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,
#3051
Celia Hoyles
#47491
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Areas of Specialization: Mathematics Education, Mathematics Policy, Applied Mathematics Celia Mary Hoyles (née French) was born in Chigwell, Essex, a small town in the UK located about 20 miles northeast of London. She is Professor of Mathematics Education at UCL Institute of Education (UCL), as well as in that university’s Institute of Education. After graduating from Loughton County High School in 1964, French (as she was then known) attended the University of Manchester, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1967, with a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics. Upon graduation from university, French taught mathematics at a high school in London’s East End.
Go to Profile#3052
Hubert Kennedy
#29685
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Hubert Collings Kennedy is an American author and mathematician. Kennedy was born in Florida and studied mathematics at several universities. From 1961 he was professor of mathematics, with research interest in the history of mathematics, at Providence College , He spent three sabbatical years doing research in Italy and Germany. He published a definitive biography of Giuseppe Peano who conceived modern mathematical notation.
Go to Profile#3053
José Felipe Voloch
#68276
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
José Felipe Voloch is a Brazilian mathematician who works on number theory and algebraic geometry and is a professor at Canterbury University. Career Voloch earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 under the supervision of John William Scott Cassels. He was a professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
Go to Profile#3054
Chandler Davis
#23193
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Horace Chandler Davis was an American-Canadian mathematician, writer, educator, and left-wing political activist. The socialist magazine Jacobin described Davis as "an internationally esteemed mathematician, a minor science fiction writer of note, and among the most celebrated political prisoners in the United States during the years of the high Cold War."
Go to Profile#3055
Wilfred Kaplan
#57627
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
Wilfred Kaplan was a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan for 46 years, from 1940 through 1986. His research focused on dynamical systems, the topology of curve families, complex function theory, and differential equations. In total, he authored over 30 research papers and 11 textbooks.
Go to Profile#3056
Nancy K. Nichols
#50908
Overall Influence
Nancy K. Nichols is an applied mathematician and numerical analyst whose research concerns numerical methods for differential equations, linear algebra, and control theory, and data assimilation. She is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Reading.
Go to Profile#3057
Federico Ardila
#65107
Overall Influence
Federico Ardila is a Colombian mathematician and DJ who researches combinatorics and specializes in matroid theory. Ardila graduated from MIT with a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1998 and obtained a Ph.D. in 2003 under the supervision of Richard P. Stanley in the same institution. Ardila is currently a professor at the San Francisco State University and additionally holds an adjunct position at the University of Los Andes in Colombia.
Go to Profile#3058
Hellmuth Stachel
#36705
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Hellmuth Stachel is an Austrian mathematician, a professor of geometry at the Technical University of Vienna, who is known due to his contributions to geometry, kinematics and computer-aided design.
Go to Profile#3059
Maria Hasse
#55542
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Maria-Viktoria Hasse was a German mathematician who became the first female professor in the faculty of mathematics and science at TU Dresden. She wrote books on set theory and category theory, and is known as one of the namesakes of the Gallai–Hasse–Roy–Vitaver theorem in graph coloring.
Go to Profile#3060
Cédric Villani
#36056
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani is a French politician and mathematician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010, and he was the director of Sorbonne University's Institut Henri Poincaré from 2009 to 2017. As of September 2022, he is a professor at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.
Go to Profile#3061
G. Mike Reed
#40912
Overall Influence
George Michael Reed is an American computer scientist. He has contributed to theoretical computer science in general and CSP in particular. Mike Reed has a doctorate in pure mathematics from Auburn University, United States, and a doctorate in computation from Oxford University, England. He has an interest in mathematical topology.
Go to Profile#3062
Amy Cohen-Corwin
#56732
Overall Influence
Amy Cohen-Corwin is a professor emerita of mathematics at Rutgers University, and former Dean of University College at Rutgers University. In 2006, she was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#3063
Hans Maass
#62898
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
Hans Maass was a German mathematician who introduced Maass wave forms and Koecher–Maass series and Maass–Selberg relations and who proved most of the Saito–Kurokawa conjecture. Maass was a student of Erich Hecke.
Go to Profile#3064
József Beck
#54960
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
József Beck is a Harold H. Martin Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. His contributions to combinatorics include the partial colouring lemma and the Beck–Fiala theorem in discrepancy theory, the algorithmic version of the Lovász local lemma, the two extremes theorem in combinatorial geometry and the second moment method in the theory of positional games, among others.
Go to Profile#3065
Jean Jacod
#56970
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jean Jacod is a French mathematician specializing in stochastic processes and probability theory. He has been a professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. He has made fundamental contributions to a wide range of topics in probability theory including stochastic calculus, limit theorems, martingale problems, Malliavin calculus and statistics of stochastic processes.
Go to Profile#3066
Julian Peto
#21657
Overall Influence
Julian Peto is an English statistician and cancer epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was Cancer Research UK Chair of Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research from 1983 until 2010. From 1974 to 1983 he worked as a research scientist under Sir Richard Doll at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#3067
Tomio Kubota
#35534
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Tomio Kubota was a Japanese mathematician working in number theory. His contributions include works on p-adic L functions and real-analytic automorphic forms. His work on p-adic L-functions, later recognised as an aspect of Iwasawa theory, was done jointly with Leopoldt.
Go to Profile#3068
Matest M. Agrest
#21850
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Mates Mendelevich Agrest was a Russian Empire-born mathematician and a proponent of the ancient astronaut theory. Biography Agrest was born in Knyazhitsy in the Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire on 20 July 1915. He graduated from Leningrad State University in 1938 and received his PhD in Science, Physics and Mathematics in 1946. He became the Chief of the University's Laboratory in 1970. He retired in 1992 and emigrated with his wife Riva to Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States.
Go to Profile#3069
Tom Lehrer
#18711
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Thomas Andrew Lehrer is an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician, who later taught mathematics and musical theater. He recorded pithy and humorous songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though they usually had original melodies. An exception is "The Elements", in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.
Go to Profile#3070
C. Stanley Ogilvy
#57631
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Charles Stanley Ogilvy was an American mathematician, sailor, and author. He was a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College , and a frequent competitor at the Star World Championships. His many books include works on both mathematics and sailing.
Go to Profile#3071
Helmut Maier
#44335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Helmut Maier is a German mathematician and professor at the University of Ulm, Germany. He is known for his contributions in analytic number theory and mathematical analysis and particularly for the so-called Maier's matrix method as well as Maier's theorem for primes in short intervals. He has also done important work in exponential sums and trigonometric sums over special sets of integers and the Riemann zeta function.
Go to Profile#3072
Abram Ilyich Fet
#36943
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Abram Fet was a Russian mathematician, Soviet dissident, philosopher, Samizdat translator and writer. He used various pseudonyms for Samizdat, like N. A. Klenov, A.B. Nazyvayev, D.A. Rassudin, S.T. Karneyev, etc. If published, his translations were usually issued under the name of A.I. Fedorov, which reproduced Fet's own initials and sometimes under the names of real people who agreed to publish Fet's translations under their names.
Go to Profile#3073
Maurice Tweedie
#31619
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Maurice Charles Kenneth Tweedie was a British medical physicist and statistician from the University of Liverpool. He was known for research into the exponential family probability distributions. Education and career Tweedie read physics at the University of Reading and attained a BSc and BSc in physics in 1939 followed by a MSc in physics 1941. He found a career in radiation physics, but his primary interest was in mathematical statistics where his accomplishments far surpassed his academic postings.
Go to Profile#3074
Raúl Rojas
#9187
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Raúl Rojas González is an emeritus professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, and a renowned specialist in artificial neural networks. The FU-Fighters, football-playing robots he helped build, were world champions in 2004 and 2005. He is now leading an autonomous car project called Spirit of Berlin.
Go to Profile#3075
Nick Day
#50135
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Nicholas Edward Day, CBE, FRS is a retired statistician and cancer epidemiologist. Education He was educated at Gresham's School and the University of Oxford, from 1958-1962, where he gained a B.A. in Mathematics and a Diploma in Statistics, and the University of Aberdeen from 1962-1966, where he obtained a Doctorate of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#3076
Karl Mahlburg
#35150
Overall Influence
Karl Mahlburg is an American mathematician whose research interests lie in the areas of modular forms, partitions, combinatorics and number theory. He is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles. Mahlburg received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Between 2011 and 2021 he was an assistant professor and an associate professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University.
Go to Profile#3077
Hilary Priestley
#51468
Overall Influence
Hilary Ann Priestley is a British mathematician. She is a professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where she has been Tutor in Mathematics since 1972. Hilary Priestley introduced ordered separable topological spaces; such topological spaces are now usually called Priestley spaces in her honour. The term "Priestley duality" is also used for her application of these spaces in the representation theory of distributive lattices.
Go to Profile#3078
Roger Carter
#59599
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Roger William Carter was a British mathematician who was emeritus professor at the University of Warwick. He defined Carter subgroups and wrote the standard reference Simple Groups of Lie Type. He obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1960 and his dissertation was entitled Some Contributions to the Theory of Finite Soluble Groups, with Derek Taunt as thesis advisor. Carter died in Wirral on 21 February 2022, at the age of 87.
Go to Profile#3079
Mario Fiorentini
#66403
Overall Influence
1918 - 2022 (104 years)
Mario Fiorentini was an Italian partisan, spy, mathematician, and academic, for years a professor of geometry at the University of Ferrara. He engaged in numerous partisan actions, including the assault on the entrance to the Regina Coeli prison and participating in the organization of the attack in via Rasella. He was Italy's most decorated World War II partisan.
Go to Profile#3080
Len Cook
#27526
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leonard Warren Cook CBE CRSNZ is a professional statistician who was Government Statistician of New Zealand from 1992 to 2000, and National Statistician and Director of the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics, and Registrar General for England and Wales from 2000 to 2005. He served as Families Commissioner in New Zealand from 2015 to 2018.
Go to Profile#3081
Ivan Corwin
#46099
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Ivan Zachary Corwin is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. Research His research concerns probability, mathematical physics, quantum integrable systems, stochastic PDEs, and random matrix theory. He is particularly known for work related to the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation.
Go to Profile#3082
Curtis Cooper
#33512
Overall Influence
Curtis Niles Cooper is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at the University of Central Missouri, in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. GIMPS Using software from the GIMPS project, Cooper and Steven Boone found the 43rd known Mersenne prime on their 700 PC cluster on December 15, 2005. The prime, 230,402,457 − 1, is 9,152,052 digits long and is the ninth Mersenne prime for GIMPS.
Go to Profile#3083
Cabiria Andreian Cazacu
#56147
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Cabiria Andreian Cazacu was a Romanian mathematician known for her work in complex analysis. She held the chair in mathematical analysis at the University of Bucharest from 1973 to 1975, and was dean of the faculty of mathematics at the University of Bucharest from 1976 to 1984.
Go to Profile#3084
Susan Landau
#10708
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#3085
Jean-Paul Pier
#59873
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
Jean-Paul Pier was a Luxembourgish mathematician, specializing in harmonic analysis and the history of mathematics, particularly mathematical analysis in the 20th century. Education and career Jean-Paul Pier was a graduate student in Luxembourg and at the universities of Paris and Nancy. He earned a University of Luxembourg doctorate in mathematical sciences and a French doctorate in pure mathematics. He also spent six months at the Grenoble Nuclear Research Center and a year at the University of Oregon .
Go to Profile#3086
A. M. Mathai
#59205
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Arakaparampil Mathai "Arak" Mathai is an Indian mathematician who has worked in Statistics, Applied Analysis, Applications of special functions and Astrophysics. Mathai established the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Palai, Kerala, India.
Go to Profile#3087
Miklós Bóna
#50440
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Miklós Bóna is an American mathematician of Hungarian origin. Bóna completed his undergraduate studies in Budapest and Paris, then obtained his Ph.D. at MIT in 1997 as a student of Richard P. Stanley. Since 1999, he has taught at the University of Florida, where in 2010 he was inducted to the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars.
Go to Profile#3088
Suzanne Lenhart
#60456
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Suzanne Marie Lenhart is an American mathematician who works in partial differential equations, optimal control and mathematical biology. She is a Chancellor's Professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee, an associate director for education and outreach at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, and a part-time researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#3089
Deborah Chung
#46282
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Deborah Duen Ling Chung is an American scientist and university professor. Early life and education Chung was born and raised in Hong Kong. Her mother was Rebecca Chan Chung , whose mother was Lee Sun Chau .
Go to Profile#3090
Leslie Hogben
#38295
Overall Influence
Leslie Hogben is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory and linear algebra, and known for her mentorship of graduate students in mathematics. She is a professor of mathematics at Iowa State University, where she held the Dio Lewis Holl Chair in Applied Mathematics 2012-2020; she is also professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State, associate dean for graduate studies and faculty development of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State, and associate director for diversity at the American Institute of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#3091
Mark Gross
#49393
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Mark William Gross is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mirror symmetry. Early life and education Mark William Gross was born on 30 November 1965 in Ithaca, New York, to Leonard Gross and Grazyna Gross. From 1982, he studied at Cornell University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1984. He gained a PhD in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley, for research supervised by Robin Hartshorne with a thesis on the surfaces in the four-dimensional Grassmannian.
Go to Profile#3092
Clive W. Kilmister
#50647
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Clive William Kilmister was a British mathematician who specialised in the mathematical foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics and relativity. Kilmister attended Queen Mary College London for both his under- and postgraduate degrees. His 1950 PhD on The Use of Quaternions in Wave-Tensor Calculus related to Arthur Eddington's work, and was supervised by cosmologist George C. McVittie, who was one of Eddington's students. His own students included Brian Tupper , Samuel Edgar , and Tony Crilly .
Go to Profile#3093
Katrin Wendland
#55839
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Katrin Wendland is a German mathematical physicist who works as a professor at Trinity College Dublin. Wendland earned a diploma in mathematics from the University of Bonn in 1996, and a PhD in physics from the University of Bonn in 2000, under the supervision of Werner Nahm. After being a lecturer and then senior lecturer at the University of Warwick from 2002 to 2006, she returned to Germany as a professor at the University of Augsburg, where she held the Chair for Analysis and Geometry. She moved to Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in 2011 and then to Trinity College Dublin in 2022.
Go to Profile#3094
Vladimir Rokhlin Jr.
#34221
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Vladimir Rokhlin Jr. is a mathematician and professor of computer science and mathematics at Yale University. He is the co-inventor with Leslie Greengard of the fast multipole method in 1985, recognised as one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#3095
Eduard Wirsing
#63520
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Eduard Wirsing was a German mathematician, specializing in number theory. Biography Wirsing was born on 28 June 1931 in Berlin. Wirsing studied at the University of Göttingen and the Free University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1957 under the supervision of Hans-Heinrich Ostmann with thesis Über wesentliche Komponenten in der additiven Zahlentheorie . In 1967/68 he was a professor at Cornell University and from 1969 a full professor at the University of Marburg, where he was since 1965. In 1970/71 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. Since 1974 he was a professor at the University of Ulm, where he led the 1976 Mathematical Colloquium.
Go to Profile#3096
Robert P. Dilworth
#48748
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
Robert Palmer Dilworth was an American mathematician. His primary research area was lattice theory; his biography at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive states "it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was one of the main factors in the subject moving from being merely a tool of other disciplines to an important subject in its own right". He is best known for Dilworth's theorem relating chains and antichains in partial orders; he was also the first to study antimatroids .
Go to Profile#3097
Robert G. Bland
#31289
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Gary Bland is an American mathematician and operations researcher, a professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University. He was born in New York City. Bland did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Cornell University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969, M.S. in 1972, and a Ph.D. in 1974 under the supervision of D. R. Fulkerson. He began his faculty career at Binghamton University, but then returned to Cornell in 1978.
Go to Profile#3098
Robert I. Soare
#31435
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Irving Soare is an American mathematician. He is the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1967. He proved, together with Carl Jockusch, the low basis theorem, and has done other work in mathematical logic, primarily in the area of computability theory.
Go to Profile#3099
Wojciech Zaremba
#9646
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist, a founding team member of OpenAI , where he leads both the Codex research and language teams. The teams actively work on AI that writes computer code and creating successors to GPT-3 respectively. The mission of OpenAI is to build safe artificial intelligence , and ensure that its benefits are as evenly distributed as possible.
Go to Profile#3100
William B. Gragg
#62224
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
William B. Gragg ended his career as an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has made fundamental contributions in numerical analysis, particularly the areas of numerical linear algebra and numerical methods for ordinary differential equations.
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