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,
#3001
Reiko Sakamoto
#61601
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Reiko Sakamoto is a Japanese mathematician affiliated with Nara Women's University. Her teachers have included Sigeru Mizohata and Masaya Yamaguchi; her students have included Yoshihiro Shibata. She is known for her research on mixed boundary conditions for hyperbolic partial differential equations, for which she won the 1974 Iyanaga Prize of the Mathematical Society of Japan, and for her book on hyperbolic boundary value problems.
Go to Profile#3002
Pierre Rosenstiehl
#25540
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Pierre Rosenstiehl was a French mathematician recognized for his work in graph theory, planar graphs, and graph drawing. The Fraysseix-Rosenstiehl's planarity criterion is at the origin of the left-right planarity algorithm implemented in Pigale software, which is considered the fastest implemented planarity testing algorithm.
Go to Profile#3003
William R. Pulleyblank
#47194
Overall Influence
William R. Pulleyblank is a Canadian and American operations researcher. He is a professor of operations research at the United States Military Academy , where he also holds the Class of 1950 Chair of Advanced Technology.
Go to Profile#3004
Robert Miller Hardt
#65036
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Miller Hardt is an American mathematician. His research deals with geometric measure theory, partial differential equations, and continuum mechanics. He is particularly known for his work with Leon Simon proving the boundary regularity of volume minimizing hypersurfaces.
Go to Profile#3005
Gunilla Kreiss
#49539
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Gunilla Kreiss is a Swedish applied mathematician and numerical analyst specializing in level-set methods and numerical methods for partial differential equations, especially for problems arising in fluid dynamics including two-phase flow, shear flow, and Burgers' equation. She is professor of numerical analysis in the Department of Information Technology, Division of Scientific Computing at Uppsala University, and editor-in-chief of BIT Numerical Mathematics.
Go to Profile#3006
Karen Saxe
#58246
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Karen Saxe is an American mathematician who specializes in functional analysis, and in the mathematical study of issues related to social justice. She is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics, Emerita at Macalester College,. She is Associate Executive Director of the American Mathematical Society and Director of its Office of Government Relations, based in Washington DC.
Go to Profile#3007
Karin Melnick
#59148
Overall Influence
Karen Melnick is a mathematician and associate professor at University of Maryland, College Park. She specializes in differential geometry and was most recently awarded the 2020-2021 Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars by the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#3008
Melvin Conway
#5323
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Melvin Edward Conway is an American computer scientist, computer programmer, and hacker who coined what is now known as Conway's law: "Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The adage remains relevant in modern software engineering and is still being referenced and investigated.
Go to Profile#3009
Boris Korenblum
#42415
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Boris Isaac Korenblum was a Soviet-Israeli-American mathematician, specializing in mathematical analysis. Boris Korenblum was a child prodigy in music, languages, and mathematics. He started as a violinist at the famous School of Stolyarsky in Odessa. After he won a young mathematicians competition, the family was given an apartment in Kiev, an extraordinary event. Boris was given a mentor, a local mathematics professor, who would peremptorily supervise his course of self study. To the great chagrin of his mother, Boris decided against pursuing a music career. In June 1941, when the war began, he volunteered, not yet having reached the draft age, for the Soviet Army.
Go to Profile#3010
Vikraman Balaji
#67546
Overall Influence
Vikraman Balaji is an Indian mathematician and is currently a professor at Chennai Mathematical Institute. He completed his doctorate in Mathematics under the supervision of C. S. Seshadri. His primary area of research is in algebraic geometry, representation theory and differential geometry. Balaji was awarded the 2006 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Sciences along with Indranil Biswas "for his outstanding contributions to moduli problems of principal bundles over algebraic varieties, in particular on the Uhlenbeck-Yau compactification of the Moduli Spaces of µ-semistable bundl...
Go to Profile#3011
Gottfried E. Noether
#55501
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Gottfried Emanuel Noether was a German-born American statistician and educator; one of the third generation of a famous family of mathematicians: he was the son of Fritz Noether and nephew of Emmy Noether, the grandson of Max Noether, and brother of chemist Herman Noether. He died in Willimantic, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#3012
Siemion Fajtlowicz
#56864
Overall Influence
Siemion Fajtlowicz is a Polish-American mathematician, formerly a professor at the University of Houston. He is known for creating and developing the conjecture-making computer program Graffiti. Fajtlowicz received his Ph.D. in 1967 or 1968 from the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, under the supervision of Edward Marczewski.
Go to Profile#3013
Sherman K. Stein
#58917
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Sherman Kopald Stein is an American mathematician and an author of mathematics textbooks. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. His writings have won the Lester R. Ford Award and the Beckenbach Book Prize.
Go to Profile#3014
Michio Suzuki
#34350
Overall Influence
1926 - 1998 (72 years)
was a Japanese mathematician who studied group theory. Biography He was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1953 to his death. He also had visiting positions at the University of Chicago , the Institute for Advanced Study , the University of Tokyo , and the University of Padua . Suzuki received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Tokyo, despite having moved to the United States the previous year. He was the first to attack the Burnside conjecture, that every finite non-abelian simple group has even order.
Go to Profile#3015
Michel Las Vergnas
#62046
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Michel Las Vergnas was a French mathematician associated with Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University in Paris, and a research director emeritus at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Las Vergnas earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University, under the supervision of Claude Berge. He was one of the founders of the European Journal of Combinatorics, which began publishing in 1980.
Go to Profile#3016
Anjan Biswas
#67652
Overall Influence
#3017
Vladimir Kanovei
#46055
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Vladimir G. Kanovei is a Russian mathematician working at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow, Russia. His interests include mathematical logic and foundations, as well as mathematical history.
Go to Profile#3018
Deborah Tepper Haimo
#51627
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Deborah Tepper Haimo was an American mathematician who became president of the Mathematical Association of America . Her research concerned "classical analysis, in particular, generalizations of the heat equation, special functions, and harmonic analysis".
Go to Profile#3019
Jay Kappraff
#41222
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jay Kappraff is an American professor of mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author. Biography Kappraff was trained in engineering, physical sciences and mathematics, earning a B.Ch.E. in chemical engineering at New York Polytechnic in 1958. He went on to be awarded a PhD in applied mathematics in 1974 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, New York University and a M.S. in chemical engineering in 1960 from Iowa State University. He began work for DuPont DeNemours as a chemical engineer from 1961 to 1962 going on to teach mathematics for a brief period before obtaining a position at NASA as an aerospace engineer from 1962 until 1965.
Go to Profile#3020
Ann E. Watkins
#43091
Overall Influence
Ann Esther Watkins is an American mathematician and statistician specializing in statistics education. She edited the College Mathematics Journal from 1989 to 1994, chaired the Advanced Placement Statistics Development Committee from 1997 to 1999, and was president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2001 to 2002.
Go to Profile#3021
Nigel Higson
#61771
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Nigel David Higson is a Canadian math professor at Pennsylvania State University who received the 1996 Coxeter–James Prize. His doctorate came from Dalhousie University in 1985, under the supervision of Peter Fillmore. He works in the fields of operator algebra and K-theory. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. In 2012 he was chosen as one of the inaugural Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#3022
Ruth F. Curtain
#54500
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Ruth F. Curtain was an Australian mathematician who worked for many years in the Netherlands as a professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen. Her research concerned infinite-dimensional linear systems.
Go to Profile#3023
Alexei Borodin
#57828
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Alexei Mikhailovich Borodin is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research His research concerns asymptotic representation theory, relations with random matrices and integrable systems, and the difference equation formulation of monodromy.
Go to Profile#3024
Ingeborg Seynsche
#34742
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Martha Mechthild Ingeborg Seynsche was a German mathematician. She was one of the first women to be allowed to earn a doctorate on a mathematical topic in Göttingen. Life and work Her father Johannes Seynsche was a professor and senior teacher at the Unterbarmer Higher Girls' School. Her mother was Anna Seynsche , née Limbach. Ingeborg passed her Abitur in Unterbarmen in 1924. She then studied in Marburg and Göttingen, and in 1929 passed the state examination for teachers in pure and applied mathematics and physics. She went on to become an assistant at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen.
Go to Profile#3025
Tamar Schlick
#48508
Overall Influence
Tamar Schlick is an American applied mathematician who works as a professor of chemistry, mathematics, and computer science at New York University. Her research involves developing and applying tools for modeling and simulating biomolecules.
Go to Profile#3026
Jean-Pierre Ramis
#50140
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jean-Pierre Ramis, born in 1943, is a French mathematician and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. His work concerns the dynamic systems of complex field functions, discrete and continuous , in particular the notions of integrability and the Galois differential theory.
Go to Profile#3027
E. Brian Davies
#57201
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Edward Brian Davies FRS is a former professor of Mathematics, King's College London , and is the author of the popular science book Science in the Looking Glass: What do Scientists Really Know. In 2010, he was awarded a Gauss Lecture by the German Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#3028
Jacques F. Benders
#36141
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Jacobus Franciscus Benders was a Dutch mathematician and Emeritus Professor of Operations Research at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He was the first Professor in the Netherlands in the field of Operations Research and is known for his contributions to mathematical programming.
Go to Profile#3029
Thomas Zink
#35981
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Zink is a German mathematician. He currently holds a chair for arithmetic algebraic geometry at the University of Bielefeld. He has been doing research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, at the University of Toronto and at the University of Bonn among others.
Go to Profile#3030
Xin Zhou
#33520
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Xin Zhou is a mathematician known for his contributions in scattering theory, integrable systems, random matrices and Riemann–Hilbert problems. He is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Duke University. Zhou had obtained M.Sc. from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1982 and then got his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Rochester. He received the Pólya prize in 1998 and was awarded with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. He is most well known for his work with Percy Deift on the steepest descent method for oscillatory Riemann–Hilbert problems.
Go to Profile#3031
Welington de Melo
#34846
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Welington Celso de Melo was a Brazilian mathematician. Known for his contributions to dynamical systems theory, he served as full professor at Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada from 1980 to 2016. Melo wrote numerous papers, one being a complete description of the topological behavior of 1-dimensional real dynamical systems . He proved the global hyperbolicity of renormalization for r unimodal maps . He was a recipient of the 2003 TWAS Prize.
Go to Profile#3032
Ross Street
#53072
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ross Howard Street is an Australian mathematician specialising in category theory. Biography Street completed his undergraduate and postgraduate study at the University of Sydney, where his dissertation advisor was Max Kelly. He is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Macquarie University, a fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society , and was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1989. He was awarded the Edgeworth David Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1977, and the Australian Mathematical Society's George Szekeres Medal in 2012.
Go to Profile#3033
Jean Mawhin
#66510
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean L. Mawhin is a Belgian mathematician and historian of mathematics. Mawhin received his PhD in 1969 under Paul Ledoux at the University of Liège, where he had studied since 1962 and received his licentiate in mathematics in 1964. He was assistant professor at Liège from 1964 and maitre de conferences from 1969 to 1973. From 1970 he was assistant professor and from 1974 professor of mathematics at the Université catholique de Louvain . In 2008 he retired.
Go to Profile#3034
Wolf Barth
#61084
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Wolf Paul Barth was a German mathematician who discovered Barth surfaces and whose work on vector bundles has been important for the ADHM construction. Until 2011 Barth was working in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.
Go to Profile#3035
Josselin Garnier
#57695
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Josselin Garnier is a French mathematician. Garnier studied from 1991 to 1994 at the École normale supérieure and received in 1996 his doctorate from the École polytechnique with thesis Ondes en milieux aleatoires under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Fouque. In 2000 Garnier habilitated at Pierre and Marie Curie University . In 2001 he became an assistant professor at the University of Toulouse. He became in 2005 an assistant professor and in 2007 a full professor at Paris Diderot University . He works there at the Laboratoire de Probabilités et Modèles Aléatoires and at the laboratory Jacqu...
Go to Profile#3036
George Kempf
#67806
Overall Influence
1944 - 2002 (58 years)
George Rushing Kempf was a mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, who proved the Riemann–Kempf singularity theorem, the Kempf–Ness theorem, the Kempf vanishing theorem, and who introduced Kempf varieties.
Go to Profile#3037
Vlastimil Dlab
#62050
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Vlastimil Dlab is a Czech-born Canadian mathematician who has worked in Czechoslovakia, Sudan, Australia and especially Canada where he founded and led an influential department of modern mathematics.
Go to Profile#3038
Volodymyr Korolyuk
#53891
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Volodymyr Semenovych Korolyuk was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician who made significant contributions to probability theory and its applications, academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine .
Go to Profile#3039
Simone Warzel
#53681
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Simone Warzel is a German mathematical physicist at the Technical University of Munich. Her research involves statistical mechanics and the many-body problem in quantum mechanics. She is a co-author of the book Random Operators: Disorder Effects on Quantum Spectra and Dynamics.
Go to Profile#3040
Winifred Asprey
#14838
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Winifred "Tim" Alice Asprey was an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was one of only around 200 women to earn PhDs in mathematics from American universities during the 1940s, a period of women's underrepresentation in mathematics at this level. She was involved in developing the close contact between Vassar College and IBM that led to the establishment of the first computer science lab at Vassar.
Go to Profile#3041
Cecil C. Rousseau
#55581
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Cecil Clyde Rousseau, Jr. was a mathematician and author who specialized in graph theory and combinatorics. He was a professor at The University of Memphis starting in 1970 until retiring in 2008, and was involved with USAMO in many capacities, including serving as chair.
Go to Profile#3042
Fariba Fahroo
#48290
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Fariba Fahroo is an American Persian mathematician, a program manager at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and a former program manager at the Defense Sciences Office. Along with I. M. Ross, she has published papers in pseudospectral optimal control theory. The Ross–Fahroo lemma and the Ross–Fahroo pseudospectral method are named after her. In 2010, she received , the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award for fundamental contributions to flight mechanics.
Go to Profile#3043
Luigi Amerio
#59872
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Luigi Amerio , was an Italian electrical engineer and mathematician. He is known for his work on almost periodic functions, on Laplace transforms in one and several dimensions, and on the theory of elliptic partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#3044
Mark Stern
#47322
Overall Influence
Mark Stern is an American mathematician whose focus has been on geometric analysis, Yang–Mills theory, Hodge theory, and string theory. One of Stern's foremost accomplishments is his proof of the Zucker conjecture concerning locally symmetric spaces. Since about 2000, Stern has focused on geometric problems arising in physics, ranging from harmonic theory to string theory and supersymmetry.
Go to Profile#3045
Vadim Kaloshin
#53672
Overall Influence
Vadim Kaloshin is a Soviet-born mathematician, known for his contributions to dynamical systems. He was a student of John N. Mather at Princeton University, obtaining a Ph.D. in 2001. He was subsequently a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a faculty member at the California Institute of Technology and Pennsylvania State University. Until 2020 he was the Michael Brin Chair at the University of Maryland, College Park, mathematics professor for the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences,. Now he is a chair professor...
Go to Profile#3046
Max Rössler
#49050
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Max Rössler is a Swiss investor and philanthropist that has invested in a number of businesses in Switzerland and sits on the board of a number of those companies. He has used his private wealth to donate to a number of causes including sponsoring the annual Rössler Prize at his old alma mater.
Go to Profile#3047
Paul Kelly
#56570
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Paul Joseph Kelly was an American mathematician who worked in geometry and graph theory. Education and career Kelly was born in Riverside, California. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles before moving to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for doctoral studies; he earned his Ph.D. in 1942 with a dissertation concerning geometric transformations under the supervision of Stanislaw Ulam.
Go to Profile#3048
Michał Misiurewicz
#57417
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michał Misiurewicz is a Polish mathematician. He is known for his contributions to chaotic dynamical systems and fractal geometry, notably the Misiurewicz point. Misiurewicz participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad for Poland, winning a bronze medal in 1965 and a gold medal in 1966. He earned his Doctorate from University of Warsaw under supervision of Bogdan Bojarski.
Go to Profile#3049
Satyan Devadoss
#30338
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Satyan L. Devadoss is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Applied Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Diego. His research concerns topology and geometry, with inspiration coming from theoretical physics, phylogenetics, and scientific visualization.
Go to Profile#3050
I. Michael Ross
#21448
Overall Influence
Isaac Michael Ross is a Distinguished Professor and Program Director of Control and Optimization at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has published a highly-regarded textbook on optimal control theory and seminal papers in pseudospectral optimal control theory, energy-sink theory, the optimization and deflection of near-Earth asteroids and comets, robotics, attitude dynamics and control, orbital mechanics, real-time optimal control and unscented optimal control. The Kang–Ross–Gong theorem, Ross' lemma, Ross' time constant, the Ross–Fahroo lemma, and the Ross–Fahroo pseudosp...
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