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,
#301
Ngô Bảo Châu
#2709
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ngô Bảo Châu is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms . He is the first Vietnamese national to have received the Fields Medal.
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Yves Meyer
#3587
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Yves F. Meyer is a French mathematician. He is among the progenitors of wavelet theory, having proposed the Meyer wavelet. Meyer was awarded the Abel Prize in 2017. Biography Born in Paris, Yves Meyer studied at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis; he won the French General Student Competition in Mathematics, and was placed first in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in 1957. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1966, under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Kahane. The Mexican historian Jean Meyer is his cousin.
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Manfredo do Carmo
#7591
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Manfredo Perdigão do Carmo was a Brazilian mathematician. He spent most of his career at IMPA and is seen as the doyen of differential geometry in Brazil. Education and career Do Carmo studied civil engineering at the University of Recife from 1947 to 1951. After working a few years as engineer, he accepted a teaching position at the newly created Institute of Physics and Mathematics at Recife.
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Reuben Hersh
#2783
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Reuben Hersh was an American mathematician and academic, best known for his writings on the nature, practice, and social impact of mathematics. Although he was generally known as Reuben Hersh, late in life he sometimes used the name Reuben Laznovsky in recognition of his father's ancestral family name. His work challenges and complements mainstream philosophy of mathematics.
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Leslie Lamport
#638
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.
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Demetrios Christodoulou
#4879
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Demetrios Christodoulou is a Greek mathematician and physicist, who first became well known for his proof, together with Sergiu Klainerman, of the nonlinear stability of the Minkowski spacetime of special relativity in the framework of general relativity. Christodoulou is a 1993 MacArthur Fellow.
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Richard S. Varga
#5164
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Richard Steven Varga was an American mathematician who specialized in numerical analysis and linear algebra. He was an Emeritus University Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Kent State University and an adjunct Professor at Case Western Reserve University. Varga was known for his contributions to many areas of mathematics, including matrix analysis, complex analysis, approximation theory, and scientific computation. He was the author of the classic textbook Matrix Iterative Analysis. Varga served as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis .
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Shizuo Kakutani
#5513
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
Shizuo Kakutani was a Japanese-American mathematician, best known for his eponymous fixed-point theorem. Biography Kakutani attended Tohoku University in Sendai, where his advisor was Tatsujirō Shimizu. At one point he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton at the invitation of the mathematician Hermann Weyl. While there, he also met John von Neumann.
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Shigefumi Mori
#4598
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Shigefumi Mori is a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in algebraic geometry, particularly in relation to the classification of three-folds. Career Mori completed his Ph.D. titled "The Endomorphism Rings of Some Abelian Varieties" under Masayoshi Nagata at Kyoto University in 1978. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University during 1977–1980, the Institute for Advanced Study in 1981–82, Columbia University 1985–87 and the University of Utah for periods during 1987–89 and again during 1991–92. He has been a professor at Kyoto University since 1990.
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Andreas Floer
#6742
Overall Influence
1956 - 1991 (35 years)
Andreas Floer was a German mathematician who made seminal contributions to symplectic topology, and mathematical physics, in particular the invention of Floer homology. Floer's first pivotal contribution was a solution of a special case of Arnold's conjecture on fixed points of a symplectomorphism. Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition and was invited as a plenary speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Kyoto in August 1990. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1989.
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Jack Edmonds
#3259
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.
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Kefeng Liu
#7578
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Kefeng Liu , is a Chinese-American mathematician who is known for his contributions to geometric analysis, particularly the geometry, topology and analysis of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and Calabi–Yau manifolds. He is a professor of mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the executive director of the Center of Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University. He is best known for his collaboration with Bong Lian and Shing-Tung Yau in which they establish some enumerative geometry conjectures motivated by mirror symmetry.
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Joel Spencer
#3746
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Joel Spencer is an American mathematician. He is a combinatorialist who has worked on probabilistic methods in combinatorics and on Ramsey theory. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1970, under the supervision of Andrew Gleason. He is currently a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Spencer's work was heavily influenced by Paul Erdős, with whom he coauthored many papers .
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Fedor Bogomolov
#7684
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#315
Branko Grünbaum
#6796
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Branko Grünbaum was a Croatian-born mathematician of Jewish descent and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
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Clifford Taubes
#7084
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Clifford Henry Taubes is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and works in gauge field theory, differential geometry, and low-dimensional topology. His brother is the journalist Gary Taubes.
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Graeme Segal
#6395
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Graeme Bryce Segal FRS is an Australian mathematician, and professor at the University of Oxford. Biography Segal was educated at the University of Sydney, where he received his BSc degree in 1961. He went on to receive his D.Phil. in 1967 from St Catherine's College, Oxford; his thesis, written under the supervision of Michael Atiyah, was titled Equivariant K-theory.
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Boris Feigin
#7862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Boris Lvovich Feigin is a Russian mathematician. His research has spanned representation theory, mathematical physics, algebraic geometry, Lie groups and Lie algebras, conformal field theory, homological and homotopical algebra.
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Robert M. Solovay
#5258
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robert Martin Solovay is an American mathematician specializing in set theory. Biography Solovay earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1964 under the direction of Saunders Mac Lane, with a dissertation on A Functorial Form of the Differentiable Riemann–Roch theorem. Solovay has spent his career at the University of California at Berkeley, where his Ph.D. students include W. Hugh Woodin and Matthew Foreman.
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William Fulton
#8127
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
William Edgar Fulton is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Education and career He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1961 and his doctorate from Princeton University in 1966. His Ph.D. thesis, written under the supervision of Gerard Washnitzer, was on The fundamental group of an algebraic curve.
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Shlomo Sternberg
#6518
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Shlomo Zvi Sternberg , is an American mathematician known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory. Education and career Sternberg earned his PhD in 1955 from Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis entitled "Some Problems in Discrete Nonlinear Transformations in One and Two Dimensions", supervised by Aurel Wintner.
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Michael J. Hopkins
#7842
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michael Jerome Hopkins is an American mathematician known for work in algebraic topology. Life He received his PhD from Northwestern University in 1984 under the direction of Mark Mahowald, with thesis Stable Decompositions of Certain Loop Spaces. Also in 1984 he also received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Ioan James. He has been professor of mathematics at Harvard University since 2005, after fifteen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a few years of teaching at Princeton University, a one-year position with the University of Chicago, and ...
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Andrew Ranicki
#5697
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Andrew Alexander Ranicki was a British mathematician who worked on algebraic topology. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Life Ranicki was the only child of the well-known literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the artist Teofila Reich-Ranicki; he spoke Polish in his family. Born in London, he lived in Warsaw, in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, and attended school in England at the King's School, Canterbury from the age of sixteen.
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Chenyang Xu
#9518
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Chenyang Xu is a Chinese mathematician in the area of algebraic geometry and a professor at Princeton University. Xu is known for his work in birational geometry, the minimal model program, and the K-stability of Fano varieties.
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Stanley Osher
#5347
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stanley Osher is an American mathematician, known for his many contributions in shock capturing, level-set methods, and PDE-based methods in computer vision and image processing. Osher is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles , Director of Special Projects in the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.
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Nicola Fusco
#9031
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nicola Fusco is an Italian mathematician mainly known for his contributions to the fields of calculus of variations, regularity theory of partial differential equations, and the theory of symmetrization. He is currently professor at the Università di Napoli "Federico II". Fusco also taught and conducted research at the Australian National University at Canberra, the Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburgh and at the University of Florence.
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Michael D. Morley
#4570
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Michael Darwin Morley was an American mathematician. At his death in 2020, Morley was professor emeritus at Cornell University. His research was in mathematical logic and model theory, and he is best known for Morley's categoricity theorem, which he proved in his PhD thesis Categoricity in Power in 1962.
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Toshikazu Sunada
#8298
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
is a Japanese mathematician and author of many books and essays on mathematics and mathematical sciences. He is professor emeritus of both Meiji University and Tohoku University. He is also distinguished professor of emeritus at Meiji in recognition of achievement over the course of an academic career. Before he joined Meiji University in 2003, he was professor of mathematics at Nagoya University , at the University of Tokyo , and at Tohoku University . Sunada was involved in the creation of the School of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences at Meiji University and is its first dean . Sinc...
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Reinhold Remmert
#6568
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Reinhold Remmert was a German mathematician. Born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, he studied mathematics, mathematical logic and physics in Münster. He established and developed the theory of complex-analytic spaces in joint work with Hans Grauert. Until his retirement in 1995, he was a professor for complex analysis in Münster.
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Harold S. Shapiro
#6914
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Harold Seymour Shapiro was a professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, best known for inventing the so-called Shapiro polynomials and for work on quadrature domains.
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George Lusztig
#7361
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
George Lusztig is a Romanian-born American mathematician and Abdun Nur Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a Norbert Wiener Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1999 to 2009.
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Péter Frankl
#7823
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Péter Frankl is a mathematician, street performer, columnist and educator, active in Japan. Frankl studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and submitted his PhD thesis while still an undergraduate. He holds a PhD degree from the University Paris Diderot as well. He has lived in Japan since 1988, where he is a well-known personality and often appears in the media. He keeps travelling around Japan performing . Frankl won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1971. He has seven joint papers with Paul Erdős, and eleven joint papers with Ronald Graham. His research is in combinatorics, especially in extremal combinatorics.
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Cleve Moler
#1592
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Cleve Barry Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.
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Frank Yates
#2925
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Frank Yates FRS was one of the pioneers of 20th-century statistics. Biography Yates was born in Manchester, England, the eldest of five children of seed merchant and botanist Percy Yates and his wife Edith. He attended Wadham House, a private school, before gaining a scholarship to Clifton College in 1916. In 1920, he obtained a scholarship at St John's College, Cambridge, and four years later graduated with a First Class Honours degree.
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Sun-Yung Alice Chang
#8169
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sun-Yung Alice Chang is a Taiwanese American mathematician specializing in aspects of mathematical analysis ranging from harmonic analysis and partial differential equations to differential geometry. She is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.
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Bruce Kleiner
#6627
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Bruce Alan Kleiner is an American mathematician, working in differential geometry and topology and geometric group theory. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Wu-Yi Hsiang. Kleiner is a professor of mathematics at New York University.
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Wendelin Werner
#3602
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Wendelin Werner is a German-born French mathematician working on random processes such as self-avoiding random walks, Brownian motion, Schramm–Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematical physics. In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory". He is currently Rouse Ball professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
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Gerald Teschl
#8183
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gerald Teschl is an Austrian mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics. He works in the area of mathematical physics; in particular direct and inverse spectral theory with application to completely integrable partial differential equations .
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Miles Reid
#8645
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Miles Anthony Reid FRS is a mathematician who works in algebraic geometry. Education Reid studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge and obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 under the supervision of Peter Swinnerton-Dyer and Pierre Deligne.
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Peter Shor
#886
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Williston Shor is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.
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Jamal Nazrul Islam
#3003
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Jamal Nazrul Islam was a Bangladeshi mathematical physicist and cosmologist. He was a professor at University of Chittagong, served as a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and member of the syndicate at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology until his death. He also served as the director of the Research Center for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Chittagong. He was awarded Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh.
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Eric Zaslow
#5896
Overall Influence
Eric Zaslow is an American mathematical physicist at Northwestern University. Biography Zaslow attended Harvard University, earning his Ph.D. in physics in 1995, with thesis "Kinks, twists, and folds : exploring the geometric musculature of quantum field theory" written under the direction of Cumrun Vafa. His research focuses on mathematical questions arising from duality symmetries in theoretical physics such as mirror symmetry. With Andrew Strominger and Shing-Tung Yau, he formulated the SYZ conjecture.
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R. Tyrrell Rockafellar
#4980
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text "Convex Analysis" , which has been cited more than 27,000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences .
Go to Profile#344
Zhiwei Yun
#9162
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
#345
Herbert Wilf
#5335
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Herbert Saul Wilf was an American mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote numerous books and research papers. Together with Neil Calkin he founded The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics in 1994 and was its editor-in-chief until 2001.
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Henri Cohen
#8226
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Henri Cohen is a number theorist, and an emeritus professor at the University of Bordeaux. He is best known for leading the team that created the PARI/GP computer algebra system. He also introduced the Rankin–Cohen bracket, co-proposed the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics and has written several textbooks in computational and algebraic number theory.
Go to Profile#347
Ciprian Foias
#7868
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Ciprian Ilie Foiaș was a Romanian-American mathematician. He was awarded the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics in 1995, for his contributions in operator theory. Education and career Born in Reșița, Romania, Foias studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest. He completed his dissertation in 1957, but was not allowed to defend his thesis by the Communist government until 1962. He received his doctorate in 1962 under supervision of Miron Nicolescu.
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Bruce C. Berndt
#5926
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#349
Andrew Casson
#8379
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Andrew John Casson FRS is a mathematician, studying geometric topology. Casson is the Philip Schuyler Beebe Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Education and Career Casson was educated at Latymer Upper School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in the Mathematical Tripos in 1965. His doctoral advisor at the University of Liverpool was C. T. C. Wall, but he never completed his doctorate; instead what would have been his Ph.D. thesis became his fellowship dissertation as a research fellow at Trinity College.
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Claire Voisin
#6668
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Claire Voisin is a French mathematician known for her work in algebraic geometry. She is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and holds the chair of algebraic geometry at the Collège de France.
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