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,
#3301
Luminița Vese
#40792
Overall Influence
Luminița Aura Vese is a Romanian professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for her research in image processing, including work on active contour models, level-set methods, image segmentation, and inpainting.
Go to Profile#3302
Richard Davis Anderson
#63071
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Richard Davis Anderson, Sr. was an American mathematician known internationally for his work in infinite-dimensional topology. Much of his early work focused on proofs surrounding Hilbert space and Hilbert cubes.
Go to Profile#3303
Péter Varjú
#61628
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Péter Varjú is a Hungarian mathematician that works in harmonic analysis and ergodic theory. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Szeged and his doctoral studies at Princeton University, where he defended his thesis Random walks and spectral gaps in linear groups in 2011 under the supervision of Jean Bourgain. He works at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3304
Petr Vopěnka
#42651
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Petr Vopěnka was a Czech mathematician. In the early seventies, he developed alternative set theory , which he subsequently developed in a series of articles and monographs. Vopěnka’s name is associated with many mathematical achievements, including Vopěnka's principle. Since the mid-eighties he concerned himself with philosophical questions of mathematics .
Go to Profile#3305
Eduard Prugovečki
#52782
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
Eduard Prugovečki was a Canadian physicist and mathematician of Croatian-Romanian descent. Prugovečki was born in Craiova, Romania to a Romanian mother, Helena , and Croatian father, Slavoljub. He completed the first four years of secondary education in Bucharest, before his family was forced to relocate to Zagreb in 1951, due to an anti-Yugoslav campaign by the communist authorities. He finished high school there and proceeded to study physics at the University of Zagreb, getting his diploma in 1959. He joined the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute Ruđer Bošković in Zagreb, w...
Go to Profile#3306
Angelika Steger
#57275
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Angelika Steger is a mathematician and computer scientist whose research interests include graph theory, randomized algorithms, and approximation algorithms. She is a professor at ETH Zurich. Education and career After earlier studies at the University of Freiburg and Heidelberg University, Steger earned a master's degree from Stony Brook University in 1985. She completed a doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1990, under the supervision of Hans Jürgen Prömel, with a dissertation on random combinatorial structures, and earned her habilitation from Bonn in 1994. After a visiting position a...
Go to Profile#3307
Peter D. T. A. Elliott
#72802
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Peter D. T. A. Elliott is an American mathematician, working in the field of number theory. He is one of the two mathematicians after whom the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture is named. He obtained his PhD in 1969, from the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Harold Davenport. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Go to Profile#3308
Mario Wschebor
#41355
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
Mario Wschebor Wonsever was an Uruguayan mathematician. He earned his degree at the University of the Republic, Uruguay, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Sciences between 1987 and 1997, after actively participating in the process of its creation. Another important contribution from this period was the "Document of the four deans", in which the need to create a national system of tertiary education was laid out.
Go to Profile#3309
Daniel Nagin
#20513
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#3310
Amnon Yekutieli
#73054
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Amnon Yekutieli is an Israeli mathematician, working in noncommutative algebra, algebraic geometry and deformation quantization. He is a professor of mathematics at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Go to Profile#3311
Richard O. Duda
#5185
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Richard O. Duda is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University renowned for his work on sound localization and pattern recognition. He lives in Menlo Park, California. Education Duda received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958 and 1959, and the PhD in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962.
Go to Profile#3312
Joachim Schwermer
#62602
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joachim Schwermer is a German mathematician, specializing in number theory. Schwermer received his Abitur in 1969 at Aloisiuskolleg in Bad Godesberg and then studied mathematics at the University of Bonn. After graduating in 1974 with his Diplom, he received in 1977 his Promotion underi Günter Harder with thesis . In 1982 he received his Habilitation from the University of Bonn. From 1986 he was a professor at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, then at the University of Düsseldorf, and finally in the 2000s at the University of Vienna. During the academic year 1980–1981 Schwermer was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#3313
Christiane Rousseau
#53469
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Christiane Rousseau is a French and Canadian mathematician, a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the Université de Montréal. She was president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2004.
Go to Profile#3314
Gesine Reinert
#54179
Overall Influence
Gesine Reinert is a German statistician who is University Professor in Statistics at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Her research concerns the probability theory and statistics of biological sequences and biological networks.
Go to Profile#3315
Arnaldo Garcia
#64232
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Arnaldo Leite Pinto Garcia is a Brazilian mathematician working on algebraic geometry and coding theory. He is a titular researcher at the IMPA. Garcia is a titular member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and has received Brazil's National Order of Scientific Merit.
Go to Profile#3316
Isaak Russman
#36587
Overall Influence
1938 - 2005 (67 years)
Isaak Borisovich Russman was a Russian mathematician and economist. He studied and worked at Voronezh State University. Isaak Borisovich Russman was born on March 7, 1938, in Voronezh. Although his childhood dream was studying astronomy, in 1955 he entered Voronezh State University where he studied in the Physics and Mathematics department. Starting in 1969 and until the end of his life, Russman conducted research in operations research at the same institution where he had studied.
Go to Profile#3317
Olive Jean Dunn
#51679
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Olive Jean Dunn was an American mathematician and statistician, and professor of biostatistics at the University of California Los Angeles . She described methods for computing confidence intervals and also codified the Bonferroni correction's application to confidence intervals. She authored the textbook Basic Statistics: A Primer for the Biomedical Sciences in 1977.
Go to Profile#3318
Vanessa Robins
#58424
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Vanessa Robins is an Australian applied mathematician whose research interests include computational topology, image processing, and the structure of granular materials. She is a fellow in the departments of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Australian National University, where she was ARC Future Fellow from 2014 to 2019.
Go to Profile#3319
Colette Guillopé
#58095
Overall Influence
Colette Guillopé is a French mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. She is a professor at Paris 12 Val de Marne University, where she is also the gender officer for the university.
Go to Profile#3320
Henry W. Gould
#51269
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Henry Wadsworth Gould is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at West Virginia University. Early life and education Gould was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. Between 1945 and 1947, he attended National Radio Institute in Washington D.C. In 1946, he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia. In 1946–1948 he studied at Old Dominion University and then at the University of Virginia. He worked at WUVA radio 1948–1957. In 1951 to 1952, he studied communications theory at The Southeastern Signal School , Fort Gordon, Georgia. He received a B.A. in mathematics in 1954 and an M.A.
Go to Profile#3321
Stephen Raudenbush
#17846
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Stephen Webb Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Sociology and Chairman of the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his development and application of hierarchical linear models in the field of education but he has also published on other subjects such as health and crime. Hierarchical linear models, which go by many other names, are used to study many natural processes. To use an example from education, a three level hierarchical model might account for the fact that students are nested in classrooms which are nested in schools. With the rig...
Go to Profile#3322
Hart F. Smith
#65198
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hart Francis Smith, III is an American mathematician, specializing in analysis. Biography Hart F. Smith III received in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley his A.B. in mathematics and in January 1989 from Princeton University his Ph.D. in mathematics under the supervision of Elias M. Stein with thesis The subelliptic oblique derivative problem. Smith was from 1988–1991 a C. L. E. Moore Instructor at MIT and in fall-winter 1991–1992 a visiting fellow at Princeton University. He was appointed at the University of Washington in 1991 an assistant professor, in 1995 an associate professor, and in 1999 a full professor, holding this professorship until the present.
Go to Profile#3323
Semën Samsonovich Kutateladze
#52697
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Semën Samsonovich Kutateladze is a mathematician. He is known for contributions to functional analysis and its applications to vector lattices and optimization. In particular, he has made contributions to the calculus of subdifferentials for vector-lattice valued functions, to whose study he introduced methods of Boolean-valued models and infinitesimals.
Go to Profile#3324
Robyn Owens
#54770
Overall Influence
Robyn Anne Owens is an Australian applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in computer vision and face recognition, and on the non-invasive imaging of lactation. Formerly a professor at the University of Western Australia and the deputy vice-chancellor for research at UWA, she retired in 2019, and remains affiliated with UWA as a professorial fellow.
Go to Profile#3325
Kathrin Bringmann
#47809
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Kathrin Bringmann is a German number theorist in the University of Cologne, Germany, who has made fundamental contributions to the theory of mock theta functions. Education and career Kathrin Bringmann was born on 8 May 1977, in Muenster, Germany. She passed the State Examinations in Mathematics and Theology at the University of Würzburg, Germany, in 2002, and obtained a Diploma in Mathematics at Würzburg in 2003. She received PhD in 2004 from University of Heidelberg under the supervision of .
Go to Profile#3326
Yongbin Ruan
#67574
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Yongbin Ruan is a Chinese mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and symplectic geometry with applications to string theory. Ruan studied from 1978 at Sichuan University with Benke Certificate of graduation followed by a master's degree in 1985. In 1985/86 he was a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1991 he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley with thesis Gauge theory and its applications to Riemannian Geometry under the supervision of Robion Kirby . As a postdoctoral researcher he was at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#3327
Herbert Enderton
#22386
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Herbert Bruce Enderton was an American mathematician. He was a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at UCLA and a former member of the faculties of Mathematics and of Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3328
Manuel Sadosky
#9667
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Manuel Sadosky was an Argentine mathematician, civil servant and author who was born in Buenos Aires to Jewish Russian immigrants who had fled the pogroms in Europe. Bibliography Son of a shoemaker, Natalio Sadosky and his wife Maria Steingart of Ekaterinoslav , Ukraine, the family had arrived in Argentina in 1905.
Go to Profile#3329
Patrick Dehornoy
#52961
Overall Influence
1952 - 2019 (67 years)
Patrick Dehornoy was a mathematician at the University of Caen Normandy who worked on set theory and group theory. Early life and education Dehornoy was born on 11 September 1952 in Rouen, France. He graduated from the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in 1971. He studied at the École normale supérieure from 1971 to 1975 and completed his Ph.D. in 1978 at the University of Paris, with a thesis written under the direction of Kenneth Walter McAloon.
Go to Profile#3330
David Brydges
#62331
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Chandos Brydges is a mathematical physicist. Brydges received in 1976 his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan with thesis advisor Paul Federbush and thesis A Linear Lower Bound for Generalized Yukawa Model Field Theories. Brydges was a professor at the University of Virginia and is now a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Go to Profile#3331
Shmuel Friedland
#68062
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Shmuel Friedland is an Israeli-American mathematician. Friedland studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, graduating in 1967 with bachelor's degree and in 1971 with doctorate of science under the supervision of Binjamin Schwarz. As a postdoc Friedland was in 1972/73 at the Weizmann Institute, in 1973/74 at Stanford University, and in 1974/75 at the Institute for Advanced Study. Then he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became in 1982 a full professor. In 1985 he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#3332
Sy Friedman
#35892
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sy-David Friedman is an American and Austrian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna and the former director of the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. His main research interest lies in mathematical logic, in particular in set theory and recursion theory.
Go to Profile#3333
Michael Resnik
#22259
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael David Resnik is a leading contemporary American philosopher of mathematics. Biography Resnik obtained his B.A. in mathematics and philosophy at Yale University in 1960, and his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard University in 1964. He wrote his thesis on Frege. He was appointed Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1967, Professor in 1975, and University Distinguished Professor in 1988. He is Professor Emeritus of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently resides in rural Chatham County, North Carolina.
Go to Profile#3334
Alice Silverberg
#55707
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alice Silverberg is professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. She was faculty at the Ohio State University from 1984 through 2004. She has given over 300 lectures at universities around the world, and she has brought attention to issues of sexism and discrimination through her blog Alice's Adventures in Numberland.
Go to Profile#3335
Maria Heep-Altiner
#62239
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Maria Heep-Altiner is a German mathematician, actuary and university lecturer. Life After graduating from the Prince Johann Ludwig School in Hadamar in 1978, Heep-Altiner studied mathematics and economics at the University of Bonn. In 1989 she earned her doctorate in mathematics on the number theory" under Günter Harder and Michael Rapoport.
Go to Profile#3336
Marty Golubitsky
#70467
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Martin Aaron Golubitsky is an American Distinguished professor of mathematics at Ohio State University and the former director of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute. Biography Education Marty Golubitsky was born on April 5, 1945, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated with bachelor's degree in 1966 from the University of Pennsylvania and the same year got his master's there as well. He obtained his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 where his advisor was Victor Guillemin.
Go to Profile#3337
Elchanan Mossel
#54999
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Elchanan Mossel is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research fields are probability theory, combinatorics, and statistical inference. Research Mossel's research spans a number of topics across mathematics, statistics, economics, and computer science, including combinatorial statistics, discrete function inequalities, isoperimetry, game theory, social choice, computational complexity, and computational evolutionary biology.
Go to Profile#3338
Joel Hass
#61252
Overall Influence
Joel Hass is an American mathematician and a professor of mathematics and at the University of California, Davis. His work focuses on geometric and topological problems in dimension 3. Biography Hass received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 under the supervision of Robion Kirby. He joined the Davis faculty in 1988.
Go to Profile#3339
Melvin Fitting
#25166
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Melvin Fitting is a logician with special interests in philosophical logic and tableau proof systems. He was a professor at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. from 1968 to 2013. At the Graduate Center he was in the departments of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics, and at Lehman College he was in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He is now Professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#3340
David E. Rowe
#60590
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David E. Rowe is an American mathematician and historian. He studied mathematics and the history of science at the University of Oklahoma, and took a second doctorate in history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He served as book review editor, managing editor, and editor of the journal Historia Mathematica. In 1992, Rowe was appointed Professor of History of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz where he presently teaches. His research has mainly focused on mathematics in Germany, but in recent years he has been concerned with...
Go to Profile#3341
Martin Lo
#43092
Overall Influence
Martin Wen-Yu Lo is a spacecraft trajectory expert currently working at the NASA-owned Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Martin Lo is well known for discovering the Interplanetary Superhighway, also known as the Interplanetary Transport Network. The superhighway is created by combined gravitational forces of several planets that connects planets by a network of “tunnels” and is the most efficient way to navigate the solar system. This continues to be his main area of research.
Go to Profile#3342
Olvi L. Mangasarian
#59139
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Olvi Leon Mangasarian was the John von Neumann Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Sciences in Department of Mathematics, University of California, San Diego and Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recognised expert on optimization, data mining, and classification. In 2000, while professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he was awarded the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for pioneering work in introducing the use of Operations Research techniques to the field of data mining with a particularl...
Go to Profile#3343
Hajer Bahouri
#69180
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Hajer Bahouri is a Franco-Tunisian mathematician who is interested in partial differential equations. She is Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Laboratory of Analysis and Applied Mathematics at the University Paris-Est-Créteil-Val-de-Marne.
Go to Profile#3344
Pandurang Vasudeo Sukhatme
#29326
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Pandurang Vasudeo Sukhatme was an Indian statistician. He is known for his pioneering work of applying random sampling methods in agricultural statistics and in biometry, in the 1940s. He was also influential in the establishment of the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute. As a part of his work at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, he developed statistical models for assessing the dimensions of hunger and future food supplies for the world. He also developed methods for measuring the size and nature of the protein gap.
Go to Profile#3345
Kirsten Eisenträger
#56770
Overall Influence
Anne Kirsten Eisenträger is a professor of mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University, known for her research on computational number theory, Hilbert's tenth problem, and applications in cryptography.
Go to Profile#3346
Fioralba Cakoni
#63232
Overall Influence
Fioralba Cakoni is an American-Albanian mathematician and an expert on inverse scattering theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Education and career Cakoni earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Tirana in 1987 and 1990 respectively. She completed her Ph.D. in 1996, jointly between the University of Tirana and University of Patras, supervised by George Dassios. Her dissertation was Some Results on the Abstract Wave Equation. Problems of the Scattering Theory in Elasticity and Thermoelasticity in Low-Frequency.
Go to Profile#3347
Mary Perry Smith
#48603
Overall Influence
Mary Perry Smith was an American mathematics educator who cofounded the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement program and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. Early life and education Perry Smith was born on May 29, 1926, and was originally from Evansville, Indiana, one of six children of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; her maternal grandfather, Henry Allen Perry had been a chaplain and mathematics teacher at the Tuskegee Institute, where her parents met. As a child she moved frequently, to Kokomo, Logansport, Anderson, Crawfordsville, and Frankfort, all in Indiana.
Go to Profile#3348
Walter Neumann
#68825
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Walter David Neumann is a British mathematician who works in topology, geometric group theory, and singularity theory. He is an emeritus professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. Neumann obtained his Ph.D. under the joint supervision of Friedrich Hirzebruch and Klaus Jänich at the University of Bonn in 1969.
Go to Profile#3349
Sonja Petrović
#21831
Overall Influence
Sonja Petrović is a Serbian-American statistician and associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics, College of Computing, at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on mathematical statistics and algebraic statistics, applied and computational algebraic geometry and random graph models. She was elected to the International Statistics Institute in 2015.
Go to Profile#3350
Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
#43261
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
