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,
#2701
Helga Baum
#54469
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Helga Baum is a German mathematician. She is professor for differential geometry and global analysis in the Institute for Mathematics of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Education Baum earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1980 at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her dissertation, Spin-Strukturen und Dirac-Operatoren über Pseudoriemannschen Mannigfaltigkeiten, was supervised by .
Go to Profile#2702
Sandi Klavžar
#50084
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sandi Klavžar is a Slovenian mathematician working in the area of graph theory and its applications. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Ljubljana. Education Klavžar received his Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana in 1990, under the supervision of Wilfried Imrich and Tomaž Pisanski.
Go to Profile#2703
Jaikumar Radhakrishnan
#42681
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jaikumar Radhakrishnan is an Indian computer scientist specialising in combinatorics and communication complexity. He has served as dean of the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, where he is currently a senior professor.
Go to Profile#2704
Fanghua Lin
#61509
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Fanghua Lin , also written as Fang-Hua Lin, is a Chinese-born American mathematician. He is currently the Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He applies rigorous analysis to nonlinear systems and is a leader in this field.
Go to Profile#2705
Péter Komjáth
#54670
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Péter Komjáth is a Hungarian mathematician, working in set theory, especially combinatorial set theory. Komjáth is a professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University. He is currently a visiting faculty member at Emory University in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
Go to Profile#2706
Francis B. Hildebrand
#36153
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Francis Begnaud Hildebrand was an American mathematician. He was a Professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1940 until 1984. Hildebrand was known for his many influential textbooks in mathematics and numerical analysis.
Go to Profile#2707
Ivar Stakgold
#45844
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Ivar Stakgold was a Norwegian-born American academic mathematician and bridge player from Newark, Delaware. As the sole author of two books he specialized in boundary value problems . Life Stakgold was born in Oslo, Norway to parents with Russian-Jewish heritage. He studied applied mathematics at Harvard University and earned the Ph.D. in 1949 with a dissertation, The Cauchy Relations In A Molecular Theory of Elasticity, under Léon Nicolas Brillouin. He was professor emeritus of mathematical sciences at the University of Delaware and a researcher at the University of California, San Diego. He...
Go to Profile#2708
Nina Snaith
#48536
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Nina Claire Snaith is a British mathematician at the University of Bristol working in random matrix theory and quantum chaos. Education Snaith was educated at the University of Bristol where she received her PhD in 2000 for research supervised by Jonathan Keating.
Go to Profile#2709
David Shale
#54295
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
David Winston Howard Shale was a New Zealand-American mathematician, specializing in the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. He is known as one of the namesakes of the Segal–Shale-Weil representation.
Go to Profile#2710
Michael Katehakis
#24867
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael N. Katehakis is a Professor of Management Science at Rutgers University. He is noted for his work in Markov decision process, Gittins index, the multi-armed bandit, Markov chains and other related fields.
Go to Profile#2711
Mark Krasnoselsky
#44597
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Mark Aleksandrovich Krasnoselsky was a Soviet and Russian mathematician renowned for his work on nonlinear functional analysis and its applications. Biography Early years Mark Krasnoselsky was born in Starokostiantyniv, where his father worked as a construction engineer and his mother taught in an elementary school. In 1932 the Krasnoselsky family moved to Berdiansk and in 1938 Mark entered the physico-mathematical faculty of Kyiv University, which was evacuated at the beginning of World War II to Kazakhstan where it became known as the Joint Ukrainian University.
Go to Profile#2712
David Schweickart
#6602
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Schweickart is an American mathematician and philosopher. He holds a BS in Mathematics from the University of Dayton, a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Virginia, and a PhD in Philosophy from Ohio State University. He currently is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.
Go to Profile#2713
Boris Komrakov
#60373
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Boris Petrovich Komrakov is a Russian mathematician, who works on Lie groups. Komrakov received his PhD in 1991 at the University of Tartu in Estonia with thesis Primitive Actions and the Sophus Lie Problem; however, while living in Minsk he had published papers since the 1970s. He is a professor and the director of the International Sophus Lie Center founded in 1990 in Minsk; the center collaborates with the University of Oslo. In 1997 Komrakov received the Lobachevsky Medal fof his work on the theory of Lie groups, in particular for Primitive Actions and the Sophus Lie Problem and the book Structures on Manifolds and Homogeneous Spaces.
Go to Profile#2714
Ely Merzbach
#47380
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ely Yissachar Merzbach is an Israeli mathematician and emeritus professor at Bar-Ilan University's Department of Mathematics and the Gonda Brain Research Center. Biography Ely Merzbach was born in 1950 in Paris, where he attended École Yabné. He immigrated to Israel at the age of 17, studying for a year at Yeshivat Be'er Ya'akov and then enlisting in the Nahal Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces. He obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics and statistics and an M.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed his doctoral studies in 1979 at Ben-Gurion University of the Nege...
Go to Profile#2715
Mary Rees
#52729
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Susan Mary Rees, FRS is a British mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Liverpool since 2018, specialising in research in complex dynamical systems. Career Rees was born in Cambridge. After obtaining her BA in 1974 and MSc in 1975 at St Hugh's College, Oxford, she did research in mathematics under the direction of Bill Parry at the University of Warwick, obtaining a PhD in 1978. Her first postdoctoral position was at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1978 to 1979. Later she worked at Institut des hautes études scientifiques and the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#2716
Erwin Engeler
#29261
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Erwin Engeler is a Swiss mathematician who did pioneering work on the interrelations between logic, computer science and scientific computation in the 20th century. He was one of Paul Bernays' students at the ETH Zürich.
Go to Profile#2717
Bo Berndtsson
#61757
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bo Berndtsson , is a Swedish mathematician. His main contributions concern the theory of several complex variables and complex geometry. He gained in 1971 a BA degree from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and obtained his PhD in 1977 under the direction of Tord Ganelius. Since 1996 he has been a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. He has also been a guest professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, Université de Paris, Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, UAB in Barcelona and IPN in Mexico City. Berndtsson has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2003.
Go to Profile#2718
Prasad V. Tetali
#45479
Overall Influence
Prasad V. Tetali is an Indian-American mathematician and computer scientist who works as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His research concerns probability theory, discrete mathematics, and approximation algorithms.
Go to Profile#2719
Robert Hermann
#54198
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Robert C. Hermann was an American mathematician and mathematical physicist. In the 1960s Hermann worked on elementary particle physics and quantum field theory, and published books which revealed the interconnections between vector bundles on Riemannian manifolds and gauge theory in physics, before these interconnections became "common knowledge" among physicists in the 1970s.
Go to Profile#2720
Giovanni Felder
#49401
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Giovanni Felder is a Swiss mathematical physicist and mathematician, working at ETH Zurich. He specializes in algebraic and geometric properties of integrable models of statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.
Go to Profile#2721
Seymour Geisser
#44882
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Seymour Geisser was an American statistician noted for emphasizing predictive inference. In his book Predictive Inference: An Introduction, he held that conventional statistical inference about unobservable population parameters amounts to inference about things that do not exist, following the work of Bruno de Finetti. He also pioneered the theory of cross-validation.
Go to Profile#2722
Bernd Siebert
#61208
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Bernd Siebert is a German mathematician who researches in algebraic geometry. Life Siebert studied mathematics starting 1984 at the University of Erlangen. In 1986, he changed to the University of Bonn and in 1987 to the University of Göttingen where he finished his Diplom in 1989 under the supervision of Hans Grauert with distinction. He became Grauert's PhD student and assistant in Göttingen. He received his PhD in 1992 . A stay at the Courant Institute followed in 1993–94 after which we went to Bochum. In 1997–98 he spent some time at the MIT as a visiting scholar before completing his habilitation in Bochum in 1998 .
Go to Profile#2723
Roderick Melnik
#45715
Overall Influence
Roderick Melnik is a Canadian-Australian mathematician and scientist, internationally known for his research in applied mathematics, numerical analysis, and mathematical modeling for scientific and engineering applications.
Go to Profile#2724
Christoph Zenger
#29505
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Christoph Zenger is a German mathematician. Career Born in Lindau, Zenger studied physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and did a doctorate in mathematics in 1967. In 1973 he did his habilitation in mathematics and in 1977 he became professor of mathematics at Technical University of Munich. In 1980 he accepted an offer of a full professorship from the Bundeswehr University of Munich. In 1982 he returned to TU Munich to fill a chair in computer science. In 2000 Zenger was selected as a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He retired in 2005, but is still...
Go to Profile#2725
Thomas Lengauer
#7847
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist. Education Lengauer studied Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, earning his Diploma in 1975 and a Dr. rer. nat. in 1976. Lengauer later gained an MSc and a PhD in computer science, both from Stanford University. He received his habilitation degree in computer science at Saarland University in 1984.
Go to Profile#2726
Eknath Prabhakar Ghate
#34836
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Eknath Prabhakar Ghate is a mathematician specialising in number theory and working at the School of Mathematics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for science and technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2013 in the mathematical sciences category.
Go to Profile#2727
Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri
#51286
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Dwijendra Kumar Ray-Chaudhuri is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He and his student R. M. Wilson together solved Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in 1968 which contributed to developments in design theory.
Go to Profile#2728
Chaim Goodman-Strauss
#52459
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Chaim Goodman-Strauss is an American mathematician who works in convex geometry, especially aperiodic tiling. He is on the faculty of the University of Arkansas and currently serves as outreach mathematician for the National Museum of Mathematics. He is co-author with John H. Conway and Heidi Burgiel of The Symmetries of Things, a comprehensive book surveying the mathematical theory of patterns.
Go to Profile#2729
Constantine Dafermos
#35384
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Constantine Michael Dafermos is a Greek-American applied mathematician. He received a Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a Ph.D. in Mechanics from Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Jerald Ericksen . He has been an Assistant Professor at Cornell University and an Associate Professor and Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. Since 1984, he has been the Alumni-Alumnae University Professor at Brown.
Go to Profile#2730
Aline Bonami
#27342
Overall Influence
Aline Bonami is a French mathematician known for her expertise in mathematical analysis. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Orléans, and was president of the Société mathématique de France for 2012–2013.
Go to Profile#2731
Paul Olum
#16902
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Paul Olum was an American mathematician , professor of mathematics, and university administrator. Early years Born in Binghamton, New York to a father who was a Russian Jew who immigrated at age of nine to escape persecution, Olum took an interest in mathematics at an early age. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1940. In 1942 he married Vivian Goldstein, completed an MA in physics at Princeton University, and joined the scientific staff of the Manhattan Project. During his time at Los Alamos, Olum was among the Los Alamos scientists who questioned the implications of the...
Go to Profile#2732
Torkel Franzén
#19933
Overall Influence
1950 - 2006 (56 years)
Torkel Franzén was a Swedish academic. Biography Franzén worked at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, in the fields of mathematical logic and computer science. He was known for his work on Gödel's incompleteness theorems and for his contributions to Usenet. He was active in the online science fiction fan community, and even issued his own electronic fanzine Frotz on his fiftieth birthday. He died of bone cancer at age 56.
Go to Profile#2733
Tom Bridgeland
#52419
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Thomas Andrew Bridgeland is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sheffield. He was a senior research fellow in 2011–2013 at All Souls College, Oxford and, since 2013, remains as a Quondam Fellow. He is most well-known for defining Bridgeland stability conditions on triangulated categories.
Go to Profile#2734
Nathan Fine
#56132
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Nathan Jacob Fine was an American mathematician who worked on basic hypergeometric series. He is best known for his lecture notes on the subject which for four decades served as an inspiration to experts in the field until they were finally published as a book. He solved the Jeep problem in 1946.
Go to Profile#2735
Raymond Redheffer
#40884
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Raymond Moos Redheffer was an American mathematician. He was the creator of one of the first electronic games, Nim, a knowledge game. Early life He earned his PhD in 1948 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Norman Levinson.
Go to Profile#2736
Cameron Leigh Stewart
#59015
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Cameron Leigh Stewart FRSC is a Canadian mathematician. He is a professor of pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Contributions He has made numerous contributions to number theory, in particular to work on the abc conjecture. In 1976 he obtained, with Alan Baker, an effective improvement to Liouville's Theorem. In 1991 he proved that the number of solutions to a Thue equation. This improves on an earlier result of Enrico Bombieri and Wolfgang M. Schmidt and is close to the best possible result. In 1995 he obtained, along with Jaap Top, the existence of infinitely many quadratic, cubic, and sextic twists of elliptic curves of large rank.
Go to Profile#2737
Paul Fearnhead
#35627
Overall Influence
Paul Fearnhead is Professor of Statistics at Lancaster University. He is a researcher in computational statistics, in particular Sequential Monte Carlo methods. His interests include sampling theory and genetics – he has published several papers working on the epidemiology of campylobacter by looking at recombination events in a large sample of genomes. Since January 2018 he has been the editor of Biometrika.
Go to Profile#2738
Gérald Tenenbaum
#50897
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gérald Tenenbaum is a French mathematician and novelist, born in Nancy on 1 April 1952. He is one of the namesakes of the Erdős–Tenenbaum–Ford constant. Biography An alumnus of the École Polytechnique, he has been professor of mathematics at the Institut Élie Cartan at Université de Lorraine since 1981.
Go to Profile#2739
Seema Nanda
#45773
Overall Influence
Seema Nanda is an Indian mathematician. In her research she applies mathematics to study problems in biology, engineering and finance. Her research interests are primarily in solving real world problems using mathematics and computations.
Go to Profile#2740
Carlos Gustavo Moreira
#54136
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Carlos Gustavo Tamm de Araújo Moreira is a Brazilian mathematician working on dynamical systems, ergodic theory, number theory and combinatorics. Moreira is currently a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada , where he goes by the nickname "Gugu". He is also a member of the Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad Commission, a fanatic fan of the Brazilian football team Flamengo and a member of the Brazilian Communist Party . In October 2016, he achieved the mark of 5000 goals scored in his amateur football career. He maintains a record of his goals to show to the incredulo...
Go to Profile#2741
Mizan Rahman
#46051
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Mizan Rahman was a Bangladeshi Canadian mathematician and writer. He specialized in fields of mathematics such as hypergeometric series and orthogonal polynomials. He also had interests encompassing literature, philosophy, scientific skepticism, freethinking and rationalism. He co-authored Basic Hypergeometric Series with George Gasper. This book is widely considered as the standard work of choice for that subject of study. He also published ten Bengali books.
Go to Profile#2742
Peter J. Freyd
#34234
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Peter John Freyd is an American mathematician, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, known for work in category theory and for founding the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Mathematics Freyd obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960; his dissertation, on Functor Theory, was written under the supervision of Norman Steenrod and David Buchsbaum.
Go to Profile#2743
Karl-Otto Stöhr
#54535
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Karl-Otto Stöhr is a German mathematician working on algebraic geometry. He is a titular researcher at the IMPA. Stöhr is a titular member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and has received Brazil's National Order of Scientific Merit. He is also a member of the European Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2744
Claude Ambrose Rogers
#50234
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Claude Ambrose Rogers FRS was an English mathematician who worked in analysis and geometry. Research Much of his work concerns the Geometry of Numbers, Hausdorff Measures, Analytic Sets, Geometry and Topology of Banach Spaces, Selection Theorems and Finite-dimensional Convex Geometry. In the theory of Banach spaces and summability, he proved the Dvoretzky–Rogers lemma and the Dvoretzky–Rogers theorem, both with Aryeh Dvoretzky. He constructed a counterexample to a conjecture related to the Busemann–Petty problem. In the geometry of numbers, the Rogers bound is a bound for dense packings of sp...
Go to Profile#2745
Sandy Green
#47359
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
James Alexander "Sandy" Green FRS was a mathematician and Professor at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick, who worked in the field of representation theory. Early life Sandy Green was born in February 1926 in Rochester, New York, but moved to Toronto with his emigrant Scottish parents later that year. The family returned to Britain in May 1935 when his father, Frederick C. Green, took up the Drapers Professorship of French at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2746
Max Gunzburger
#48011
Overall Influence
Max D. Gunzburger, Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Florida State University, is an American mathematician and computational scientist affiliated with the Florida State interdisciplinary Department of Scientific Computing. He was the 2008 winner of the SIAM W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize in Mathematics. His seminal research contributions include flow control, finite element analysis, superconductivity and Voronoi tessellations. He has also made contributions in the areas of aerodynamics, materials, acoustics, climate change, groundwater, image processing and risk assessm...
Go to Profile#2747
Peter Paule
#60841
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Peter Paule is an Austrian mathematician who works in symbolic computation and its connections to combinatorics, number theory, and special functions. Since 1990 he has held a faculty position at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation of the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, and since 2009 he has directed the Institute.
Go to Profile#2748
Hans Georg Bock
#37230
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans Georg Bock is a German university professor for mathematics and scientific computing. He has served as managing director of Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing of Heidelberg University from 2005 to 2017. Before this, he had been vice managing director from 1993 to 2004. Hans Georg Bock is a member of the European Mathematical Society's committee for developing countries and responsible member for the region of Asia therein.
Go to Profile#2749
Jennifer Quinn
#46921
Overall Influence
Jennifer J. Quinn is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics, and professor of mathematics at the University of Washington Tacoma. She sits on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America, and is serving as its president for the years 2021 and 2022. From 2004 to 2008 she was co-editor of Math Horizons.
Go to Profile#2750
Dmitri Burago
#51278
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Dmitri Yurievich Burago is a leading Russian - American mathematician, specializing in differential, Riemannian, Finsler geometry, geometric analysis, dynamical systems and applications to mathematical physics.
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