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).
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.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#2501
David Hinkley
#41987
Overall Influence
1945 - 2019 (74 years)
David Victor Hinkley was a statistician known for his research in statistical models and inference and for his graduate-level books. Early life David Victor Hinkley was born on 10 September 1944 in Kent, England. He studied mathematics and statistics at the University of Birmingham. He earned a PhD from the University of London in 1969 under the supervision of David R. Cox.
Go to Profile#2502
Barrett O'Neill
#57386
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Barrett O'Neill was an American mathematician. He is known for contributions to differential geometry, including two widely-used textbooks on its foundational theory. He was the author of eighteen research articles, the last of which was published in 1973.
Go to Profile#2503
Meyer Jerison
#48755
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Meyer Jerison was an American mathematician known for his work in functional analysis and ringss, and especially for collaborating with Leonard Gillman on one of the standard texts in the field: Rings of Continuous Functions.
Go to Profile#2504
Joseph H. M. Steenbrink
#55435
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Joseph Henri Maria Steenbrink is a Dutch mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Steenbrink received in 1974 his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam with thesis advisor Frans Oort and thesis Limits of Hodge Structures and Intermediate Jacobians. He is now a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Go to Profile#2505
Friederich Ignaz Mautner
#52662
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Friederich Ignaz Mautner was an Austrian-American mathematician, known for his research on the representation theory of groups, functional analysis, and differential geometry. He is known for Mautner's Lemma and Mautner's Phenomenon in the representation theory of Lie groups.
Go to Profile#2506
Zbyněk Šidák
#49585
Overall Influence
1933 - 1999 (66 years)
Zbyněk Šidák was a Czech mathematician. He is known for developing the Šidák correction. Early life and education Šidák was born and raised in Golčův Jeníkov. He completed his undergraduate studies in statistics at Charles University in Prague in 1956, received a Ph.D. in 1961, and a DrSc. in 1973.
Go to Profile#2507
Xu-Jia Wang
#35237
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Xu-Jia Wang is a Chinese-Australian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Biography Wang was born in Chun'an County, Zhejiang province, China. Wang obtained his B.S. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1990 from the Department of Mathematics of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.
Go to Profile#2508
Edna Grossman
#37842
Overall Influence
Edna Grossman is an American mathematician. She was born in Germany, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated with a B.S. in mathematics from Brooklyn College. She earned her M.S. in mathematics from New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where she also received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1972; her thesis, supervised by Wilhelm Magnus, concerned the symmetries of free groups. Grossman worked for IBM, where she was part of the team that designed and analyzed the Data Encryption Standard. She is known for her development, along with Bryant Tuckerman, of the first...
Go to Profile#2509
D. G. Champernowne
#13442
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
David Gawen Champernowne, was an English economist and mathematician. Champernowne was the only child of Francis Gawayne Champernowne , M.A. , a barrister and bursar of Keble College, Oxford, and his wife Isabel Mary, daughter of George Rashleigh, of Riseley, Horton Kirby, Kent. The Champernowne family were landed gentry, of Dartington, Devon; Francis Gawayne Champernowne was a grandson of Arthur Champernowne , M.P. for Saltash in 1806, who, born to Rev. Richard Harington, second son of Sir James Harington, 6th Baronet, had taken his maternal grandfather's name on inheriting his estates.
Go to Profile#2510
Carl Morris
#42250
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Carl Neracher Morris was a professor in the Statistics Department of Harvard University and spent several years as a researcher for the RAND Corporation working on the RAND Health Insurance Experiment.
Go to Profile#2511
Lisa Goldberg
#27535
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Lisa Goldberg is a financial economist and statistician who serves at the University of California, Berkeley as director of research at the Center for Risk Management Research and as Adjunct Professor of Statistics. She is also the Co-Director for the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk at UC Berkeley.
Go to Profile#2512
Michael Athans
#25932
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Michael Athans was a Greek-American control theorist and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the AAAS . He was the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions in the field of control theory. A pioneer in the field of control theory, he helped shape modern control theory and spearheaded the field of multivariable control system design and the field of robust control. Athans was a member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory from 1961 to 1964, and a Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty member from 1964 to 1998.
Go to Profile#2513
Ron Larson
#40595
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Roland "Ron" Edwin Larson is a professor of mathematics at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Pennsylvania. He is best known for being the author of a series of widely used mathematics textbooks ranging from middle school through the second year of college.
Go to Profile#2514
Lynn Steen
#35958
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Lynn Arthur Steen was an American mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, in the U.S. He wrote numerous books and articles on the teaching of mathematics. He was a past president of the Mathematics Association of America and served as chairman of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#2515
Richard Schroeppel
#31823
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Richard C. Schroeppel is an American mathematician born in Illinois. His research has included magic squares, elliptic curves, and cryptography. In 1964, Schroeppel won first place in the United States among over 225,000 high school students in the Annual High School Mathematics Examination, a contest sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America and the Society of Actuaries. In both 1966 and 1967, Schroeppel scored among the top 5 in the U.S. in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. In 1973 he discovered that there are 275,305,224 normal magic squares of order 5. In 1998...
Go to Profile#2516
Susan Howson
#42932
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Susan Howson is a British mathematician whose research is in the fields of algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. Education and career Howson received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1998 with thesis title Iwasawa Theory of Elliptic Curves for ρ-Adic Lie Extensions under the supervision of John H. Coates.
Go to Profile#2517
Ernest Vinberg
#31641
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Ernest Borisovich Vinberg was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, who worked on Lie groups and algebraic groups, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, invariant theory, and representation theory. He introduced Vinberg's algorithm and the Koecher–Vinberg theorem.
Go to Profile#2518
Ron Eglash
#17491
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ron Eglash is an American who works in cybernetics, professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan with a secondary appointment in the School of Design, and an author widely known for his work in the field of ethnomathematics, which aims to study the diverse relationships between mathematics and culture.
Go to Profile#2519
Catharina Stroppel
#31312
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Catharina Stroppel is a German mathematician whose research concerns representation theory, low-dimensional topology, and category theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn, and vice-coordinator of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn.
Go to Profile#2520
Michael Starbird
#44574
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael P. Starbird is a Professor of Mathematics and a University of Texas Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.A from Pomona College and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#2521
R. Dennis Cook
#56582
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ralph Dennis Cook is an American statistician, mostly known for Cook's distance and the Cook–Weisberg test. Cook is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Minnesota. After graduating from Northern Montana College , Cook earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees from Kansas State University. His dissertation, The Dynamics of Finite Populations: The Effects of Variable Selection Intensity and Population Size on the Expected Time to Fixation and the Ultimate Probability of Fixation of an Allele, was supervised by Raj Nassar.
Go to Profile#2522
Goro Nishida
#56332
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Goro Nishida was a Japanese mathematician. He was a leading member of the Japanese school of homotopy theory, following in the tradition of Hiroshi Toda. Nishida received his Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 1973, after spending the 1971–72 academic year at the University of Manchester in England. He then became a professor at Kyoto University in 1990. His proof in 1973 of Michael Barratt's conjecture was a major breakthrough: following Frank Adams' solution of the Hopf invariant one problem, it marked the beginning of a new global understanding of algebraic topology.
Go to Profile#2523
Christopher Skinner
#53555
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Christopher McLean Skinner is an American mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands program. He specialises in algebraic number theory. Skinner was a Packard Foundation Fellow from 2001 to 2006, and was named an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013. In 2015, he was named a Simons Investigator in Mathematics. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006.
Go to Profile#2524
Sergey Stechkin
#43815
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Sergey Borisovich Stechkin was a prominent Soviet mathematician who worked in theory of functions and number theory. Biography Sergey Stechkin was born on 6 September 1920 in Moscow. His father was a Soviet turbojet engine designer, academician. His great uncle, N.Ye. Zhukovsky, was the founding father of modern aero- and hydrodynamics. His maternal grandfather, N.A. Shilov, was a notable chemist. His paternal grandfather was Sergey Solomin, a science fiction author.
Go to Profile#2525
Ewout W. Steyerberg
#51063
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Ewout W. Steyerberg is Professor of Clinical Biostatistics and Medical Decision Making at Leiden University Medical Center and a Professor of Medical Decision Making at Erasmus MC. He is interested in a wide range of statistical methods for medical research, but is mainly known for his seminal work on prediction modeling, which was stimulated by various research grants including a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences . Steyerberg is one of the most cited researchers from the Netherlands. He has published over 1000 peer-reviewed articles according to PubMed , many in collaboration with clinical researchers, both in methodological and medical journals.
Go to Profile#2526
Vera Nikolaevna Maslennikova
#46230
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
Vera Nikolaevna Maslennikova was a Russian Mathematician known for her contributions to the theory of partial differential equations. Early life and war service Maslennikova was born on 29 April 1926 in the village of Priluki near Vologda in the former USSR. Little is known about her childhood except that she lost her parents when she was only eleven years old. In 1941 she entered the Moscow Textile Engineering School. Maslennikova served in the Great Patriotic War for Russia during the early 1940s in the 413th Independent Antiaircraft Artillery Division in the front-line army. For her servic...
Go to Profile#2527
Katalin Vesztergombi
#39558
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Katalin L. Vesztergombi is a Hungarian mathematician known for her contributions to graph theory and discrete geometry. A student of Vera T. Sós and a co-author of Paul Erdős, she is an emeritus associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2528
Andrew C. Berry
#57886
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Andrew Campbell Berry was an American mathematician. The Berry–Esseen theorem is named after him. Berry was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, US on November 23, 1906. He spent eight years at Harvard University, receiving his A.B. degree in 1925, A.M. degree in 1926, and a Ph.D. in 1929. After two years at Brown University and Princeton University on a National Research Fellowship, he joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1931, where he was assistant professor from 1935 to 1941. In 1941, he joined Lawrence University as associate professor.
Go to Profile#2529
Mary Kay Stein
#46361
Overall Influence
Mary Kay Stein is an American mathematics educator who works as a professor of learning sciences and policy and as the associate director and former director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#2530
T. A. Sarasvati Amma
#38732
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
T. A. Sarasvati Amma was a scholar born in Cherpulassery, Palakkad District, Kerala, India. She has contributed to the fields of history of Mathematics and Sanskrit, through her work on Geometry of ancient and medieval India.
Go to Profile#2531
Donald G. Saari
#15349
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Donald Gene Saari is an American mathematician, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and former director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include the -body problem, the Borda count voting system, and application of mathematics to the social sciences.
Go to Profile#2532
Jean Écalle
#57245
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jean Écalle is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamic systems, perturbation theory, and analysis. Écalle received, in 1974 from the University of Paris-Saclay in Orsay, a doctorate under the supervision of Hubert Delange with Thèse d'État entitled La théorie des invariants holomorphes. He is a directeur de recherche of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and is a professor at the University of Paris-Saclay.
Go to Profile#2533
Alexander Volberg
#52743
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alexander Volberg is a Russian mathematician. He is working in operator theory, complex analysis and harmonic analysis. He received the Salem Prize in 1988 for his work in harmonic analysis. Also he received the Lars Onsager medal in 2004. He is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. From 2007-2008 he was the Sir Edmund Whittaker Professor of Mathematical Science at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#2534
Myhailo Yadrenko
#42436
Overall Influence
1932 - 2004 (72 years)
Myhailo Yosypovych Yadrenko was born April 16, 1932, in the village of Drimailivka and died September 28, 2004, in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yadrenko was a prominent Ukrainian mathematician and pedagogue, Corresponding Member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, and head of the Department of Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics at Kiev State University of Ukraine.
Go to Profile#2535
Maurizio Cornalba
#55770
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Maurizio Cornalba is an Italian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Cornalba completed his undergraduate studies at University of Pisa in 1969 und his graduate studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1970. He was a postdoc at Princeton University from 1970 to 1971 and an assistant professor at the University of Pisa from 1971 to 1976; he was on leave of absence for the academic year 1971–1972 at Princeton University, for the academic year 1974–1975 at Harvard University, and for the academic year 1975–1976 at the University of California, Berkeley. At the University ...
Go to Profile#2536
Alice Rogers
#40815
Overall Influence
Frances Alice Rogers is a British mathematician and mathematical physicist. She is an emeritus professor of mathematics at King's College London. Research Rogers' research concerns mathematical physics and more particularly supermanifolds, generalizations of the manifold concept based on ideas coming from supersymmetry. She is the author of the book Supermanifolds: Theory and Applications .
Go to Profile#2537
Philip Emeagwali
#13118
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Philip Emeagwali is a computer scientist originally from Nigeria. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for price-performance in high-performance computing applications, in an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel mathematical formulation and implementation. He is known for making controversial claims about his achievements that are disputed by the scientific community.
Go to Profile#2538
Ruth Aaronson Bari
#38022
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Ruth Aaronson Bari was an American mathematician known for her work in graph theory and algebraic homomorphisms. She was a professor at George Washington University, beginning in 1966. Career The daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States, Ruth Aaronson was born November 17, 1917, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
Go to Profile#2539
Jeff Rosenthal
#32148
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jeffrey Seth Rosenthal is a Canadian statistician and nonfiction author. He is a professor in the University of Toronto's department of statistics, cross-appointed with its department of mathematics.
Go to Profile#2540
Jiang Boju
#32917
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jiang Boju is a Chinese mathematician and a professor of Peking University, School of Mathematical Sciences. He is known for his contributions to topology. Honors He was elected to be a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980 and a fellow of TWAS in 1985.
Go to Profile#2541
Jerome H Friedman
#58105
Overall Influence
#2542
Annie Easley
#11313
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Annie Easley was an American computer scientist and accomplished mathemetician who made critical contributions to NASA’s rocket systems and energy technologies over her 34-year career. As a black female in America during the 1950s she faced heavy adversity throughout her career and was often underrepresented and disregarded. Despite these barriers Easley demonstrated perserverance and determination to make a name for herself in a line of work dominated by males. She demonstrated exceptional skills in mathematics, data analysis, and code development across projects focused on alternative energ...
Go to Profile#2543
Michael O'Nan
#56347
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Michael Ernest O'Nan was an American mathematician, specializing in group theory. O'Nan received his PhD in 1970 from Princeton University under Daniel Gorenstein with thesis A Characterization of the Three-Dimensional Projective Unitary Group over a Finite Field. He was a professor at Rutgers University. In 1976 he found strong evidence for the existence of a sporadic group, which Charles Sims constructed. The group is commonly called the O'Nan group after O'Nan.
Go to Profile#2544
Ravindra Bapat
#54750
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ravindra B. Bapat is an Indian mathematician known for the Bapat–Beg theorem. Education He obtained B.Sc. from University of Mumbai, M.Stat. from the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1981. His research interests include major contributions to matrix inequalities, matrices in graph theory, generalized inverses, and matrix analysis.
Go to Profile#2545
Warren Ewens
#15141
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Warren John Ewens is an Australian-born mathematician who has been Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1997. He concentrates his research on the mathematical, statistical and theoretical aspects of population genetics. Ewens has worked in mathematical population genetics, computational biology, and evolutionary population genetics. He introduced Ewens's sampling formula.
Go to Profile#2546
Marcos Dajczer
#50111
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Marcos Dajczer is an Argentine-born Brazilian mathematician whose research concerns geometry and topology. Dajczer obtained his Ph.D. from the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in 1980 under the supervision of Manfredo do Carmo.
Go to Profile#2547
Nicole Berline
#38756
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nicole Berline is a French mathematician. Life and work Berline studied from 1963 to 1966 at the and she was as an exchange student at the Moscow State University in Moscow in 1966/67. In 1967, she taught at the ENS de Jeunes filles and in 1971, she worked for the CNRS . In 1974 she received her doctorate at the University of Paris under the supervision of Jacques Dixmier . In 1976/77 she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1977 she became a professor at the University of Rennes 1 and she has taught at the Ecole Polytechnique since 1984.
Go to Profile#2548
Dima Grigoriev
#40284
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dima Grigoriev is a mathematician. His research interests include algebraic geometry, symbolic computation and computational complexity theory in computer algebra, with over 130 published articles.
Go to Profile#2549
Mathukumalli Vidyasagar
#15694
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mathukumalli Vidyasagar is a leading control theorist and a Fellow of Royal Society. He is currently a Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at IIT Hyderabad. Previously he was the Cecil & Ida Green Chair of Systems Biology Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to that he was an executive vice-president at Tata Consultancy Services where he headed the Advanced Technology Center. Earlier, he was the director of Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics , a DRDO defence lab in Bangalore. He is the son of eminent mathematician M V Subbarao.
Go to Profile#2550
David Avis
#26550
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David Michael Avis is a Canadian and British computer scientist known for his contributions to geometric computations. Avis is a professor in computational geometry and applied mathematics in the School of Computer Science, McGill University, in Montreal. Since 2010, he belongs to Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, School of Informatics, Kyoto University.
Go to Profile