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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#3101
George A. Elliott
#66208
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
George Arthur Elliott is a Canadian mathematician specializing in operator algebras, K-theory, and non-commutative geometry. He is a professor at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics, and holds a Canada Research Chair. He is best known for his work on classifying C*-algebras, both for initiating their classification and highlighting the importance of K-theory in this respect.
Go to Profile#3102
Garrison Sposito
#69284
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#3103
Ed Scheinerman
#63139
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Edward R. Scheinerman is an American mathematician, working in graph theory and order theory. He is a professor of applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science at Johns Hopkins University. His contributions to mathematics include Scheinerman's conjecture, now proven, stating that every planar graph may be represented as an intersection graph of line segments.
Go to Profile#3104
Christine Guenther
#44698
Overall Influence
Christine Guenther is an American mathematician known for her research on the differential geometry of manifolds, including the Ricci flow. She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Pacific University.
Go to Profile#3105
Maria Cibrario
#62056
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Elisa Maria Eugenia Cibrario Cinquini was an Italian mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and known for her research in association with Guido Fubini, Giuseppe Peano, and Francesco Tricomi.
Go to Profile#3106
Michèle Artigue
#28713
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michèle Artigue is a French expert in mathematics education, a professor emeritus at Paris Diderot University and the former president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction. Early life and education Artigue was born in 1946 in Bordères-sur-l'Échez, a small town in the Pyrenees. She was the daughter of a kindergarten teacher, and writes that she was "always interested in mathematics". She attended the lycée in Tarbes, the nearest town large enough for that level of school, and then spent two years in a preparatory mathematics course for entrance to the grandes écoles in T...
Go to Profile#3107
Katya Scheinberg
#47208
Overall Influence
Katya Scheinberg is a Russian-American applied mathematician known for her research in continuous optimization and particularly in derivative-free optimization. She works at Cornell University and is a professor in Cornell's School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.
Go to Profile#3108
Albrecht Fröhlich
#50688
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Albrecht Fröhlich FRS was a German-born British mathematician, famous for his major results and conjectures on Galois module theory in the Galois structure of rings of integers. Education He was born in Munich to a Jewish family. He fled from the Naziss to France, and then to Palestine. He went to Bristol University in 1945, gaining a Ph.D in 1951 with a dissertation entitled On Some Topics in the Theory of Representation of Groups and Individual Class Field Theory under the supervision of Hans Heilbronn. He was a lecturer at the University of Leicester and then at the Keele University, t...
Go to Profile#3109
Richard F. Bass
#69236
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Richard Franklin Bass is an American mathematician, the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is known for his work in probability theory.
Go to Profile#3110
Leslie Howarth
#54231
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Leslie Howarth, FRS was a British mathematician who dealt with hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. Biography Howarth was educated at Accrington Grammar School, whence he moved to the University of Manchester and then on to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At Cambridge Howarth received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1933 and a doctorate under the supervision of Sydney Goldstein in 1936. Howarth married Eva Priestley when he was still a research student. Afterwards, he was a lecturer at King's College, Cambridge. In 1937–38 he was with Theodore von Kármán at Caltech. During World War II he worked first in ballistics and from 1942 at the Armament Research Department.
Go to Profile#3111
Gabriel Paternain
#43313
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gabriel Pedro Paternain is a Uruguayan mathematician. He is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. Previously he was a professor in DPMMS at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity College. He obtained his Licenciatura from Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay in 1987, and his PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1991. He has lectured several undergraduate and graduate courses and has gained widespread popularity due to his entertaining and informal lecturing style, which has been recognised by the university in the past for its high calibre.
Go to Profile#3112
Alexander Its
#36163
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alexander R. Its is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He completed his doctorate from Saint Petersburg State University, then known as Leningrad University, in 1977. Afterwards, he continued his career as a lecturer at the Steklov Institute in Saint Petersburg before becoming a professor at his alma mater. He remained there until 1993, when he assumed his current role at Indiana University. His research focuses on integrable systems, examining asymptotic analysis of matrix models using Riemann–Hilbert and isomonodromy metho...
Go to Profile#3113
George Glauberman
#33125
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
George Isaac Glauberman is a mathematician at the University of Chicago who works on finite simple groups. He proved the ZJ theorem and the Z* theorem. Born in New York City on March 3, 1941, Glauberman did his undergraduate studies at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, graduating in 1961, and earned a master's degree from Harvard University in 1962. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965, under the supervision of Richard Bruck. He has had 22 PhD students, including Ahmed Chalabi and Peter Landrock, the president and founder of Cryptomathic. He has co-authored with J. L.
Go to Profile#3114
John Robinson
#44918
Overall Influence
1935 - 2007 (72 years)
John Robinson was a British sculptor and co-founder of the Bradshaw Foundation. Accounts of his work may be seen at the Robinson estate website, the website of the Centre for the Popularisation of Mathematics and the June and July 2007, issues of Hyperseeing. Among other distinctions, he was the Official Sculptor for the British Olympic Committee in 1988, and a University of Wales Honorary Fellow, 1992.
Go to Profile#3115
Kai Behrend
#64402
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kai Behrend is a German mathematician. He is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His work is in algebraic geometry and he has made important contributions in the theory of algebraic stacks, Gromov–Witten invariants and Donaldson–Thomas theory He is also known for Behrend's formula, the generalization of the Grothendieck–Lefschetz trace formula to algebraic stacks.
Go to Profile#3116
Norbert Schappacher
#57723
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Norbert Schappacher is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 in Hyderabad. Education and career After secondary education at Essen's Burggymnasium, Schappacher studied from 1969 to 1971 at the University of Bonn, where he was taught by Günter Harder and Friedrich Hirzebruch. Schappacher obtained his Vordiplom in 1971 at the University of Göttingen, where he studied from 1971 to 1974 and was taught by Hans Grauert, Ulrich Stuhler, and Martin Kneser. For the academic year 1974–1975, Schappacher st...
Go to Profile#3117
Jürg Peter Buser
#63026
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jürg Peter Buser, known as Peter Buser, is a Swiss mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and global analysis. Education and career Buser received his doctorate in 1976 from the University of Basel with advisor Heinz Huber and thesis Untersuchungen über den ersten Eigenwert des Laplaceoperators auf kompakten Flächen . As a post-doctoral student he was at the University of Bonn, the University of Minnesota. and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, before he habilitated at the University of Bonn with a thesis on the length spectrum of Riemann surfaces.
Go to Profile#3118
Viviane Baladi
#52144
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Viviane Baladi is a mathematician who works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France. Originally Swiss, she has become a naturalized citizen of France. Her research concerns dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#3119
Aryabhata II
#50590
Overall Influence
Āryabhaṭa also known as Arya Diya Jankhi was an Indian mathematician and astronomer, and the author of the Maha-Siddhanta. The numeral II is given to him to distinguish him from the earlier and more influential Āryabhaṭa I. Scholars are unsure of when exactly he was born, though David Pingree dates of his main publications between 950–1100. The manuscripts of his Maha-Siddhanta have been discovered from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal, so he probably lived in northern India.
Go to Profile#3120
Tamara G. Kolda
#42928
Overall Influence
Tamara G. Kolda is an American applied mathematician and former Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She is noted for her contributions in computational science, multilinear algebra, data mining, graph algorithms, mathematical optimization, parallel computing, and software engineering. She is currently a member of the SIAM Board of Trustees and served as associate editor for both the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.
Go to Profile#3121
Alfred Menezes
#21690
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Alfred Menezes is co-author of several books on cryptography, including the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Education Alfred Menezes' family is from Goa, a state in western India, but he was born in Tanzania and grew up in Kuwait except for a few years at a boarding school in India. His undergraduate and post-graduate degrees are from the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#3122
Yousef Alavi
#67947
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Yousef Alavi was an Iranian born American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and graph theory. He received his PhD from Michigan State University in 1958. He was a professor of mathematics at Western Michigan University from 1958 until his retirement in 1996; he chaired the department from 1989 to 1992.
Go to Profile#3123
Nobushige Kurokawa
#68877
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nobushige Kurokawa is a Japanese mathematician working in number theory, especially analytic number theory, multiple trigonometric function theory, zeta functions and automorphic forms. He is currently a professor emeritus at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#3124
Ira Gessel
#56319
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ira Martin Gessel is an American mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics. He is a long-time faculty member at Brandeis University and resides in Arlington, Massachusetts. Education and career Gessel studied at Harvard University graduating magna cum laude in 1973. There, he became a Putnam Fellow in 1972, alongside Arthur Rubin and David Vogan.
Go to Profile#3125
Sara Zahedi
#52040
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Sara Zahedi is an Iranian-Swedish mathematician who works in computational fluid dynamics and holds an associate professorship in numerical analysis at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. She is one of ten winners and the only female winner of the European Mathematical Society Prize for 2016 "for her outstanding research regarding the development and analysis of numerical algorithms for partial differential equations with a focus on applications to problems with dynamically changing geometry". The topic of Zahedi's EMS Prize lecture was her recent research on the CutFEM method of so...
Go to Profile#3126
Dona Strauss
#31815
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dona Anschel Papert Strauss is a South African mathematician working in topology and functional analysis. Her doctoral thesis was one of the initial sources of pointless topology. She has also been active in the political left, lost one of her faculty positions over her protests of the Vietnam War, and became a founder of European Women in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#3127
Jan Jaworowski
#63908
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Jan W. Jaworowski was a Polish and American mathematician, topologist. Biography His father was Jan Leonard Jaworowski, and his mother—Helena . He graduated from the mathematical department of the University of Warsaw. He got his Ph.D. from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1955, in Algebraic topology, under Karol Borsuk. He generalized the Borsuk–Ulam theorem about antipodes.
Go to Profile#3128
Alexander Moiseevich Olevskii
#44640
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Alexander Moiseevich Olevskii is a Russian-Israeli mathematician at Tel Aviv University, specializing in mathematical analysis. As of July 2021, he is a professor emeritus. He graduated in 1963 with a Candidate of Sciences degree from Moscow State University. There he received in 1966 a Russian Doctor of Sciences degree . At the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, he was from 1988 to 1992 head of the department of algebra and analysis. In the spring of 1996 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has held visiting appointments at universities or institutes in several cou...
Go to Profile#3129
Jennifer Seberry
#25570
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.
Go to Profile#3130
Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt
#68427
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic number theory. Leopoldt earned his Ph.D. in 1954 at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse with the thesis Über Einheitengruppe und Klassenzahl reeller algebraischer Zahlkörper . As a postdoc, he was from 1956 to 1958 at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1959, he obtained his habilitation degree at the University of Erlangen and was then at the University of Tübingen. From 1964, he was ordentlicher Professor at the University of Karlsruhe, where he was also Director of the Mathematics Institute.
Go to Profile#3131
Gudrun Kalmbach
#50984
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Gudrun Kalmbach is a German mathematician and educator known for her contributions in the field of quantum logic and for the educational programmes she developed. Career After teacher training in mathematics and chemistry, Kalmbach obtained a PhD at the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Hans Grauert on the topic of low-dimensional CW complexes in non-compact manifolds.
Go to Profile#3132
Simon Tavaré
#34223
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Simon Tavaré is the founding Director of the Herbert and Florence Irving Institute of Cancer Dynamics at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he was Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, Professor of Cancer Research at the Department of Oncology and Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3133
Amy Dahan
#48033
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Amy Dahan-Dalmédico is a French mathematician, historian of mathematics, and historian of the politics of climate change. Education and career Dahan earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1979 and taught mathematics at the University of Amiens until 1983, when she became a researcher for the CNRS. She has also taught at the École Polytechnique, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and Université libre de Bruxelles. She earned a second doctorate in the history of mathematics in 1990, and is an emeritus member of the Alexandre Koyré Center for Research in the History of Science and ...
Go to Profile#3134
Irina Mitrea
#47761
Overall Influence
Irina Mitrea is a Romanian-American mathematician who works as professor and department chair at the Department of Mathematics of Temple University. She is known for her contributions to harmonic analysis, particularly on the interface of this field with partial differential equations, geometric measure theory, scattering theory, complex analysis and validated numerics. She is also known for her efforts to promote mathematics among young women.
Go to Profile#3135
Francis Clarke
#51864
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Frank "Francis" H. Clarke is a Canadian and French mathematician. Biography Francis Clarke graduated in 1969 from McGill University with a B.Sc. degree in 1969 and in 1973 from the University of Washington with a Ph.D. with thesis advisor R. Tyrrell Rockafellar. In 1978 Clarke became a full professor at the University of British Columbia and gave an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki. In 1984 he was appointed director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques of the University of Montreal. During the nine years of his directorship, CRM became Canada's leading national research center for mathematics and its applications.
Go to Profile#3136
Alexander Barvinok
#48650
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Alexander I. Barvinok is a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan. Barvinok received his Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State University in 1988 under the supervision of Anatoly Moiseevich Vershik.
Go to Profile#3137
Gordon Douglas Slade
#62951
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gordon Douglas Slade is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in probability theory. Education Slade received in 1977 his bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto and in 1984 his PhD for research supervised by Joel Feldman and Lon Rosen at the University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#3138
Mark H. A. Davis
#43819
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Mark Herbert Ainsworth Davis was Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London. He made fundamental contributions to the theory of stochastic processes, stochastic control and mathematical finance.
Go to Profile#3139
Freydoon Shahidi
#43275
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Freydoon Shahidi is an Iranian American mathematician who is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in the U.S. He is known for a method of automorphic L-functions which is now known as the Langlands–Shahidi method.
Go to Profile#3140
Frederick Rowbottom
#35016
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Frederick Rowbottom was a British logician and mathematician. The large cardinal notion of Rowbottom cardinals is named after him. Biography After graduating from Cambridge University, Rowbottom studied under Howard Jerome Keisler at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning his Ph.D. degree in 1964, with a thesis entitled Large Cardinals and Small Constructible Sets, under the supervision of Jerome Keisler. With a recommendation from Georg Kreisel, he took a position at the University of Bristol in 1965, where he spent the rest of his professional career.
Go to Profile#3141
Corinna Ulcigrai
#36553
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Corinna Ulcigrai is an Italian mathematician working on dynamical systems. With Krzysztof Frączek in 2013, Ulcigrai is known for proving that in the Ehrenfest model most trajectories are not ergodic.
Go to Profile#3142
Oleg Besov
#61488
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Oleg Vladimirovich Besov is a Russian mathematician. He heads the Department of Function Theory at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where he defended his PhD in 1960 and habilitation in 1966. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1970 in Nice. He is professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and European Academy of Sciences . A festschrift was published in honor of Besov's 70th birthday.
Go to Profile#3143
Sarah Witherspoon
#60404
Overall Influence
Sarah Jane Witherspoon is an American mathematician interested in topics in abstract algebra, including Hochschild cohomology and quantum groups. She is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University
Go to Profile#3144
Susanne Brenner
#53768
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susanne Cecelia Brenner is an American mathematician, whose research concerns the finite element method and related techniques for the numerical solution of differential equations. She is a Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Previously, she held the Nicholson Professorship of Mathematics and the Michael F. and Roberta Nesbit McDonald Professorship at Louisiana State University, She currently chairs the editorial committee of the journal Mathematics of Computation. During 2021-2022 she is serving as President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics .
Go to Profile#3145
Jun-Muk Hwang
#42216
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jun-Muk Hwang is a South Korean mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and complex differential geometry. Personal life Hwang is the eldest son of gayageum musician Hwang Byungki and novelist Han Malsook.
Go to Profile#3146
Karl Prachar
#40319
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Karl Prachar was an Austrian mathematician who worked in the area of analytic number theory. He is known for his much acclaimed book on the distribution of the prime numbers, Primzahlverteilung . Prachar received his doctorate in 1947 from the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#3147
Giovanni Prodi
#36218
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Giovanni Prodi was an Italian mathematician, also known for many activities concerning the teaching of mathematics. There is a professorship of mathematics at the University of Würzburg named in his honour, created in 2006.
Go to Profile#3148
Roger D. Nussbaum
#49980
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Roger David Nussbaum is an American mathematician, specializing in nonlinear functional analysis and differential equations. Nussbaum graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Chicago with thesis The Fixed Point Index and Fixed Point Theorems for K-Set Contractions supervised by Felix Browder. At Rutgers University Nussbaum became in 1969 an assistant professor, in 1973 an associate professor, and in 1977 a full professor. He retired there as professor emeritus. He was elected in 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathe...
Go to Profile#3149
Nader Masmoudi
#66020
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Nader Masmoudi is a Tunisian mathematician. Life He studied in Tunis and then at the École normale supérieure in Paris with a diploma in 1996; In 1999 he received his doctorate from the University of Paris-Dauphine with Pierre-Louis Lions . He then went to the Courant Institute at New York University, where he became a professor in 2008.
Go to Profile#3150
George Leitmann
#50822
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
George Leitmann is an Austrian-born American engineering scientist and educator. Early life and education Leitmann was born on May 24, 1925, to a fully assimilated Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. His paternal grandfather was a career officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Imperial Army. His father had been a volunteer in the Austrian Army in World War I and was wounded twice on the Serbian front.
Go to Profile