra.
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Alan Weinstein
#7213
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Alan David Weinstein is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, working in the field of differential geometry, and especially in Poisson geometry. Education and career After attending Roslyn High School, Weinstein obtained a bachelor's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. His teachers included, among others, James Munkres, Gian-Carlo Rota, Irving Segal, and, for the first senior course of differential geometry, Sigurður Helgason.
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Henry Mann
#5422
Overall Influence
1905 - 2000 (95 years)
Henry Berthold Mann was a professor of mathematics and statistics at the Ohio State University. Mann proved the Schnirelmann-Landau conjecture in number theory, and as a result earned the 1946 Cole Prize. He and his student developed the U-statistic of nonparametric statistics. Mann published the first mathematical book on the design of experiments: .
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Gigliola Staffilani
#7375
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Gigliola Staffilani is an Italian-American mathematician who works as the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation.
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Ian Agol
#6884
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Ian Agol is an American mathematician who deals primarily with the topology of three-dimensional manifolds. Education and career Agol graduated with B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, his advisor was Michael Freedman and his thesis was Topology of Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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C. T. C. Wall
#7208
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Charles Terence Clegg "Terry" Wall is a British mathematician, educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Liverpool, where he was first appointed professor in 1965. From 1978 to 1980 he was the president of the London Mathematical Society.
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Nets Katz
#7484
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Nets Hawk Katz is the W.L. Moody Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. He was a professor of Mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington until March 2013 and the IBM Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology until 2023.
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Morris Hirsch
#6313
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Morris William Hirsch is an American mathematician, formerly at the University of California, Berkeley. A native of Chicago, Illinois, Hirsch attained his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1958, under supervision of Edwin Spanier and Stephen Smale. His thesis was entitled Immersions of Manifolds. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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Felix Browder
#5189
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Felix Earl Browder was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society until 2000. His two younger brothers also became notable mathematicians, William Browder and Andrew Browder .
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Ludvig Faddeev
#3107
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Ludvig Dmitrievich Faddeev was a Soviet and Russian mathematical physicist. He is known for the discovery of the Faddeev equations in the theory of the quantum mechanical three-body problem and for the development of path integral methods in the quantization of non-abelian gauge field theories, including the introduction of Faddeev–Popov ghosts. He led the Leningrad School, in which he along with many of his students developed the quantum inverse scattering method for studying quantum integrable systems in one space and one time dimension. This work led to the invention of quantum groups b...
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Hoàng Tụy
#4817
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Hoàng Tụy was an prominent Vietnamese applied mathematician. He was considered one of two founders of the mathematical institutions of Vietnam; the other was Lê Văn Thiêm. Career Hoàng Tụy's early career coincided with the French war , which interrupted his studies. In December 1946, after two months as a mathematics student at Hanoi University, he had to return to the south, because the French had invaded and seized Hanoi, and the University had closed. Hoàng Tụy taught secondary school in Quảng Ngãi province in the Fifth Liberated Zone from 1947 to 1951, during which time he wrote a geometr...
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Clifford Truesdell
#4340
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III was an American mathematician, natural philosopher, and historian of science. Life Truesdell was born in Los Angeles, California. After high school, he spent two years in Europe learning French, German, and Italian, and improving his Latin and Greek. His linguistic skills stood him in good stead in his later historical investigations. At Caltech he was deeply influenced by the teaching of Harry Bateman. In particular, a course in partial differential equations "taught me the difference between an ordinary good teacher and a great mathematician, and after that I never cared what grade I got in anything." He obtained a B.Sc.
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Donald C. Spencer
#6113
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Donald Clayton Spencer was an American mathematician, known for work on deformation theory of structures arising in differential geometry, and on several complex variables from the point of view of partial differential equations. He was born in Boulder, Colorado, and educated at the University of Colorado and MIT.
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Nobuo Yoneda
#5131
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Nobuo Yoneda was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist. In 1952, he graduated the Department of Mathematics, the Faculty of Science, the University of Tokyo, and obtained his Bachelor of Science. That same year, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Tokyo. He obtained his Doctor of Science degree from the University of Tokyo in 1961, under the direction of Shokichi Iyanaga. In 1962, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Faculty of Science at Gakushuin University, and was promoted in 1966 to the rank of Professor. He became a professor of Theoretical Foundation of Information Science in 1972.
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Adi Shamir
#474
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#297
Jonathan Borwein
#5148
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Jonathan Michael Borwein was a Scottish mathematician who held an appointment as Laureate Professor of mathematics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He was a close associate of David H. Bailey, and they have been prominent public advocates of experimental mathematics.
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Ben Green
#6711
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Early life and education Ben Green was born on 27 February 1977 in Bristol, England. He studied at local schools in Bristol, Bishop Road Primary School and Fairfield Grammar School, competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 and 1995. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1995 and completed his BA in mathematics in 1998, winning the Senior Wrangler title. He stayed on for Part III and earned his do...
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Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn
#3950
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
Nicolaas Govert "Dick" de Bruijn was a Dutch mathematician, noted for his many contributions in the fields of analysis, number theory, combinatorics and logic. Biography De Bruijn was born in The Hague where he attended elementary school between 1924 and 1930 and secondary school until 1934. He started studies in mathematics at Leiden University in 1936 but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He became a full-time Assistant in the Department of Mathematics of the Technological University of Delft in September 1939 while continuing his studies. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Leiden in 1941.
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Neal Koblitz
#4790
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is also an adjunct professor with the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. He is the creator of hyperelliptic curve cryptography and the independent co-creator of elliptic curve cryptography.
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