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,
#2751
Basilis Gidas
#55364
Overall Influence
Basilis Gidas is an applied mathematician at Brown University, interested in many applications of mathematics. Following degrees in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and mathematics, he obtained a combined Ph.D. in physics and nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan in 1970. He is an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has had past appointments in various mathematics and physics departments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Rutgers University, Rockefeller University, Bielefeld University, University of Washington, and University of Michigan...
Go to Profile#2752
François Trèves
#45006
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
J. François Treves is an American mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations. Trèves earned his Ph.D. in 1958 from Paris-Sorbonne University under the supervision of Laurent Schwartz. He then went to the United States where from 1958 to 1960 he was assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1961 to 1964 he was an associate professor at Yeshiva University, and from 1964 to 1970 professor at Purdue University. In 1970 he became a professor at Rutgers University, and then, in 1984, Robert-Adrian professor of mathematics. He became professor emeritus i...
Go to Profile#2753
Lee Sallows
#28454
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Lee Cecil Fletcher Sallows is a British electronics engineer known for his contributions to recreational mathematics. He is particularly noted as the inventor of golygons, self-enumerating sentences, and geomagic squares.
Go to Profile#2754
Gwyneth Stallard
#40562
Overall Influence
Gwyneth Mary Stallard is a British mathematician whose research concerns complex dynamics and the iteration of meromorphic functions. She is a professor of pure mathematics at the Open University. Education and career Stallard read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, finishing in 1985, and earned her Ph.D. from Imperial College London in 1991. Her dissertation, Some problems in the iteration of meromorphic functions, was supervised by Irvine Noel Baker. She has spoken about the difficulty of finding postdoctoral research positions at a time when there were few such positions in England ...
Go to Profile#2755
Dana S. Richards
#28706
Overall Influence
Dana S. Richards is a writer, mathematics popularizer and Associate Professor in Computer Science at George Mason University. His research interests include comparisons of protein sequences, Steiner tree algorithms, information dissemination in networks, parallel heuristics, methodology for computationally intractable problems and parallel algorithms for median filters. He is the longtime bibliographer of polymath Martin Gardner.
Go to Profile#2756
Dan Boneh
#10739
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dan Boneh is an Israeli–American professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University. In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and computer security.
Go to Profile#2757
Tony Gardiner
#52823
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Tony Gardiner is a British mathematician who until 2012 held the position of Reader in Mathematics and Mathematics Education at the University of Birmingham. He was responsible for the foundation of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust in 1996, one of the UK's largest mathematics enrichment programs, initiating the Intermediate and Junior Mathematical Challenges, creating the Problem Solving Journal for secondary school students and organising numerous masterclasses, summer schools and educational conferences. Gardiner has contributed to many educational articles and internationally circulated educational pamphlets.
Go to Profile#2758
Mark Kisin
#60326
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mark Kisin is a mathematician known for work in algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. In particular, he is known for his contributions to the study of p-adic representations and p-adic cohomology.
Go to Profile#2759
Johannes Buchmann
#11527
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Johannes Alfred Buchmann is a German computer scientist, mathematician and professor emeritus at the department of computer science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He is known for his research in algorithmic number theory, algebra, post-quantum cryptography and IT security. In 1993, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize together with Claus-Peter Schnorr for his work in algorithmic number theory and cryptography. Buchmann also developed the stateful hash-based signature scheme XMSS, the first future-proof secure and practical signature scheme with minimal security requirements, which was declared the first international standard for post-quantum signature schemes in 2018.
Go to Profile#2760
David E. Evans
#39509
Overall Influence
David E. Evans FLSW was born in 1950 at Glanamman, Dyfed, Wales. He is a professor of mathematics at Cardiff University, specialising in knot theory. He has published a number of books, many in collaboration with Yasuyuki Kawahigashi.
Go to Profile#2761
Scott A. Wolpert
#54991
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Scott A. Wolpert is an American mathematician specializing in geometry. He is a professor at the University of Maryland. Wolpert received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1976. In 1986 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congresses of Mathematicians in Berkeley, California. In 2012, Wolpert became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#2762
Lesley Sibner
#57532
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Lesley Millman Sibner was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She earned her Bachelors at City College CUNY in Mathematics. She completed her doctorate at Courant Institute NYU in 1964 under the joint supervision of Lipman Bers and Cathleen Morawetz. Her thesis concerned partial differential equations of mixed-type.
Go to Profile#2763
Kay Wingberg
#61635
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kay Wingberg is a German mathematician at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests include algebraic number theory, Iwasawa theory, arithmetic geometry and the structure of profinite groups.
Go to Profile#2764
Zdzisław Pawlak
#26406
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Zdzislaw I. Pawlak was a Polish mathematician and computer scientist. He was affiliated with several organization, including the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Warsaw School of Information Technology. He served as the Director of the Institute of Computer Science at the Warsaw University of Technology . Pawlak was known for his contribution to many branches of theoretical computer science. He was credited with introducing the rough set theory and also known for his fundamental works on it. He also introduced the Pawlak flow graphs, a graphical framework for reasoning from data. He was conferred with Order of Polonia Restituta in 1999.
Go to Profile#2765
Mark Iosifovich Graev
#56062
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Mark Iosifovich Graev was a Russian mathematician. He is known as one of the namesakes in the Gelfand–Graev representation. Education and career Graev received his doctorate in 1947 from Lomonosov Moscow State University with thesis Free topological groups under the supervision of Alexander Kurosh. Graev was a professor at the Scientific Research Institute of System Development of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2766
Henry Cohn
#35515
Overall Influence
Henry Cohn is an American mathematician. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at MIT. In collaboration with Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Maryna Viazovska, he solved the sphere packing problem in 24 dimensions.
Go to Profile#2767
George Grätzer
#56297
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
George A. Grätzer is a Hungarian-Canadian mathematician, specializing in lattice theory and universal algebra. He is known for his books on LaTeX and his proof with E. Tamás Schmidt of the Grätzer–Schmidt theorem.
Go to Profile#2768
Lawrence D. Brown
#53065
Overall Influence
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
Lawrence David Brown was Miers Busch Professor and Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is known for his groundbreaking work in a broad range of fields including decision theory, recurrence and partial differential equations, nonparametric function estimation, minimax and adaptation theory, and the analysis of census data and call-center data.
Go to Profile#2769
Roland Bulirsch
#27817
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Roland Zdeněk Bulirsch was a German mathematician specialising in numerical analysis. He studied and taught at the Technical University of Munich, and taught internationally as visiting professor. He was co-author of the reference book Introduction to Numerical Analysis, and president of the edition of the works by Johannes Kepler. He received honorary doctorates from international universities, and several awards.
Go to Profile#2770
Cyril Offord
#42219
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
Albert Cyril Offord FRS FRSE was a British mathematician. He was the first professor of mathematics at the London School of Economics. Life He was born in London on 9 June 1906 the eldest child of Albert Edwin Offord, a master printer, and his wife Hester Louise, a former opera singer. The family were Plymouth Brethren. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. He then studied Mathematics at University College, London. He then went to St John's College, Cambridge as a postgraduate, working with Prof John Edensor Littlewood.
Go to Profile#2771
David Sumner
#61612
Overall Influence
David P. Sumner is an American mathematician known for his research in graph theory. He formulated Sumner's conjecture that tournaments are universal graphs for polytrees in 1971, and showed in 1974 that all claw-free graphs with an even number of vertices have perfect matchings. He and András Gyárfás independently formulated the Gyárfás–Sumner conjecture according to which, for every tree T, the T-free graphs are χ-bounded.
Go to Profile#2772
Yifeng Liu
#61337
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Yifeng Liu is a Chinese professor of mathematics at Zhejiang University specializing in number theory, automorphic forms and arithmetic geometry. Career Liu received his BS Degree from Peking University in 2007 and PhD degree from Columbia University, New York, in 2012 under the direction of Shou-Wu Zhang. He was a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT from 2012 to 2015 and an assistant professor at Northwestern University from 2015 to 2018 before being appointed an associate professor at Yale University. Liu returned to China in 2021 to join Zheijiang University became a full professor of mathemat...
Go to Profile#2773
Svetlana Katok
#52851
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Svetlana Katok is a Russian-American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. Education and career Katok grew up in Moscow, and earned a master's degree from Moscow State University in 1969; however, due to the anti-Semitic and anti-intelligentsia policies of the time, she was denied admission to the doctoral program there and instead worked for several years in the area of early and secondary mathematical education. She immigrated to the US in 1978, and earned her doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1983 under the supervision of Don Zagier.
Go to Profile#2774
V. S. Huzurbazar
#28121
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
Vasant Shankar Huzurbazar was an Indian statistician from Kolhapur. Huzurbazar was the founder head of the department of statistics, University of Pune from 1953 to 1976. From 1979 to 1991, he served as professor at University of Denver, Colorado until his death. He served as visiting professor for two years to the Iowa State University in 1962.
Go to Profile#2775
Vagif Guliyev
#50255
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Prof. Vagif Guliyev is an Azerbaijani mathematician. He was born in Salyan district of Azerbaijan republic, USSR. He has earned Doctor of Sciences Degree from Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Moscow in 1994. He has written three books and more than 100 published articles. He is a full professor at Baku State University.
Go to Profile#2776
Yiannis N. Moschovakis
#24984
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Yiannis Nicholas Moschovakis is a set theorist, descriptive set theorist, and recursion theorist, at UCLA. His book Descriptive Set Theory is the primary reference for the subject. He is especially associated with the development of the effective, or lightface, version of descriptive set theory, and he is known for the Moschovakis coding lemma that is named after him.
Go to Profile#2777
Nati Linial
#36602
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nathan Linial is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, a professor in the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an ISI highly cited researcher.
Go to Profile#2778
J. H. van Lint
#62789
Overall Influence
1932 - 2004 (72 years)
Jacobus Hendricus van Lint was a Dutch mathematician, professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, of which he was rector magnificus from 1991 till 1996. He gained his Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 1957 under the supervision of Fred van der Blij. He was professor of mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology from 1959 to 1997.
Go to Profile#2779
Samuel James Patterson
#49436
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Samuel James Patterson is a Northern Irish mathematician specializing in analytic number theory. He has been a professor at the University of Göttingen since 1981. Biography Patterson was born in Belfast and grew up in the east of the city, attending Grosvenor High School. He went to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1967, and received his BA in mathematics in 1970, and his Ph.D. on "The limit set of a Fuchsian group" under Alan Beardon. He spent 1974–1975 at Göttingen, 1975–1979 he was back at Cambridge, and 1979–1981 he was at Harvard as Benjamin Pierce Lecturer. From 1981 to his retirement i...
Go to Profile#2780
Gordon Preston
#44853
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Gordon Bamford Preston was an English mathematician best known for his work on semigroups. He received his D.Phil. in mathematics in 1954 from Magdalen College, Oxford. He was born in Workington and brought up in Carlisle. During World War II, he left his undergraduate studies at Oxford University for Bletchley Park, to help crack German codes with a small group of mathematicians, which included Alan Turing. At Bletchley Park he persuaded Max Newman to authorise talks to the Wrens to explain their work mathematically, and the talks were very popular.
Go to Profile#2781
James W. Cannon
#50473
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
James W. Cannon is an American mathematician working in the areas of low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory. He was an Orson Pratt Professor of Mathematics at Brigham Young University. Biographical data James W. Cannon was born on January 30, 1943, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Cannon received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Utah in 1969, under the direction of C. Edmund Burgess.
Go to Profile#2782
Graciela Boente
#20679
Overall Influence
Graciela Lina Boente Boente is an Argentine mathematical statistician at the University of Buenos Aires. She is known for her research in robust statistics, and particularly for robust methods for principal component analysis and regression analysis.
Go to Profile#2783
Diana Shelstad
#53908
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Diana Frost Shelstad is a mathematician known for her work in automorphic forms. She is a professor at Rutgers University–Newark. She earned her doctorate at Yale University in 1974 studying real reductive algebraic groups.
Go to Profile#2784
Noel Cressie
#58511
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Noel Andrew Cressie is an Australian and American statistician. He is Distinguished Professor and Director, Centre for Environmental Informatics, at the University of Wollongong in Wollongong , Australia.
Go to Profile#2785
Jason Behrstock
#45884
Overall Influence
Jason Alan Behrstock is a mathematician at the City University of New York known for his work in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. Life and career Behrstock was born in California and was educated in California's public school system. He received his Ph.D. from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2004. He went to work at Columbia University and the University of Utah before his time at Lehman College, City University of New York.
Go to Profile#2786
Richard Weber
#34618
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Richard Robert Weber is a mathematician working in operational research. He is Emeritus Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2787
Nicholas Manton
#50165
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nicholas Stephen Manton is a British mathematical physicist. He is a Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College.
Go to Profile#2788
Jack K. Hale
#40975
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Jack Kenneth Hale was an American mathematician working primarily in the field of dynamical systems and functional differential equations. Biography Jack Hale defended his Ph.D. thesis "On the Asymptotic Behavior of the Solutions of Systems of Differential Equations" at Purdue University under Lamberto Cesari in 1954; his undergraduate years were spent at Berea College, where he was studying Mathematics until 1949.
Go to Profile#2789
Guoliang Yu
#59832
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Guoliang Yu is a Chinese American mathematician. After receiving his Ph.D from SUNY at Stony Brook in 1991 under the direction of Ronald G. Douglas, Yu spent time at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute , the University of Colorado at Boulder , Vanderbilt University , and a variety of visiting positions. He currently holds the Powell Chair in Mathematics and was appointed University Distinguished Professor in 2018 at Texas A&M University. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#2790
Peter Donnelly
#16511
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Sir Peter James Donnelly is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contributions to coalescent theory. His research group at Oxford has an international reputation for the development of statistical methodology to analyze genetic data.
Go to Profile#2791
Ilse Ipsen
#48365
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ilse Clara Franziska Ipsen is a German-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at North Carolina State University. She was formerly associate director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, a joint venture of North Carolina State and other nearby universities.
Go to Profile#2792
Hiroshi Haruki
#29737
Overall Influence
Hiroshi Haruki was a Japanese mathematician. A world-renowned expert in functional equations, he is best known for discovering Haruki's theorem and Haruki's lemma in plane geometry. Some of his published work, such as: "On a Characteristic Property of Confocal Conic Sections" is available on Project Euclid.
Go to Profile#2793
Pauline van den Driessche
#53954
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Pauline van den Driessche is a British and Canadian applied mathematician who is a professor emerita in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Victoria, where she has also held an affiliation in the department of computer science. Her research interests include mathematical biology, matrix analysis, and stability theory.
Go to Profile#2794
James Michael Gardner Fell
#61712
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
James Michael Gardner Fell was a Canadian-American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and representation theory. He is known for Fell bundles . He was an accomplished linguist who knew Sanskrit, Icelandic, German, French, Russian, Greek, and Latin.
Go to Profile#2795
Stuart Geman
#28918
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Stuart Alan Geman is an American mathematician, known for influential contributions to computer vision, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and the neurosciences. He and his brother, Donald Geman, are well known for proposing the Gibbs sampler, and for the first proof of convergence of the simulated annealing algorithm.
Go to Profile#2796
Jessica Fintzen
#43218
Overall Influence
Jessica Fintzen is a German mathematician whose research concerns the representation theory of algebraic groups over the -adic numbers, with connections to the Langlands program. She is jointly appointed at the University of Cambridge, Duke University, and the University of Bonn.
Go to Profile#2797
Bruce Nauman
#2070
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
Go to Profile#2798
Weiqing Gu
#39855
Overall Influence
Weiqing Gu is a Chinese-American mathematician who works as the Avery Professor of Mathematics and director of the mathematics clinic at Harvey Mudd College. Her research concerns differential geometry and Grassmann manifolds. She has also worked with Harvey Mudd colleague Lisette de Pillis on the mathematical modeling of cancer.
Go to Profile#2799
Richard P. Brent
#26221
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Peirce Brent is an Australian mathematician and computer scientist. He is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. From March 2005 to March 2010 he was a Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. His research interests include number theory , random number generators, computer architecture, and analysis of algorithms.
Go to Profile#2800
Yves Le Jan
#58180
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Yves Le Jan is a French mathematician working in Probability theory and Stochastic processes. Le Jan studied from 1971 to 1974 at the École normale supérieure, finishing with an Agrégation. 1975 he became a researcher at the CNRS and in 1979 obtained his PhD . Since 1993 he is Professor at the University of Paris-Sud. From 2001 to 2004 he was leading its group on probability theory and statistics.
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