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,
#2801
Bernard Morin
#41312
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Bernard Morin was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist. Early life and education Morin lost his sight at the age of six due to glaucoma, but his blindness did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Go to Profile#2802
Qiang Du
#50429
Overall Influence
Qiang Du , the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, is a Chinese mathematician and computational scientist. Prior to moving to Columbia, he was the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University affiliated with the Pennsylvania State University Department of Mathematics and Materials Sciences.
Go to Profile#2803
Kenneth M. Golden
#23963
Overall Influence
Kenneth "Ken" Morgan Golden is an American applied mathematician and Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah. He is recognized as the "Indiana Jones of Mathematics" for his work in polar climate modeling and has traveled to the polar regions eighteen times, in total, to study sea ice.
Go to Profile#2804
Stanko Bilinski
#44168
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Stanko Bilinski was a Croatian mathematician and academician. He was a professor at the University of Zagreb and a fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1960, he discovered a rhombic dodecahedron of the second kind, the Bilinski dodecahedron. Like the standard rhombic dodecahedron, this convex polyhedron has 12 congruent rhombus sides, but they are differently shaped and arranged. Bilinski's discovery corrected a 75-year-old omission in Evgraf Fedorov's classification of convex polyhedra with congruent rhombic faces.
Go to Profile#2805
Valery Vasilevich Kozlov
#43645
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Valery Vasilevich Kozlov is a Russian mathematician and mathematical physicist. Education and career Kozlov studied from 1967 at the Moscow State University with his undergraduate degree in 1972 and his Candidate of Sciences degree in 1974 under Andrei Kolmogorov with thesis Качественное исследование движения тяжёлого твёрдого тела в интегрируемых случаях . At Moscow State University he was a lecturer and assistant and completed in 1978 his Russian Doctor of Sciences degree in 1978 with thesis Вопросы качественного анализа в динамике твёрдого тела . At Moscow State University he became in 19...
Go to Profile#2806
Mark Adler
#7432
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mark Adler is an American software engineer. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author together with Jean-loup Gailly of the zlib compression library and gzip. He has contributed to Info-ZIP, and has participated in developing the Portable Network Graphics image format. Adler was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Go to Profile#2807
Lisette de Pillis
#35894
Overall Influence
Lisette G. de Pillis is an American mathematician at Harvey Mudd College and holds the Norman F. Sprague, Jr. Professorship of Life Sciences at Harvey Mudd. She chaired the Department of Mathematics in 2008-2009 and again from 2014 to 2019. She directed the Harvey Mudd College Global Clinic program from 2009 to 2014. She is also the co-director of the Harvey Mudd College Center for Quantitative Life Sciences.
Go to Profile#2808
Robert Kozma
#63680
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Robert Kozma is First Tennessee University Professor of Mathematics at the University of Memphis. Biography Kozma received his MS in Power Engineering from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1982, his MS in mathematics from the Eötvös Loránd University in 1988, and his PhD in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology in 1992
Go to Profile#2809
Rob J. Hyndman
#34698
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Robin John Hyndman is an Australian statistician known for his work on forecasting and time series. He is Professor of Statistics at Monash University and was Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Forecasting from 2005–2018. In 2007 he won the Moran Medal from the Australian Academy of Science for his contributions to statistical research. In 2021 he won the Pitman Medal from the Statistical Society of Australia.
Go to Profile#2810
Maria E. Schonbek
#48455
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Maria Elena Schonbek is an Argentine-American mathematician at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research concerns fluid dynamics and associated partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations.
Go to Profile#2811
Carlos Conca
#32404
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Carlos Conca is a Chilean applied mathematician, engineer and scientist. He is the first Chilean scientist to be recognized by the French government with a distinction in the field of Exact and Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#2812
Jesús María Sanz-Serna
#60459
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jesús María Sanz-Serna is a mathematician who specializes in applied mathematics. Sanz-Serna pioneered the field of geometric integration and wrote the first book on this subject. From 1998 to 2006, he was rector of the University of Valladolid.
Go to Profile#2813
Juan Luis Vázquez Suárez
#54639
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Juan Luis Vázquez Suárez is Professor of Applied Mathematics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid , Spain. Education He was born in Oviedo on July 26, 1946. In the years 1964/69 he studied Telecommunication Engineering at the Superior Technical School of Ingenieros de Telecomunicación in Madrid. In 1973 he graduated in Mathematics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he also obtained the Ph. D. degree in 1979 with a thesis directed by Haïm Brezis.
Go to Profile#2814
María J. Esteban
#43363
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Maria J. Esteban is a Basque-French mathematician. In her research she studies nonlinear partial differential equations, mainly by the use of variational methods, with applications to physics and quantum chemistry. She has also worked on fluid-structure interaction.
Go to Profile#2815
Donald John Lewis
#55029
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Donald John Lewis , better known as D.J. Lewis, was an American mathematician specializing in number theory. Lewis received his PhD in 1950 at the University of Michigan under supervision of Richard Dagobert Brauer, and subsequently was an NSF fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , an NSF senior fellow , a senior visiting fellow at Cambridge University , a visiting fellow at Oxford University , and Humboldt Awardee .
Go to Profile#2816
Joel Tropp
#53109
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Joel Aaron Tropp is the Steele Family Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on sparse approximation, numerical linear algebra, and random matrix theory.
Go to Profile#2817
Svetlana Roudenko
#21092
Overall Influence
Svetlana A. Roudenko is a Russian-American mathematician known for her work in functional analysis and partial differential equations, and in particular in scattering theory and nonlinear Schrödinger equations. She is also known for her mentorship of women in mathematics, and is a Diversity Mentor Professor and professor of mathematics and statistics at Florida International University.
Go to Profile#2818
Eduard Looijenga
#55139
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Eduard Jacob Neven Looijenga is a Dutch mathematician who works in algebraic geometry and the theory of algebraic groups. He was a professor of mathematics at Utrecht University until his retirement in 2013.
Go to Profile#2819
Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène
#25670
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène is a French mathematician. He is a Directeur de Recherches at CNRS at the Université Paris-Saclay in Orsay. He studies mainly number theory and arithmetic geometry. Awards Prize of the French Academy of Sciences "Charles Louis de Saulces de Freycine" Invited Speaker to the International Congress of Mathematicians Fermat Prize for mathematical research Grand prize of the French Academy of Sciences "Léonid Frank" Fellow of the American Mathematical Society
Go to Profile#2820
Brent Coull
#63934
Overall Influence
Brent Andrew Coull is an American statistician and Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard University. Biography He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Florida in 1997. His thesis advisor was Alan Agresti. He and his advisor came up with the Agresti–Coull interval, an approximate method for calculating binomial confidence intervals.
Go to Profile#2821
Marek Karpinski
#12847
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Marek Karpinski is a computer scientist and mathematician known for his research in the theory of algorithms and their applications, combinatorial optimization, computational complexity, and mathematical foundations. He is a recipient of several research prizes in the above areas.
Go to Profile#2822
Andrea Malchiodi
#63341
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Andrea Malchiodi is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of partial differential equations and calculus of variations, with several contributions to geometric analysis. Scientific activity Malchiodi received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the International School for Advanced Studies in 2000 under the supervision of Antonio Ambrosetti. He is a professor of mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa. He was previously professor of mathematics at the International School for Advanced Studies and at the University of Warwick. Malchiodi has developed topological and analyt...
Go to Profile#2823
Robert Rumely
#53124
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert Scott Rumely is a professor of mathematics at the University of Georgia who specializes in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is one of the inventors of the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test.
Go to Profile#2824
Pallavi Dani
#55874
Overall Influence
Pallavi Dani is an Indian-American mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her research area is geometric group theory; in particular, she studies quasi-isometry invariantss of groups.
Go to Profile#2825
Sheldon Katz
#57062
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sheldon H. Katz is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and its applications to string theory. Background and career In 1973 Katz won first prize in the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad. He received in 1976 his bachelor's degree from MIT and in 1980 his Ph.D. from Princeton University under Robert C. Gunning with thesis Deformations of Linear Systems, Divisors and Weierstrass Points on Curves. At the University of Utah, he was an instructor from 1980 to 1984. At the University of Oklahoma he was an assistant professor from 1984 to 1987. At Oklahoma State University, he be...
Go to Profile#2826
Norman Shapiro
#16905
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Norman Zalmon Shapiro was an American mathematician, who was the co-author of the Rice–Shapiro theorem. Education Shapiro obtained a BS in Mathematics at University of Illinois in 1952. Shapiro spent the summer of 1954 at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey where, in collaboration with Karel de Leeuw, Ed Moore, and Claude Shannon, he investigated the question of whether providing a Turing machine augmented with an oracle machine producing an infinite sequence of random events would enable the machine to output a non-computable sequence. The well-known efficacy of Monte Carlo methods might have led one to think otherwise, but the result was negative.
Go to Profile#2827
Henry Wynn
#37066
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Henry Philip Wynn is a British statistician who has been a President of the Royal Statistical Society. He gained a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Oxford and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Imperial College, London. He was appointed a Lecturer and then Reader at Imperial College before moving to City University London in 1985 as Professor of Mathematical Statistics . At City he co-founded the Engineering Design Centre.
Go to Profile#2828
William Shaw
#56926
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
William Shaw is a British mathematician, and formerly professor of the mathematics and computation of risk at University College London. He is a consultant on financial derivatives, an author of a primary book on using Mathematica to model financial derivatives, formerly co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Mathematical Finance.
Go to Profile#2829
Tara S. Holm
#56039
Overall Influence
Tara Suzanne Holm is a mathematician at Cornell University specializing in algebraic geometry and symplectic geometry. Life and career Holm graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College. Holm received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 under the supervision of Victor Guillemin. She went on to a three-year postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, before eventually joining the faculty at Cornell.
Go to Profile#2830
Henry Crapo
#55872
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Henry Howland Crapo was an American-Canadian mathematician who worked in algebraic combinatorics. Over the course of his career, he held positions at several universities and research institutes in Canada and France. He is noted for his work in matroid theory and lattice theory.
Go to Profile#2831
Étienne Fouvry
#37132
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Étienne Fouvry is a French mathematician working primarily in analytic number theory. In 1985, Fouvry showed that the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem is true for infinitely many primes. External links Videos of Étienne Fouvry in the AV-Portal of the German National Library of Science and Technology
Go to Profile#2832
Mark Mahowald
#58203
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Mark Edward Mahowald was an American mathematician known for work in algebraic topology. Life Mahowald was born in Albany, Minnesota in 1931. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1955 under the direction of Bernard Russell Gelbaum with a thesis on Measure in Groups. In the sixties, he became professor at Syracuse University and around 1963 he went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Go to Profile#2833
Aleksandr Olshansky
#62334
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Aleksandr Yuryevich Olshansky is a Russian mathematician, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , laureate of the Maltsev Prize, a professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University . In 1983 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw. He is a specialist in the field of combinatorial and geometric group theory, and has also written several papers on Lie algebras and associative algebras. He is an honorary member of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#2834
Larry A. Wasserman
#34473
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Larry Alan Wasserman is a Canadian-American statistician and a professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science and the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Biography Wasserman received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1988 under the supervision of Robert Tibshirani.
Go to Profile#2835
Andreas Winter
#38914
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Andreas J. Winter is a German mathematician and mathematical physicist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 under Rudolf Ahlswede and Friedrich Götze at the Universität Bielefeld in Germany before moving to the University of Bristol and then to the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. In 2013 he was appointed ICREA Research Professor at UAB.
Go to Profile#2836
Michel Van den Bergh
#62810
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michel Van den Bergh is a Belgian mathematician and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and does research at Hasselt University. His research interest is on the fundamental relationship between algebra and geometry. In 2003, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Exact Sciences.
Go to Profile#2837
Cora Sadosky
#39979
Overall Influence
1940 - 2010 (70 years)
Cora Susana Sadosky de Goldstein was a mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Howard University. Early life and education Sadosky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the daughter of mathematicians Manuel Sadosky and Corina Eloísa "Cora" Ratto de Sadosky. At the age of 6, she moved with her parents to France and Italy.
Go to Profile#2838
Sylvia Bozeman
#56320
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sylvia D. Trimble Bozeman is an American mathematician and Mathematics educator. Early life and education Sylvia Bozeman was born in Camp Hill, Alabama on 1 August 1947. She was the third of five children to Horace T. Sr. and Robbie Jones. Although her father worked with numbers daily in his profession as an insurance agent, it was her mother, a housewife, who first cultivated Bozeman’s love for Mathematics. Bozeman attended segregated primary and secondary schools in Camp Hill, and was encouraged by her teachers and parents to continue her education. Her high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Frank Holley, further cultivated her interest.
Go to Profile#2839
Tadashi Nagano
#62417
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Tadashi Nagano was a Taiwan-born Japanese mathematician who worked mainly on differential geometry and related subjects. Biography Nagano was born in Taipei in 1930, when Taiwan was administered by Japan. He returned to Japan for undergraduate study from 1951 to 1954 at the University of Tokyo, and defended his doctoral thesis under Kentaro Yano's supervision at University of Tokyo in 1959. He worked at the University of Tokyo from April in 1959 to May 1967 as a lecturer and as an assistant professor . Nagano moved to United States to pursue an academic career with the University of Notre Dame in 1967.
Go to Profile#2840
David Shmoys
#26306
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
David Bernard Shmoys is a Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. His major focus has been in the design and analysis of algorithms for discrete optimization problems.
Go to Profile#2841
Chang-Shou Lin
#49947
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Chang-Shou Lin is a Taiwanese mathematician. Lin completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at National Taiwan University. He then completed doctoral study at New York University in the United States in 1983, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study between 1984 and 1985. He taught at NTU from 1987 to 1990, when he joined the faculty of National Chung Cheng University. Lin was director of the National Center for Theoretical Sciences between 1993 and 2003. In 2006, Lin returned to NTU as director of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#2842
Arlie Petters
#22763
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Arlie Oswald Petters, MBE is a Belizean-American mathematical physicist, who is the Benjamin Powell Professor of mathematics and a professor of physics and economics at Duke University. Petters became the provost at New York University Abu Dhabi effective September 1, 2020. Petters is a founder of mathematical astronomy, focusing on problems connected to the interplay of gravity and light and employing tools from astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity, high energy physics, differential geometry, singularities, and probability theory. His monograph "Singularity Theory and Gravitational Lensing" developed a mathematical theory of gravitational lensing.
Go to Profile#2843
Michael Stillman
#53762
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Michael Eugene Stillman is an American mathematician working in computational algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. He is a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for being one of the creators of the Macaulay2 computer algebra system.
Go to Profile#2844
Hans Georg Feichtinger
#60122
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Hans Georg Feichtinger is an Austrian mathematician. He is Professor in the mathematical faculty of the University of Vienna. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications and associate editor to several other journals. He is one of the founders and head of the Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group at University of Vienna. Today Feichtinger's main field of research is harmonic analysis with a focus on time-frequency analysis.
Go to Profile#2845
John Toland
#49163
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Francis Toland FRS FRSE is an Irish mathematician based in the UK. From 2011 to 2016 he served as Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences and N M Rothschild & Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2846
Terence Gaffney
#60924
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Terence Gaffney is an American mathematician who has made fundamental contributions to singularity theory – in particular, to the fields of singularities of maps and equisingularity theory. Professional career He is a Professor of Mathematics at Northeastern University. He did his undergraduate studies at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1975 under the direction of Edgar Henry Brown Jr. and Harold Levine. In 1975 he became an AMS Centennial Fellow at MIT and a year later he joined the Brown University faculty as Tamarkind instructor. In 1979 Gaffney became professor at Northeastern University where he has remained ever since.
Go to Profile#2847
Robert H. Burris
#64289
Overall Influence
#2848
Raphaèle Herbin
#41021
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Raphaèle Herbin is a French applied mathematician; she is known for her work on the finite volume method. Herbin has been a professor at Aix-Marseille University since 1995, and directs the Institut de Mathématiques de Marseille. She earned her doctorate in 1986 at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, with the dissertation Approximation numérique d'inéquations variationnelles non linéaires par des méthodes de continuation supervised by Francis Conrad.
Go to Profile#2849
Peter Slodowy
#52728
Overall Influence
1948 - 2002 (54 years)
Peter Slodowy was a German mathematician who worked on singularity theory and algebraic geometry. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Regensburg in 1978 under the direction of Theodor Bröcker and Egbert Brieskorn. The Slodowy correspondence is named after him.
Go to Profile#2850
Ralph Greenberg
#56596
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ralph Greenberg is an American mathematician who has made contributions to number theory, in particular Iwasawa theory. He was born in Chester, Pennsylvania and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a B.A. in 1966, after which he attended Princeton University, earning his doctorate in 1971 under the supervision of Kenkichi Iwasawa.
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