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,
#3151
Vikram Bhagvandas Mehta
#67535
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Vikram Bhagvandas Mehta was an Indian mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and vector bundles. Together with Annamalai Ramanathan he introduced the notion of Frobenius split varieties, which led to the solution of several problems about Schubert varieties. He is also known to have worked, from the 2000s onward, on the fundamental group scheme. It was precisely in the year 2002 when he and Subramanian published a proof of a conjecture by Madhav V. Nori that brought back into the limelight the theory of an object that until then had met with little success.
Go to Profile#3152
Frank Garvan
#46589
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Francis G. Garvan is an Australian-born mathematician who specializes in number theory and combinatorics. He holds the position Professor of Mathematics at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University with George E. Andrews as his thesis advisor. Garvan's thesis, Generalizations of Dyson's rank, concerned the rank of a partition and formed the groundwork for several of his later papers.
Go to Profile#3153
William Gerard Dwyer
#66450
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
William Gerard Dwyer is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic topology and group theory. For many years he was a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the William J. Hank Family Professor Emeritus.
Go to Profile#3154
Mary Jackson
#18573
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA's first black female engineer.
Go to Profile#3155
Harold P. Boas
#50489
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Harold P. Boas is an American mathematician. Life Boas was born in Evanston, Illinois, United States. He is the son of two noted mathematicians, Ralph P. Boas, Jr and Mary L. Boas. Education He received his A.B. and S.M. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1976 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 under the direction of Norberto Kerzman.
Go to Profile#3156
Alexander Goncharov
#61940
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Alexander B. Goncharov is a Soviet American mathematician and the Philip Schuyler Beebe Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. He won the EMS Prize in 1992. Goncharov won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1976. He attained his doctorate at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1987, under supervision of Israel Gelfand with thesis Generalized conformal structures on manifolds. Goncharov was an Invited Speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians and gave a talk Polylogarithms in arithmetic and geometry.
Go to Profile#3157
Eva-Maria Graefe
#58852
Overall Influence
Eva-Maria Graefe is a German mathematical physicist who works as a reader in mathematical physics at Imperial College London and as a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society. Her research involves ultracold atoms and non-Hermitian quantum mechanics, an area she describes informally as the study of "holes in quantum systems" by which dissipation degrades their quantum behavior.
Go to Profile#3158
Achi Brandt
#27991
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Achiezer Brandt is an Israeli mathematician, noted for his pioneering contributions to multigrid methods. Background Achi Brandt earned his Ph.D. degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1965, under the supervision of Joseph Gillis, with a thesis on numerical methods in hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. He is a faculty member of the Weizmann Institute, and has taught at several universities in the United States, including the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Stanford University.
Go to Profile#3159
Pavel Exner
#57318
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pavel Exner is a Czech mathematical physicist. Life Born on March 30, 1946, in Prague, his parents were Vilem Exner, economist, and Marie, born Karvankova, ophthalmologist. He graduated in 1969 in theoretical physics from the Charles University in Prague.
Go to Profile#3160
Hans Zantema
#22685
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Hans Zantema is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, and professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, known for his work on termination analysis. Biography Born in Goingarijp, The Netherlands, Zantema received his PhD in algebraic number theory in 1983 at the University of Amsterdam under supervision of Hendrik Lenstra Jr. for the thesis, entitled "Integer Valued Polynomials in Algebraic Number Theory."
Go to Profile#3161
Radha Kessar
#61244
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Radha Kessar is an Indian mathematician known for her research in the representation theory of finite groups. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester, and in 2009 won the Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#3162
John B. Bell
#45579
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John B. Bell is an American mathematician and the Chief Scientist of the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has made contributions in the areas of finite difference methods, numerical methods for low Mach number flows, adaptive mesh refinement, interface tracking and parallel computing. He has also worked on the application of these numerical methods to problems from a broad range of fields, including combustion, shock physics, seismology, flow in porous media and astrophysics.
Go to Profile#3163
Murad Taqqu
#51069
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Murad Taqqu is an Iraqi probabilist and statistician specializing in time series and stochastic processes. His research areas have included long-range dependence, self-similar processes, and heavy tails. He is a professor of mathematics at Boston University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has published over 250 papers, many of which are considered seminal work. He has co-authored or co-edited 9 books.
Go to Profile#3164
Yukio Matsumoto
#66953
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Yukio Matsumoto is a japanese mathematician, who worked mostly in the field of geometric topology and low-dimensional topology. He was a former professor for mathematics at the university of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D in 1973 from the university of Tokyo and his supervisor was Ichiro Tamura.
Go to Profile#3165
Deanna Needell
#48859
Overall Influence
Deanna Needell is an American applied mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. She authors The Needell in the Haystack, a column published in the Girls' Angle Bulletin. Education Deanna Needell received her PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Davis in 2009. Her dissertation title was Topics in Compressed Sensing.
Go to Profile#3166
Amir Dembo
#53348
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Amir Dembo is an Israeli-American mathematician, specializing in probability theory. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Go to Profile#3167
France Križanič
#67632
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
France Križanič was a Slovene mathematician, author of numerous books and textbooks on mathematics. He was professor of mathematical analysis at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Ljubljana.
Go to Profile#3168
Autumn Kent
#39267
Overall Influence
Autumn Kent is an American mathematician specializing in topology and geometry. She is a professor of mathematics and Vilas Associate at the University of Wisconsin. She is a transgender woman and a promoter of trans rights.
Go to Profile#3169
Mina Aganagić
#41555
Overall Influence
Mina Aganagić is a mathematical physicist who works as a professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics, the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3170
Jean-Loup Waldspurger
#46633
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jean-Loup Waldspurger is a French mathematician working on the Langlands program and related areas. He proved Waldspurger's theorem, the Waldspurger formula, and the local Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture for orthogonal groups. He played a role in the proof of the fundamental lemma, reducing the conjecture to a version for Lie algebras. This formulation was ultimately proven by Ngô Bảo Châu.
Go to Profile#3171
Yvonne Dold-Samplonius
#59960
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Yvonne Dold-Samplonius was a Dutch mathematician and historian who specialized in the history of Islamic mathematics during the Middle age. She was particularly interested in the mathematical methods used by Islamic architects and builders of the Middle Ages for measurements of volumes and measurements of religious buildings or in the design of muqarnas.
Go to Profile#3172
Umberto Bottazzini
#54951
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Umberto Bottazzini is an Italian historian of mathematics, writing on the history of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics. Biography Bottazzini graduated in 1973 with the Laurea degree from the University of Milan. He was an associate professor of matematiche complementari from 1977 to 1979 at the University of Calabria and from 1979 to 1990 at the University of Bologna. From 1990 to 2004 he was a professor ordinarius in the department of mathematics and computer science at the University of Palermo. He was for the academic year 1995–1996 a resident fellow at MIT's Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#3173
Klaus Schmidt
#68631
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Klaus D. Schmidt is an Austrian mathematician and retired professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Vienna. After studying mathematics at the University of Vienna he received his doctorate in 1968 under Edmund Hlawka. He held visiting professorships in Technical University of Vienna, University of Manchester in 1969, Bedford College and the University of Warwick from 1974 to 1994 after which he came back to the University of Vienna. He retired in 2009. In 1975/76 K. R. Parthasarathy invited Klaus Schmidt to spend 7 months at the new Delhi Centre of Indian Statistical Institute .
Go to Profile#3174
Anna Nagurney
#21878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Anna Nagurney is an American mathematician, economist, educator and writer in the field of Operations Management. Nagurney is the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she held the John F. Smith Memorial Professorship of Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management from 1998 to 2021.
Go to Profile#3175
Gila Hanna
#43458
Overall Influence
Gila Hanna is a Canadian mathematics educator and philosopher of mathematics whose research interests include the nature and educational role of mathematical proofs, and gender in mathematics education. She is professor emerita in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the former director of mathematics education at the Fields Institute, and the founder of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education.
Go to Profile#3176
Jean-Yves Chemin
#48346
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jean-Yves Chemin is a French mathematician, specializing in nonlinear partial differential equations. Education and career Chemin studied from 1979 at the École normale supérieure de Cachan with licentiate in 1980 and agrégation in 1982. At Paris-Sud University he graduated in 1983 with Diplôme d'études approfondies and in 1986 with doctorate in mathematics. His doctoral dissertation Analyse microlocale précisée de solutions d’équations aux dérivées partielles non linéaires was supervised by Jean-Michel Bony. Chemin became in 1986 Attaché de recherche at the École Polytechnique and in 1988 Chargé de recherche at the CNRS.
Go to Profile#3177
Valerie Isham
#48313
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Valerie Susan Isham is a British applied probabilist and former President of the Royal Statistical Society. Isham's research interests in include point processes, spatial processes, spatio-temporal processes and population processes.
Go to Profile#3178
Sol Garfunkel
#41087
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Solomon "Sol" Garfunkel born 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, is an American mathematician who has dedicated his career to mathematics education. Since 1980, he has served as the executive director of the award-winning non-profit organization "Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications", working with teachers, students, and business people to create learning environments where mathematics is used to investigate and model real issues in our world.
Go to Profile#3179
Thomas Schick
#60742
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Thomas Schick is a German mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and differential geometry. Education and career Schick studied mathematics and physics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he received in 1994 his Diplom in mathematics and in 1996 his PhD under the supervision of Wolfgang Lück with thesis -Index Theorem. As a postdoc he was from 1996 to 1998 at the University of Münster and from 1998 to 2000 an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he worked with Nigel Higson and John Roe. Schick received his habilitation in 2000 from the Universi...
Go to Profile#3180
Ola Bratteli
#57803
Overall Influence
1946 - 2015 (69 years)
Ola Bratteli was a Norwegian mathematician. He was a son of Trygve Bratteli and Randi Bratteli . He received a PhD degree in 1974. He was appointed as professor at the University of Trondheim in 1980 and at the University of Oslo in 1991. He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#3181
Doug Stinson
#49618
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Douglas Robert Stinson is a Canadian mathematician and cryptographer, currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo. Stinson received his B.Math from the University of Waterloo in 1978, his M.Sc. from Ohio State University in 1980, and his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in 1981. He was at the University of Manitoba from 1981 to 1989, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1990 to 1998. In 2011 he was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile#3182
Jeremy Quastel
#66902
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jeremy Daniel Quastel , is a Canadian mathematician specializing in probability theory, stochastic processes, partial differential equations. He is currently head of the mathematics department at the University of Toronto. He grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and now lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Go to Profile#3183
Bryan Shader
#66004
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Bryan Lynn Shader is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wyoming. He received his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, his advisor was Professor Richard Brualdi. Shader is the Editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra. He is also Associate Editor of other two journals, Linear Algebra and its Applications and Linear & Multilinear Algebra . He is one of the most active mathematicians working on Combinatorial Matrix Theory. He is also noted for his monograph on matrices of sign-solvable linear systems. Besides organizing many workshops, he is a co-principal investigator of Math Teacher Leadership Program, a National Science Foundation project .
Go to Profile#3184
Marjorie Senechal
#53877
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Marjorie Lee Senechal is an American mathematician and historian of science, the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College and editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer. In mathematics, she is known for her work on tessellations and quasicrystals; she has also studied ancient Parthian electric batteries and published several books about silk.
Go to Profile#3185
Tom Hull
#11674
Overall Influence
Thomas C. Hull is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Franklin & Marshall College and is known for his expertise in the mathematics of paper folding. Career Hull was an undergraduate at Hampshire College. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Rhode Island. His 1997 dissertation, Some Problems in List Coloring Bipartite Graphs, involved graph coloring, and was supervised by Nancy Eaton.
Go to Profile#3186
Penny Haxell
#66837
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Penelope Evelyn Haxell is a Canadian mathematician who works as a professor in the department of combinatorics and optimization at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include extremal combinatorics and graph theory.
Go to Profile#3187
Paul Tseng
#23692
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Paul Tseng was a Chinese-American and Canadian applied mathematician and a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington. Tseng was recognized by his peers to be one of the leading optimization researchers of his generation. On August 13, 2009, Paul Tseng went missing while kayaking in the Jinsha River in the Yunnan province of China and is presumed dead.
Go to Profile#3188
Michael Ambühl
#32575
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Ambühl is the former Swiss state secretary for foreign affairs. He was Head of Chair of Negotiation and Conflict Management at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics of ETH Zurich . In 2018/19, he was Head of the this Department .
Go to Profile#3189
Charles R. Doering
#42336
Overall Influence
1956 - 2021 (65 years)
Charles Rogers Doering was a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is notable for his research that is generally focused on the analysis of stochastic dynamical systems arising in biology, chemistry and physics, to systems of nonlinear partial differential equations. Recently he had been focusing on fundamental questions in fluid dynamics as part of the $1M Clay Institute millennium challenge concerning the regularity of solutions to the equations of fluid dynamics. With J. D. Gibbon, he notably co-authored the book Applied Analysis of the Navier-Stokes Equations, published by Cambridge University Press.
Go to Profile#3190
Lars Ramkilde Knudsen
#46652
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lars Ramkilde Knudsen is a Danish researcher in cryptography, particularly interested in the design and analysis of block ciphers, hash functions and message authentication codes . Academic After some early work in banking, Knudsen enrolled at Aarhus University in 1984 studying mathematics and computer science, gaining an MSc in 1992 and a PhD in 1994. From 1997-2001, he worked at the University of Bergen, Norway. Currently, Knudsen is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark. Ivan Damgård was Lars' mentor during his studies at Aarhus University. His Ph.D.
Go to Profile#3191
Ursula Gather
#45568
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ursula Gather is a German statistician and academic administrator. From 2008 to 2020, she was rector of TU Dortmund University. Since 2013, Gather has been chairwoman of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation.
Go to Profile#3192
George Gasper
#60178
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Gasper is a mathematician at Northwestern University working on special functions, especially orthogonal polynomials and basic hypergeometric series, who introduced the Askey–Gasper inequality.
Go to Profile#3193
Peter van Emde Boas
#17373
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Peter van Emde Boas is a Dutch computer scientist and professor at the University of Amsterdam. He gained his doctorate in 1974 under Adriaan van Wijngaarden. The Van Emde Boas tree is named after him.
Go to Profile#3194
Kang-Tae Kim
#25736
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Kang-Tae Kim is a South Korean mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at Pohang University of Science and Technology, and is the head of the Center for Geometric Research at the Center for Leading Research. He is one of executive editors of Complex Analysis and its Synergies, an international journal published by Springer-Verlag.
Go to Profile#3195
Komei Fukuda
#38291
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Komei Fukuda is a Japanese mathematician known for his contributions to optimization, polyhedral computation and oriented matroid theory. Fukuda is a professor in optimization and computational geometry in the Department of Mathematics and in the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich.
Go to Profile#3196
Sibe Mardešić
#68347
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Sibe Mardešić was a Croatian mathematician. Life and education Sibe Mardešić was born in June 1927, in Bergedorf , where his parents temporarily resided before moving to Chile. After that, they returned to Split, where he completed elementary school and high school. Soon after World War II he went to Zagreb to study mathematics. After graduation he took a job as an assistant at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Zagreb, where he stayed until his retirement in 1991. He was a full member of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academ...
Go to Profile#3197
Erhan Çinlar
#25636
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Erhan Çınlar is a probabilist and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He was the Norman J. Sollenberger Professor of the department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#3198
Jan Nekovář
#60977
Overall Influence
1963 - 2022 (59 years)
Jan Nekovář was a Czech academic and mathematician who specialized in number theory. Biography Nekovář first studied at Charles University in Prague and was an exchange student at Moscow State University from 1984 to 1985. He obtained his doctorate from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1991 with a thesis titled Modulární formy necelé váhy. From 1991 to 1993, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1993, he became an assistant professor at Charles University, where he became a lecturer in 1995. He taught at Christ's College, Cambridge from 1995 to ...
Go to Profile#3199
Kenneth Millett
#58883
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kenneth C. Millett is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research concerns low-dimensional topology, knot theory, and the applications of knot theory to DNA structure; his initial is the "M" in the name of the HOMFLY polynomial.
Go to Profile#3200
Paul Gauduchon
#67680
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Paul Gauduchon is a French mathematician, known for his work in the field of differential geometry. He is particularly known for his introduction of Gauduchon metrics in hermitian geometry. His textbook on spectral geometry, written with Marcel Berger and Edmond Mazet, is a standard reference in the field.
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