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,
#2551
Marvin Greenberg
#48340
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Marvin Jay Greenberg was an American mathematician. Education Greenberg studied at Columbia University where he received his bachelor's degree in 1955 and received his doctorate 1959 from Princeton University under Serge Lang with the thesis Pro-Algebraic Structure on the Rational Subgroup of a P-Adic Abelian Variety.
Go to Profile#2552
Sven Leyffer
#33413
Overall Influence
Sven Leyffer is an American computational mathematician specializing in nonlinear optimization. He is a Senior Computational Mathematician in the Laboratory for Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, and Statistics at Argonne National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#2553
Iskander Taimanov
#58421
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Iskander Asanovich Taimanov is a Russian mathematician whose research concerns geometry, calculus of variations, and soliton theory. He is the chair of the department of geometry and topology of Novosibirsk State University.
Go to Profile#2554
John Monteith
#25544
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
John Lennox Monteith DSc, FRS was a British scientist who pioneered the application of physics to biology. He was an authority in the related fields of water management for agricultural production, soil physics, micrometeorology, transpiration, and the influence of the natural environment on field crops, horticultural crops, forestry, and animal production.
Go to Profile#2555
Erica Flapan
#46355
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Erica Flapan is an American mathematician, the Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. Education and career Flapan did her undergraduate studies at Hamilton College , graduating in 1977, and went on to graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of Daniel McMillan.
Go to Profile#2556
Michael Boardman
#52751
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
John Michael Boardman was a mathematician whose speciality was algebraic and differential topology. He was affiliated with the University of Cambridge, England and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Boardman was most widely known for his construction of the first rigorously correct model of the homotopy category of spectra.
Go to Profile#2557
Susan Murphy
#27044
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susan Allbritton Murphy is an American statistician, known for her work applying statistical methods to clinical trials of treatments for chronic and relapsing medical conditions. She is a professor at Harvard University, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2558
Alexander Holevo
#8374
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Alexander Semenovich Holevo is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, one of the pioneers of quantum information science. Biography Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow, since 1969. He graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1966, defended a PhD Thesis in 1969 and a Doctor of Science Thesis in 1975. Since 1986 A.S. Holevo is a Professor .
Go to Profile#2559
Olivier Faugeras
#26141
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Olivier Dominique Faugeras is a French computer scientist and director of research at Inria Sophia Antipolis. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Technologies, and recipient of the 2014 Okawa Prize for his pioneering contributions to computer vision and computational neuroscience.
Go to Profile#2560
Burton Rodin
#46077
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Burton Rodin is an American mathematician known for his research in conformal mappings and Riemann surfaces. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. Education Rodin received a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1961. His thesis, titled Reproducing Formulas on Riemann Surfaces, was written under the supervision of Leo Sario.
Go to Profile#2561
Yuan-Shih Chow
#46170
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Yuan-Shih Chow , also known as Y. S. Chow or Zhou Yuanshen, was a Chinese and American probabilist. He was Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, United States. Chow served as director-general of the Institute of Mathematics, Academia Sinica, and director of the Center of Applied Statistics, Nankai University . He was an academician of the Academia Sinica.
Go to Profile#2562
Irena Swanson
#36189
Overall Influence
Irena Swanson is an American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra. She is head of the Purdue University Department of Mathematics since 2020. She was a professor of mathematics at Reed College from 2005 to 2020.
Go to Profile#2563
Kanti Mardia
#53054
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Kantilal Vardichand "Kanti" Mardia is an Indian-British statistician specialising in directional statistics, multivariate analysis, geostatistics, statistical bioinformatics and statistical shape analysis. He was born in Sirohi, Rajasthan, India in a Jain family and now resides and works in Leeds. He is known for his series of tests of multivariate normality based measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis as well as work on the statistical measures of shape.
Go to Profile#2564
Abraham Nemeth
#25914
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Abraham Nemeth was an American mathematician. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Detroit Mercy in Detroit, Michigan. Nemeth was blind and is known for developing Nemeth Braille, a system for blind people to read and write mathematics.
Go to Profile#2565
Michael Schlessinger
#58563
Overall Influence
Michael Schlessinger is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who worked in algebraic geometry. Career Schlessinger obtained his Ph.D. in 1964 from Harvard University, under the supervision of John Tate.
Go to Profile#2566
Moni Naor
#7895
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Moni Naor is an Israeli computer scientist, currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Manuel Blum.
Go to Profile#2567
Peter Jones
#51341
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Wilcox Jones is a mathematician at Yale University, known for his work in harmonic analysis and fractal geometry. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978, under the supervision of John B. Garnett. He received the Salem Prize in 1981. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences , the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He is not related to the mathematician Vaughan Jones.
Go to Profile#2568
Wilfried de Beauclair
#28174
Overall Influence
1912 - 2020 (108 years)
Wilfried de Beauclair was a Swiss-born German engineer and computer scientist. His work on automated computing technology makes him one of the first-generation computer pioneers. Biography De Beauclair was born on 4 April 1912 in Ascona, Switzerland, as the second son of the painting couple Alexander Wilhelm de Beauclair and Friederike de Beauclair. He grew up with his brother Gotthard de Beauclair in the artists' colony on Monte Verità. In 1920, his mother moved with the two children to Darmstadt, where the family came from. From 1921 to 1930 he went to school in Darmstadt.
Go to Profile#2569
Bernhard Korte
#48053
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Bernhard H. Korte is a German mathematician and computer scientist, a professor at the University of Bonn, and an expert in combinatorial optimization. Biography Korte earned his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1967. His thesis was entitled "Beiträge zur Theorie der Hardy'schen Funktionenklassen" , and was supervised by Ernst Peschl and Walter Thimm. He earned his habilitation in 1971, and briefly held faculty positions at Regensburg University and Bielefeld University before joining the University of Bonn as a faculty member in 1972. At the University of Bonn, Korte is the director...
Go to Profile#2570
Tyler VanderWeele
#18891
Overall Influence
Tyler J. VanderWeele is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also the co-director of Harvard University's Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality, the director of their Human Flourishing Program, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance, and biostatistics.
Go to Profile#2571
George Szpiro
#28563
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
George Geza Szpiro is an Israeli–Swiss author, journalist, and mathematician. He has written articles and books on popular mathematics and related topics. Life and career Szpiro was born in Vienna in 1950, and moved to Zug, Switzerland, in 1961. He obtained a master's degree in mathematics and physics from ETH Zurich. He also obtained an MBA from Stanford University, in 1975. Afterward, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. In 1984, he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematical economics from Hebrew University.
Go to Profile#2572
Narutaka Ozawa
#56298
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
is a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in operator algebras and discrete groups. He has been a professor at Kyoto University since 2013. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1997 from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 2000 from the same institution. One year later he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Texas A&M University. He was selected for one of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships in 2005 and was an invited speaker at the 2006 ICM in Madrid where he gave a talk on "Amenable actions and Applications". He has won numerous prizes including the...
Go to Profile#2573
Carl R. de Boor
#18508
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor is a German-American mathematician and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1993, de Boor was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to numerical analysis and methods in particular numerical tools used in computer-aided design.
Go to Profile#2574
Monique Laurent
#40954
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Monique Laurent is a French computer scientist and mathematician who is an expert in mathematical optimization. She is a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam where she is also a member of the Management Team. Laurent also holds a part-time position as a professor of econometrics and operations research at Tilburg University.
Go to Profile#2575
Dror Bar-Natan
#44379
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Dror Bar-Natan is a professor at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics, Canada. His main research interests include knot theory, finite type invariants, and Khovanov homology. Education Bar-Natan earned his B.Sc. in mathematics at Tel Aviv University in 1984. After performing his military service as a teacher, he went to study at Princeton University in 1987. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1991, under the direction of physicist Edward Witten.
Go to Profile#2576
Feliks Barański
#55260
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Feliks Barański was a Polish mathematician and an active member of the so-called Lwów School of Mathematics. Born May 1915 in Lwów, Austria-Hungary , he joined the circle of young, talented mathematicians formed around Stefan Banach and Hugo Steinhaus. During the period of German occupation of his hometown he made his living as a lice feeder in the institute of Rudolf Weigl. Expelled from Lwow after the war, he settled in Kraków, where he joined the local Kraków University of Technology. He was also admitted into the Polish Mathematics Society.
Go to Profile#2577
David W. Henderson
#47239
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
David Wilson Henderson was a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at Cornell University. His work ranges from the study of topology, algebraic geometry, history of mathematics and exploratory mathematics for teaching prospective mathematics teachers. His papers in the philosophy of mathematics place him with the intuitionist school of philosophy of mathematics. His practical geometry, which he put to work and discovered in his carpentry work, gives a perspective of geometry as the understanding of the infinite spaces through local properties. Euclidean geometry i...
Go to Profile#2578
Geir Ellingsrud
#48435
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Geir Ellingsrud is professor of mathematics at the University of Oslo, where he specialises in algebra and algebraic geometry. He took the cand.real. degree at the University of Oslo in 1973, and the doctorate at Stockholm University in 1982. He was a lecturer at Stockholm University from 1982 to 1984, associate professor at the University of Oslo from 1984 to 1989, professor at the University of Bergen from 1989 to 1993 and at the University of Oslo since 1993. He has been a visiting scholar in Nice, Paris, Bonn and Chicago. He has edited the journals Acta Mathematica and Normat.
Go to Profile#2579
Malabika Pramanik
#44249
Overall Influence
Malabika Pramanik is a Canadian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Her interests include harmonic analysis, complex variables, and partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#2580
Katherine E. Stange
#43255
Overall Influence
Katherine E. Stange is a Canadian-American mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a number theorist specializing in topics in arithmetic geometry.
Go to Profile#2581
Jan Philip Solovej
#42889
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jan Philip Solovej is a Danish mathematician and mathematical physicist working on the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics. He is a professor at University of Copenhagen. Biography Solovej obtained his Ph.D. in 1989 from Princeton University with the thesis on "Universality in the Thomas-Fermi-von Weizsäcker Model of Atoms and Molecules" supervised by Elliott H. Lieb. As a post-doctoral researcher, he went to the University of Michigan in 1989/90 and to the University of Toronto in 1990. In 1991 he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1991 to 1995, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#2582
Umberto Zannier
#55031
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Umberto Zannier is an Italian mathematician, specializing in number theory and Diophantine geometry. Education Zannier earned a Laurea degree from University of Pisa and studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa with Ph.D. supervised by Enrico Bombieri.
Go to Profile#2583
Otto Rössler
#39836
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Otto Eberhard Rössler is a German biochemist known for his work on chaos theory and the theoretical equation known as the Rössler attractor. He is best known to the general public for his involvement in a failed lawsuit to halt the Large Hadron Collider due to fears that it would generate mini black holes.
Go to Profile#2584
Johannes Runnenburg
#53293
Overall Influence
1932 - 2008 (76 years)
Johannes Theodorus Runnenburg was a Dutch mathematician and professor of probability theory and analysis at the University of Amsterdam from 1962 to 1997. Biography Born in Amsterdam he received his MA in Mathematics in 1956 at the University of Amsterdam, and his PhD cum laude in Mathematics and Physics in 1960 with a thesis entitled "On the Use of Markov Processes in One-server Waiting-time Problems and Renewal Theory" advised by Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn.
Go to Profile#2585
Tanja Eisner
#54403
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Tatjana Eisner is a German and Ukrainian mathematician specializing in functional analysis, operator theory as well as ergodic theory and its connection to number theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Leipzig University.
Go to Profile#2586
Della Dumbaugh
#44966
Overall Influence
Della Jeanne Dumbaugh is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, focusing on the history of algebra and number theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Richmond, and the editor-in-chief of The American Mathematical Monthly.
Go to Profile#2587
Thomas G. Kurtz
#53016
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Thomas G. Kurtz is an American emeritus professor of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Wisconsin-Madison known for his research contributions to many areas of probability theory and stochastic processes. In particular, Kurtz’s research focuses on convergence, approximation and representation of several important classes of Markov processes. His findings appear in scientific disciplines such as systems biology, population genetics, telecommunications networks and mathematical finance.
Go to Profile#2588
Sediq Afghan
#27114
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sediq Afghan is an Afghan mathematician. He is the founder and head of the World Philosophical Math Research Center in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is also a political activist. He had a prominent role in protests in Kabul about Afghanistan- and Islam-related issues, including an anti-American protest in 2003, a hunger strike to protest beatings of journalists by Afghan security officers in 2006, and another one to protest the 2008 Danish Muhammad cartoons.
Go to Profile#2589
Nikolai Shanin
#29912
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Shanin was a Russian mathematician who worked on topology and constructive mathematics. He introduced the delta-system lemma and the caliber of a topological space. Further reading
Go to Profile#2590
Enrico Giovannini
#9648
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Enrico Giovannini is an Italian economist, statistician and academic, member of the Club of Rome. Since February 2021, he has been serving as Minister of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility in the Draghi Government. From April 2013 to February 2014, he served as Minister of Labour and Social Policies in the Letta Government. From 2009 to 2013, he held the office of President of the Italian National Institute of Statistics .
Go to Profile#2591
Lawrence Zalcman
#55728
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Lawrence Allen Zalcman was a professor of Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His research primarily concerned Complex analysis, potential theory, and the relations of these ideas to approximation theory, harmonic analysis, integral geometry and partial differential equations. On top of his scientific achievements, Zalcman received numerous awards for mathematical exposition, including the Chauvenet Prize in 1976, the Lester R. Ford Award in 1975 and 1981, and the Paul R. Halmos – Lester R. Ford Award in 2017. In addition to Bar-Ilan University, Zalcman taught at the University of ...
Go to Profile#2592
Eckhard Meinrenken
#51657
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Eckhard Meinrenken is a German-Canadian mathematician working in differential geometry and mathematical physics. He is a professor at University of Toronto. Education and career Meinrenken studied Physics at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where he obtained a Diplom in 1990 and a PhD in 1994, with a thesis entitled Vielfachheitsformeln für die Quantisierung von Phasenräumen , under the supervision of .
Go to Profile#2593
Robert Lazarsfeld
#51820
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert Kendall Lazarsfeld is an American mathematician, currently a professor at Stony Brook University. He was previously the Raymond L. Wilder Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. He is the son of two sociologists, Paul Lazarsfeld and Patricia Kendall. His research focuses on algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#2594
Alice S. Whittemore
#38908
Overall Influence
Alice Segers Whittemore is an American epidemiologist and biostatistician who studies the effects of genetics and lifestyle on cancer, after an earlier career as a pure mathematician studying group theory. She works as a professor of health research and policy and of biomedical data science at Stanford University, and has served as president of the International Biometric Society.
Go to Profile#2595
Andrzej Trybulec
#36629
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Andrzej Wojciech Trybulec was a Polish mathematician and computer scientist noted for work on the Mizar system. Early years His parents Jan W. Trybulec and Barbara H. Kurlus both were professional pharmacists who owned a chemists shop in a small town Szczucin near the city of Tarnów in the south-eastern Poland where they dispensed medicines. He went to high school in Ruda Śląska and then, on his own initiative, he transferred to a prestigious high school in Kraków, where he matriculated. He studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, from 1964 to 1966 he lectured at the Chair of Geometry, in 1966 he graduated to the magister degree.
Go to Profile#2596
Megumi Harada
#56953
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Megumi Harada is a mathematician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at McMaster University, where she holds a tier-two Canada Research Chair in Equivariant Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry.
Go to Profile#2597
Andrzej Piotr Ruszczyński
#32305
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Andrzej Piotr Ruszczyński is a Polish-American applied mathematician, noted for his contributions to mathematical optimization, in particular, stochastic programming and risk-averse optimization. Schooling and positions Ruszczyński was born and educated in Poland. In 1969 he won the XX Polish Mathematical Olympiad. After graduating in 1974 with a master's degree from the Department of Electronics, Warsaw University of Technology, he joined the Institute of Automatic Control at this school. In 1977 he received his PhD degree for a dissertation on control of large-scale systems, and in 1983 Habilitation, for a dissertation on nonlinear stochastic programming.
Go to Profile#2598
Helmut Röhrl
#56541
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Helmut Röhrl or Rohrl was a German mathematician. Besides complex analysis , he worked on algebra and category theory and totally convex spaces. In 1964 he edited the new edition of the classic textbook on complex analysis by Adolf Hurwitz and Richard Courant.
Go to Profile#2599
Sergio Doplicher
#51090
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Sergio Doplicher is an Italian mathematical physicist, who mainly dealt with the mathematical foundations of quantum field theory and quantum gravity. Biography Sergio Doplicher graduated in Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1963 under the supervision of Giovanni Jona-Lasinio. From 1976 to 2011 he was full professor of quantum mechanics in the mathematics department of Sapienza University, retiring there in 2011 as professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#2600
V. S. Sunder
#48624
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Professor Vaikalathur Shankar Sunder is an Indian mathematician who specialises in subfactors, operator algebras and functional analysis in general. In 1996, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the mathematical sciences category.
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