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,
#2601
Valery Senderov
#31278
Overall Influence
1945 - 2014 (69 years)
Valery Senderov was a Soviet dissident, mathematician, teacher, and advocate of human rights known for his struggle against state-sponsored antisemitism. Biography Senderov was born on 17 March 1945 in Moscow. In 1962, he was accepted at the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he studied mathematics. In 1968, just before completing his doctoral dissertation, Senderov was expelled for the dissemination of "philosophical literature", which was a euphemism for anything that was viewed by the censors as being anti-Soviet. He was given the opportunity to complete his degr...
Go to Profile#2602
Santiago López de Medrano
#59039
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Santiago López de Medrano Sánchez is a Mexican mathematician, who works as a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . His research has concerned knot theory, singularity theory, biomathematics, and differential topology.
Go to Profile#2603
Jang-Mei Wu
#51426
Overall Influence
Jang-Mei Wu is a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in complex analysis, potential theory, quasiconformal mapping, and partial differential equations. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#2604
Richard A. Tapia
#26178
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Richard Alfred Tapia is an American mathematician and University Professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the university's highest academic title. In 2011, President Obama awarded Tapia the National Medal of Science. He is currently the Maxfield and Oshman Professor of Engineering; Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Office of Research and Graduate Studies; and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University.
Go to Profile#2605
Cristian S. Calude
#17726
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Cristian Sorin Calude is a Romanian-New Zealander mathematician and computer scientist. Biography After graduating from the Vasile Alecsandri National College in Galați, he studied at the University of Bucharest, where he was student of Grigore C. Moisil and Solomon Marcus. Calude received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest under the direction of Solomon Marcus in 1977.
Go to Profile#2606
Jacques Deny
#44744
Overall Influence
1916 - 2016 (100 years)
Jacques Deny was a French mathematician. He made notable contributions to the field of analysis, in particular potential theory. External links
Go to Profile#2607
Alexandru Dimca
#39487
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alexandru Dimca is a Romanian mathematician, who works in algebraic geometry at University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. Education and career Dimca competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1970, 1971, and 1972, earning two bronze medals and one silver medal. He obtained his PhD in 1981 from the University of Bucharest; his thesis "Stable mappings and singularities", was written under the direction of Gheorghe Galbură. His Google Scholar h-index is 24.
Go to Profile#2608
John Mackintosh Howie
#38211
Overall Influence
1936 - 2011 (75 years)
John Mackintosh Howie was a Scottish mathematician and prominent semigroup theorist. Biography Howie was educated at Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen, the University of Aberdeen and Balliol College, Oxford, where he wrote a Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Graham Higman.
Go to Profile#2609
János Körner
#31027
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
János Körner is a Hungarian mathematician who works on information theory and combinatorics. Körner studied Mathematics at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest with a degree in 1970 and was then at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until 1992. From 1981 to 1983 he was at the Bell Laboratories and in 1987–88 at Télécom Paris in Paris. He has been a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome since 1993.
Go to Profile#2610
Don Berry
#46443
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Donald Arthur Berry is an American statistician and a practitioner and proponent of Bayesian statistics in medical science. He was the chairman of the Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center from 1999-2010, where he played a role in the use of Bayesian methods to develop innovative, adaptive clinical trials. He is best known for the development of statistical theory relating to the design of clinical trials. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He founded Berry ...
Go to Profile#2611
Hazel Perfect
#43442
Overall Influence
Hazel Perfect was a British mathematician specialising in combinatorics. Contributions Perfect was known for inventing gammoids, for her work with Leon Mirsky on doubly stochastic matrices, for her three books Topics in Geometry, Topics in Algebra, and Independence Theory in Combinatorics, and for her work as a translator of Pavel Alexandrov's book An Introduction to the Theory of Groups .
Go to Profile#2612
Philip Woodward
#9310
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Philip Mayne Woodward was a British mathematician, radar engineer and horologist. He achieved notable success in all three fields. Before retiring, he was a deputy chief scientific officer at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence in Malvern, Worcestershire.
Go to Profile#2613
Bertram Huppert
#53698
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Bertram Huppert is a German mathematician specializing in group theory and the representation theory of finite groups. His Endliche Gruppen is an influential textbook in group theory, and he has over 50 doctoral descendants.
Go to Profile#2614
Murray S. Klamkin
#44884
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Murray Seymour Klamkin was an American mathematician, known as prolific proposer and editor of professionally-challenging mathematical problems. Life Klamkin was born on March 5, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from the Cooper Union in 1942 and, after four years of service in the United States Army, earned a master's degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1947, where he taught from 1948 until 1957.
Go to Profile#2615
L. R. Ford Jr.
#28358
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Lester Randolph Ford Jr. was an American mathematician specializing in network flow problems. He was the son of mathematician Lester R. Ford Sr. Ford's paper with D. R. Fulkerson on the maximum flow problem and the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm for solving it, published as a technical report in 1954 and in a journal in 1956, established the max-flow min-cut theorem. In 1962 they published Flows in Networks with Princeton University Press. According to the preface, it "included topics that were purely mathematically motivated, together with those that are strictly utilitarian in concept." In his review, S.W.
Go to Profile#2616
Ronald C. Read
#47602
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Ronald Cedric Read was a British mathematician, latterly a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He published many books and papers, primarily on enumeration of graphss, graph isomorphism, chromatic polynomials, and particularly, the use of computers in graph-theoretical research. A majority of his later work was done in Waterloo. Read received his Ph.D. in graph theory from the University of London.
Go to Profile#2617
Józef H. Przytycki
#48088
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Józef Henryk Przytycki , is a Polish mathematician specializing in the fields of knot theory and topology. Academic background Przytycki received a Master of Science degree in mathematics from University of Warsaw in 1977 and a PhD in mathematics from Columbia University advised by Joan Birman. Przytycki then returned to Poland, where he became an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. From 1986 to 1995 he held visiting positions at the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, Michigan State University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the...
Go to Profile#2618
Denny Gulick
#50635
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Denny Gulick, born Sidney Lewis Gulick III, is a professor of mathematics at University of Maryland, College Park. Life Gulick obtained his PhD from Yale University, with his main interest of operator theory. He is the leader of College Mathematics in Maryland, and is active in statewide college education and policies.
Go to Profile#2619
David Hand
#15853
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David John Hand is a British statistician. His research interests include multivariate statistics, classification methods, pattern recognition, computational statistics and the foundations of statistics. He has written technical books on statistics, data mining, finance, classification methods, and measuring wellbeing, as well as science popularisation books including The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day; Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters; and Statistics: A Very Short Introduction. In 1991 he launched the journal Statistics and Co...
Go to Profile#2620
László Pyber
#57440
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
László Pyber is a Hungarian mathematician. He is a researcher at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest. He works in combinatorics and group theory. Biography Pyber received his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1989 under the direction of László Lovász and Gyula O.H. Katona with the thesis Extremal Structures and Covering Problems.
Go to Profile#2621
Evgeny Sklyanin
#54992
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Evgeny Konstantinovich Sklyanin is a mathematical physicist, currently a professor of mathematics at the University of York. His research is in the fields of integrable systems and quantum groups. His major contributions are in the theory of quantum integrable systems, separation of variables, special functions.
Go to Profile#2622
Irene Stegun
#32591
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Irene Ann Stegun was an American mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards who edited a classic book of mathematical tables called A Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as Abramowitz and Stegun.
Go to Profile#2623
Victor Andreevich Toponogov
#56198
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Victor Andreevich Toponogov was an outstanding Russian mathematician, noted for his contributions to differential geometry and so-called Riemannian geometry "in the large". Biography After finishing secondary school in 1948, Toponogov entered the department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Tomsk State University, graduated with honours in 1953, and continued as a graduate student there until 1956. He moved to an institution in Novosibirsk in 1956 and lived in that city for the rest of his career. Since the institution at Novosibirsk had not yet been fully credentialed, he had defended his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#2624
Lokenath Debnath
#51663
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Lokenath Debnath was an Indian-American mathematician. Biography Debnath was born on September 30, 1935, in India. He received both Masters and a doctorate degree from University of Calcutta in Pure Mathematics in 1965. He obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at University of London in 1967. His doctoral advisor was Simon Rosenblat. He was a professor of mathematics at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He was a professor at University of Central Florida from 1983 to 2001.
Go to Profile#2625
Dominique Foata
#41811
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dominique Foata is a mathematician who works in enumerative combinatorics. With Pierre Cartier and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger he pioneered the modern approach to classical combinatorics, that lead, in part, to the current blossoming of algebraic combinatorics. His pioneering work on permutation statistics, and his combinatorial approach to special functions, are especially notable.
Go to Profile#2626
David Webb
#49638
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Webb is an American mathematician known for his work on hearing the shape of a drum. Webb attended Cornell University, where he received his PhD in 1983 under the supervision of Kenneth Stephen Brown. He is currently a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Go to Profile#2627
Oscar Randal-Williams
#46272
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Oscar Randal-Williams is a British mathematician and professor at the University of Cambridge, working in topology. He studied mathematics at the University of Oxford , where he wrote his doctoral thesis Stable moduli spaces of manifolds under the supervision of Ulrike Tillmann. Since 2012 he has been at the University of Cambridge, since 2017 as reader and since 2020 as professor. From 1 January 2024, he will be the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics.
Go to Profile#2628
Peter Jaeckel
#28797
Overall Influence
Peter Jaeckel is a mathematician, finance professor and market practitioner. He is the managing director of OTC Analytics. He also teaches at the Certificate of Quantitative Finance programme and at Oxford University. Previously, he was a managing director at VTB Europe and VTB Capital . Before that, Global Head of Credit, Hybrid, Inflation, and Commodity Derivative Analytics at ABN Amro, and also held several positions at Nikko Securities, NatWest , and Commerzbank Securities' product development group. He is the author of the bestselling Monte Carlo methods in finance . In mathematics, h...
Go to Profile#2629
James B. Orlin
#34247
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
James Berger Orlin is an American operations researcher, the Edward Pennell Brooks Professor in Management and Professor of Operations Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Biography Orlin did his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1974. In 1976, he earned two master's degrees, an MSc from California Institute of Technology and an MMath from University of Waterloo. Orlin received his Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981 under the supervision of Arthur Fales Veinott Jr. He joined the MIT fa...
Go to Profile#2630
Aviezri Fraenkel
#25314
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Aviezri Siegmund Fraenkel is an Israeli mathematician who has made contributions to combinatorial game theory. Biography Aviezri Siegmund Fraenkel was born in Munich, Germany, to a Jewish family, which then moved to Switzerland soon thereafter. In 1939 his family moved once more, to Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#2631
Henri Gillet
#50056
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Henri Antoine Gillet is an American mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry and algebraic geometry. Education and career Gillet received in 1974 his bachelor's degree from King’s College London and in 1978 his Ph.D. from Harvard University under David Mumford with thesis Applications of Algebraic K-Theory to Intersection Theory. As a postdoc he was an instructor and from 1981 an assistant professor at Princeton University. He became in 1984 an assistant professor, in 1986 an associate professor, and in 1988 a full professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was from 1996 to 2001 the head of the department of mathematics, statistics, and computer science.
Go to Profile#2632
Marc Culler
#38416
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Marc Edward Culler is an American mathematician who works in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. A native Californian, Culler did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara and his graduate work at Berkeley where he graduated in 1978. He is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Culler is the son of Glen Jacob Culler who was an important early innovator in the development of the Internet.
Go to Profile#2633
Jean Ginibre
#23854
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Jean Ginibre was a French mathematical physicist. He is known for his contributions to random matrix theory , statistical mechanics , and partial differential equations. With Martine Le Berre and Yves Pomeau, he provided a kinetic theory for the emission of photons by an atom maintained in an excited state by an intense field that creates Rabi oscillations. He received the Paul Langevin Prize in 1969.
Go to Profile#2634
Amanda Chetwynd
#36330
Overall Influence
Amanda G. Chetwynd is a British mathematician and statistician specializing in combinatorics and spatial statistics. She is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Provost for Student Experience, Colleges and the Library at Lancaster University, and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Go to Profile#2635
Jean-Marc Deshouillers
#47442
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Marc Deshouillers is a French mathematician, specializing in analytic number theory. He is a professor at the University of Bordeaux. Education and career Deshouillers attended the Paris École Polytechnique, graduating with an engineer diploma in 1968.
Go to Profile#2636
Yiqun Lisa Yin
#25579
Overall Influence
Yiqun Lisa Yin is a Chinese-American cryptographer and independent security consultant. Yin is known for breaking the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function, for developing the RC6 block cipher, and for her service as editor of the IEEE P1363 project for the standardization of public-key cryptography.
Go to Profile#2637
Eric Weinstein
#14015
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eric Ross Weinstein is an American hedge fund director and podcast host. He was the joint managing director for Thiel Capital from 2013 until 2022. He has a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard.
Go to Profile#2638
Andreas Blass
#19419
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Andreas Raphael Blass is a mathematician, currently a professor at the University of Michigan. He works in mathematical logic, particularly set theory, and theoretical computer science. Blass graduated from the University of Detroit, where he was a Putnam Fellow in 1965, in 1966 with a B.S. in physics. He received his Ph.D. in 1970 from Harvard University, with a thesis on Orderings of Ultrafilters written under the supervision of Frank Wattenberg. Since 1970 he has been employed by the University of Michigan, first as a T.H. Hildebrandt Research Instructor , then assistant professor , assoc...
Go to Profile#2639
Barbara Niethammer
#49582
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Barbara Niethammer is a German mathematician and materials scientist who works as a professor at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn. Her research concerns partial differential equations for physical materials, and in particular the phenomenon of Ostwald ripening by which particles in liquids grow over time.
Go to Profile#2640
Gerhard J. Woeginger
#17524
Overall Influence
1964 - 2022 (58 years)
Gerhard J. Woeginger was an Austrian mathematician and computer scientist who worked in Germany as a professor at RWTH Aachen University, where he chaired the algorithms and complexity group in the department of computer science.
Go to Profile#2641
Arto Salomaa
#22967
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Arto K. Salomaa is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. His research career, which spans over forty years, is focused on formal languages and automata theory. Early life and education Salomaa was born in Turku, Finland on June 6, 1934. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Turku in 1954 and a PhD from the same university in 1960. Salomaa's father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Turku. Salomaa was introduced to the theory of automata and formal languages during seminars at Berkeley given by John Myhill in 1957.
Go to Profile#2642
Ruth Baker
#36653
Overall Influence
Ruth Elizabeth Baker is a British applied mathematician and mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford whose research interests include pattern formation, morphogenesis, and the mathematical modeling of cell biology and developmental biology.
Go to Profile#2643
Aretha Teckentrup
#46704
Overall Influence
Aretha Leonore Teckentrup is a UK-based mathematician, known for her research on uncertainty quantification and numerical analysis. Her work focuses on multilevel Monte Carlo methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations, Gaussian processes and Bayesian inference. She is a reader in the mathematics of data science at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#2644
Jean-Claude Sikorav
#34051
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jean-Claude Sikorav is a French mathematician. He is professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon. He is specialized in symplectic geometry. Main contributions Sikorav is known for his proof, joint with François Laudenbach, of the Arnold conjecture for Lagrangian intersections in cotangent bundles, as well as for introducing generating families in symplectic topology.
Go to Profile#2645
Donald A. S. Fraser
#40014
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Donald Alexander Stuart Fraser was a Canadian statistician, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. In 2012 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for his influence in the advancement of the statistical sciences in Canada. In 1961 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 1985, he was awarded the first Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada. In 2014 he was chosen as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to the theory and foundations of statistics, as well as for leadership and influence on the advanceme...
Go to Profile#2646
Christian Krattenthaler
#42279
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christian Friedrich Krattenthaler is an Austrian mathematician. He is a professor of discrete mathematics . From 2016 to 2020 he has been the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#2647
Carlo Cercignani
#42744
Overall Influence
1939 - 2010 (71 years)
Carlo Cercignani was an Italian mathematician known for his work on the kinetic theory of gases. His contributions to the study of Boltzmann's equation include the proof of the H-theorem for polyatomic gases. The Cercignani conjecture is named after him.
Go to Profile#2648
Andrzej Białynicki-Birula
#55447
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Andrzej Białynicki-Birula was a Polish mathematician, best known for his work on algebraic geometry. He was considered one of the pioneers of differential algebra. He was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2649
Nancy Reid
#50778
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nancy Margaret Reid is a Canadian theoretical statistician. She is a professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory. In 2015 Reid became Director of the Canadian Institute for Statistical Sciences.
Go to Profile#2650
Ismat Beg
#5853
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ismat Beg, FPAS, FIMA, is a Pakistani mathematician and researcher. Beg is a professor at Lahore School of Economics, Higher Education Commission Distinguished National Professor and an honorary full professor at the Mathematics Division at the Ruggero Santilli Institute for Basic Research, Florida, US. He has an enthusiastic and interactive teaching style and is famous for saying “please come on the board” when posed with a question in class. This helps uplift the students’ confidence.
Go to Profile