Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#3351

Richard Earl Block

#41427

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Richard Earl Block is a mathematician at the University of California, Riverside who works on Lie algebras over fieldss of prime characteristic. Block earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956 under the supervision of Abraham Adrian Albert. He was the first to discover the central extension of the Witt algebra that gives the Virasoro algebra, though his discovery went unnoticed for many years. With Robert Lee Wilson he classified the simple Lie algebras over "well behaved" fields of finite characteristic.

#3352

Yurii Reshetnyak

Yurii Reshetnyak

#61379

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Yurii Grigorievich Reshetnyak was a Soviet and Russian mathematician and academician. He worked in geometry and the theory of functions of a real variable. He was known for his work in the Reshetnyak gluing theorem. Reshetnyak received the 2000 Lobachevsky Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

#3353

Hing Tong

#60134

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Hing Tong was an American mathematician. He is well known for providing the original proof of the Katetov–Tong insertion theorem. Life Hing Tong was born in Canton, China. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1947, he received his doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University, where his thesis advisor was Edgar Lorch. In 1956, he married fellow mathematician, Mary Powderly. He was the father of five children.

#3354

Roger Lee Berger

#55391

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Roger Lee Berger is an American statistician and professor, co-author of Statistical Inference, first published in 1990 with collaborator George Casella. Early life and education Roger Lee Berger was born August 21, 1951, in rural northwest Kansas. His early interest in mathematics ripened as he attended the University of Kansas, switching from physics to mathematics with emphasis on real analysis as an undergraduate. Graduating in 1973, he studied graduate statistics at Purdue University, earning a master's degree in 1975 and a doctorate in 1977. Building on the work of his advisor Shanti...

#3355

Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley

#53989

Overall Influence

1915 - 2017 (102 years)

Professor Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley , better known as Neville Temperley, was an applied mathematician who made numerous contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics, graph theory and the physics of liquids and gases. He was awarded the title Doctor of Science as a fellow of King's College Cambridge, before working for the Admiralty on numerical modelling of underwater explosions during World War 2. He continued his work on the physical properties of liquids at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston until 1965.

#3356

Jack Howlett

#36061

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Jack Howlett CBE was a British mathematician and computer scientist who was head of the Atlas Computer Laboratory for the duration of its existence. Personal life and early career He was educated at Stand Grammar School, Whitefield, Manchester and read mathematics at Manchester University. He was awarded a PhD in 1944 for research on the Numerical Integration of Partial Differential Equations.

#3357

Nike Sun

#52894

Overall Influence

Nike Sun is a probability theorist who works as an associate professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on leave from the department of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She won the Rollo Davidson Prize in 2017. Her research concerns phase transitions and the counting complexity of problems ranging from the Ising model in physics to the behavior of random instances of the Boolean satisfiability problem in computer science.

#3358

Judith Campisi

#47015

Overall Influence

Judith Campisi is an American biochemist and cell biologist. She is a professor of biogerontology at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She is also a member of the SENS Research Foundation Advisory Board and an adviser at the Lifeboat Foundation. She is co-editor in chief of the Aging Journal, together with Mikhail Blagosklonny and David Sinclair, and founder of the pharmaceutical company Unity Biotechnology. She is listed in Who's Who in Gerontology. She is widely known for her research on how senescent cells influence aging and cancer — in particular the Senescence Associated Secreto...

#3359

Brian Goodwin

#8922

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Brian Carey Goodwin was a Canadian mathematician and biologist, a Professor Emeritus at the Open University and a founder of theoretical biology and biomathematics. He introduced the use of complex systems and generative models in developmental biology. He suggested that a reductionist view of nature fails to explain complex features, controversially proposing the structuralist theory that morphogenetic fields might substitute for natural selection in driving evolution. He was also a visible member of the Third Culture movement.

#3360

Sylvie Méléard

#55837

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sylvie Méléard is a French mathematician specializing in probability theory, stochastic processes, particle systems, and stochastic differential equations. She is editor-in-chief of Stochastic Processes and Their Applications.

#3361

Ülo Lumiste

#73661

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Ülo Lumiste was an Estonian mathematician. In 1952 he graduated from the University of Tartu in mathematics. In 1968 he defended his doctoral thesis at Kazan University. Since 1959 he taught at the University of Tartu.

#3362

Askar Dzhumadildayev

#38937

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Askar Dzhumadildayev is a Kazakh mathematician, doctor of physics and mathematics, professor, Full Member of the Kazakhstan National Academy of Science. He was also member Supreme Council of Kazakh SSR and Republic of Kazakhstan.

#3363

Paula Tretkoff

#61641

Overall Influence

Paula Tretkoff is an Australian-American mathematician who studies number theory, noncommutative geometry, and hypergeometric functions. She is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University, and a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique associated with the University of Lille.

#3364

Laura Taalman

#57716

Overall Influence

Laura Anne Taalman, also known as mathgrrl, is an American mathematician known for her work on the mathematics of Sudoku and for her mathematical 3D printing models. Her mathematical research concerns knot theory and singular algebraic geometry; she is a professor of mathematics at James Madison University.

#3365

Adrian Mathias

#24507

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Adrian Richard David Mathias is a British mathematician working in set theory. The forcing notion Mathias forcing is named for him. Career Mathias was educated at Shrewsbury and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and graduated in 1965. After graduation, he moved to Bonn in Germany where he studied with Ronald Jensen, visiting UCLA, Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and Monash University during that period.

#3366

Maria Wonenburger

Maria Wonenburger

#48729

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

María Josefa Wonenburger Planells was a Galician mathematician who did research in the United States and Canada. She is known for her work on group theory. She was the first Spaniard to obtain a Fulbright scholarship for doctoral studies in mathematics.

#3367

Susan Goldstine

#36177

Overall Influence

Susan Goldstine is an American mathematician active in mathematics and fiber arts. She is a professor of mathematics at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor in the Sciences at St. Mary's College.

#3368

Gabriele Nebe

#57429

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Gabriele Nebe is a German mathematician with contributions in the theory of lattices, modular forms, spherical designs, and error-correcting codes. With Neil Sloane, she maintains the Online Catalogue of Lattices. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at RWTH Aachen University.

#3369

Panagiotis E. Souganidis

#59709

Overall Influence

Panagiotis E. Souganidis is an American mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations. Biography Souganidis graduated in 1981 with B.A. from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison he graduated with M.A. in 1981 and Ph.D. in 1984 with thesis under the supervision of Michael G. Crandall. Souganidis was a postdoc in 1984–1985 at the University of Minnesota's Institute for Mathematics and its Applications and was at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1988 and 1990. After holding professorships at Brown University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Texas at Austin, he became in 2008 the Charles H.

#3370

Alissa Crans

#49090

Overall Influence

Alissa Susan Crans is an American mathematician specializing in higher-dimensional algebra. She is a professor of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University, and the associate director of Project NExT, a program of the Mathematical Association of America to mentor post-doctoral mathematicians, statisticians, and mathematics teachers.

#3371

Iosif Vorovich

#33182

Overall Influence

1920 - 2001 (81 years)

Iosif Izrailevich-Girshevich Vorovich was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, scientific engineer, author and was made a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1970. He was a specialist in continuum mechanics and the theory of elasticity. He was born in the city of Starodub, Gomel Governorate.

#3372

Tadeusz Iwaniec

#67017

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Tadeusz Iwaniec is a Polish-American mathematician, and since 1996 John Raymond French Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Syracuse University. He and mathematician Henryk Iwaniec are twin brothers.

#3373

Gregg Zuckerman

Gregg Zuckerman

#56383

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Gregg Jay Zuckerman is a mathematician at Yale University who discovered Zuckerman functors and translation functors, and with Anthony W. Knapp classified the irreducible tempered representations of semisimple Lie groups.

#3374

Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea

#61126

Overall Influence

1923 - 2021 (98 years)

Cassius Tocqueville Ionescu Tulcea was a Romanian-American mathematician, specializing in probability theory, statistics and mathematical analysis. Ionescu Tulcea was born in October 1923 in Bucharest. He received his diploma from the University of Bucharest in 1946; there he was an assistant professor from 1946 to 1950, a lecturer from 1950 to 1951, and an associate professor from 1952 to 1957. Additionally, from 1949 to 1957 he was a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. In 1957 he moved to the United States with his wife Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea , who had been his student.

#3375

Bin Yu

#19395

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Bin Yu is a Chinese-American statistician. She is currently Chancellor's Professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3376

Luís Barreira

#70358

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Luís Barreira is a Portuguese mathematician and a professor in the department of mathematics of Instituto Superior Técnico. He is the author or coauthor of 13 books, many with Clàudia Valls, including among them Análise Complexa e Equações Diferenciais, Exercícios de Análise Complexa e Equações Diferenciais, Lyapunov Exponents and Smooth Ergodic Theory, Nonuniform Hyperbolicity, Stability of Nonautonomous Differential Equations, and Dimension and Recurrence in Hyperbolic Dynamics. He's also the author of several scientific articles, predominantly in Differential Equations, Dynamic Systems, E...

#3377

Jiang Zehan

#56440

Overall Influence

1902 - 1994 (92 years)

Jiang Zehan , also known as Kiang Tsai-han, was a Chinese mathematician and founder of China's topology. Jiang was a member of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

#3378

Christian Bär

#65269

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Christian Bär is a German mathematician, whose research concerns differential geometry and mathematical physics. Bär enrolled on Ph.D. studies at the University of Bonn as a student of Hans Werner Ballmann, and obtained his Ph.D in 1990.

#3379

Steve Simpson

#37582

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Stephen George Simpson is an American mathematician whose research concerns the foundations of mathematics, including work in mathematical logic, recursion theory, and Ramsey theory. He is known for his extensive development of the field of reverse mathematics founded by Harvey Friedman, in which the goal is to determine which axioms are needed to prove certain mathematical theorems. He has also argued for the benefits of finitistic mathematical systems, such as primitive recursive arithmetic, which do not include actual infinity.

#3380

Heiner Zieschang

#50157

Overall Influence

1936 - 2004 (68 years)

Heiner Zieschang was a German mathematician. He was a professor at Ruhr University in Bochum from 1968 till 2002. He was a topologist. In 1996 he was an honorary doctor of University of Toulouse and in 1997 he was an honorary professor of Moscow State University.

#3381

Lawrence L. Larmore

Lawrence L. Larmore

#22642

Overall Influence

Lawrence L. Larmore is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. Since 1994 he has been a professor of computer science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas . Larmore developed the package-merge algorithm for the length-limited Huffman coding problem, as well as an algorithm for optimizing paragraph breaking in linear time. He is perhaps best known for his work with competitive analysis of online algorithms, particularly for the k-server problem. His contributions, with his co-author Marek Chrobak, led to the application of T-theory to the server problem.

#3382

Hortensia Soto

#47851

Overall Influence

Hortensia Soto is a Mexican–American mathematics educator, and a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University. In May 2018, she was appointed Associate Secretary of the Mathematical Association of America .

#3383

Madhav V. Nori

#64256

Overall Influence

Madhav Vithal Nori is an Indian mathematician. In 1980 he has received the INSA Medal for Young Scientists. Career Nori was awarded his PhD in mathematics in 1981 from the University of Mumbai. He studies within the fields of algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. His areas of interest in research focus on algebraic cycles, K-theory, Hodge theory, Galois theory, and their interactions. Nori received the INSA Medal for Young Scientists in 1980 and is an elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.

#3384

Alan H. Schoenfeld

#67876

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alan Henry Schoenfeld is an American mathematics education researcher and designer. He is the Elizabeth and Edward Conner Professor of Education and Affiliated Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3385

Ping Zhang

#63833

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Ping Zhang is a mathematician specializing in graph theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Western Michigan University and the author of multiple textbooks on graph theory and mathematical proof.

#3386

Margaret Gurney

#58588

Overall Influence

1908 - 2002 (94 years)

Margaret Gurney was an American mathematician, statistician, and computer programmer. Originally trained in the mathematical study of partial differential equations at Swarthmore College, Brown University, and the University of Göttingen, she came to work for the United States Census Bureau. There, she became known for her expertise in sampling, stratified sampling, and survey methodology. At the Census Bureau she also worked as an early programmer of the UNIVAC I computer. Later, she became an international consultant, teaching statistical methods in developing countries. She won the Departm...

#3387

C. F. Jeff Wu

#37344

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Chien-Fu Jeff Wu is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm, resampling methods such as the bootstrap and jackknife, and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, and robust parameter design .

#3388

Wolfgang Härdle

Wolfgang Härdle

#63166

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Wolfgang Karl Härdle is a German statistician and University Professor at the Faculty of Economics of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Education and career Härdle was born as the son of a master glazier and a post office employee and grew up in Gaggenau, where he graduated from the Goethe Gymnasium in 1972. According to his own genealogical research, he is a distant descendant of the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss.

#3389

David Nualart

#62607

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

David Nualart is a Spanish mathematician working in the field of probability theory, in particular on aspects of stochastic processes and stochastic analysis. He obtained his PhD titled "Contribución al estudio de la integral estocástica" in 1975 at the University of Barcelona under the supervision of Francesc d'Assís Sales Vallès. After positions at the University of Barcelona and the Polytechnique University of Barcelona he took up a professorship at the University of Kansas and is currently the Black-Babcock Distinguished Professor in its Mathematics Department.

#3390

Rod Downey

#39055

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Rodney Graham Downey is a New Zealand and Australian mathematician and computer scientist, an emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He is known for his work in mathematical logic and computational complexity theory, and in particular for founding the field of parameterised complexity together with Michael Fellows.

#3391

James H. Davenport

James H. Davenport

#50010

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

James Harold Davenport is a British computer scientist who works in computer algebra. Having done his PhD and early research at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, he is the Hebron and Medlock Professor of Information Technology at the University of Bath in Bath, England.

#3392

Shabnam Akhtari

#64185

Overall Influence

Shabnam Akhtari is a Canadian-Iranian mathematician specializing in number theory, and in particular in Diophantine equations, Thue equations, and the geometry of numbers. She is a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

#3393

Gregory Chudnovsky

#62106

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

de:Gregory Chudnovsky es:Gregory Chudnovsky fr:Gregory Chudnovsky uk:Чудновський Григорій Вольфович

#3394

Richard Lyons

#61539

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Richard Neil Lyons is an American mathematician, specializing in finite group theory. Lyons received his PhD in 1970 at the University of Chicago under John Griggs Thompson with a thesis entitled Characterizations of Some Finite Simple Groups with Small 2-Rank. From 1972 to 2017, he was a professor at Rutgers University.

#3395

Svetlozar Rachev

Svetlozar Rachev

#29998

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Svetlozar Todorov Rachev is a professor at Texas Tech University who works in the field of mathematical finance, probability theory, and statistics. He is known for his work in probability metrics, derivative pricing, financial risk modeling, and econometrics. In the practice of risk management, he is the originator of the methodology behind the flagship product of FinAnalytica.

#3396

Karin Erdmann

#56254

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Karin Erdmann is a German mathematician specializing in the areas of algebra known as representation theory and homological algebra . She is notable for her work in modular representation theory which has been cited over 1500 times according to the Mathematical Reviews. Her nephew Martin Erdmann is professor for experimental particle physics at the RWTH Aachen University.

#3397

Christian Robert

#57202

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Christian P. Robert is a French statistician, specializing in Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo methods. Career Christian Robert studied at ENSAE then defended his PhD in 1987 at Université de Rouen. He held temporary positions at Purdue and Cornell before being an Associate Professor at Université Paris 6, and then Professor at Université de Rouen. He was also Professor of Statistics at École Polytechnique and director of Center for Research in Economics and Statistics. As of 2021, he is Professor at CEREMADE, Université Paris-Dauphine and a part-time member of the Department of Statistics...

#3398

Hartmut Jürgens

#36561

Overall Influence

1955 - 2017 (62 years)

Hartmut Jürgens was a German mathematician, born in Bremen, Germany. He received his doctorate in 1983 from the University of Bremen. He has worked in the computer industry, and was the Director of the Dynamical Systems Graphics Laboratory at the University of Bremen. He is the co-author of both Fractals: An Animated Discussion and Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science

#3399

Peter Schönemann

#51109

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Peter Hans Schönemann was a German born psychometrician and statistical expert. He was professor emeritus in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. His research interests included multivariate statistics, multidimensional scaling and measurement, quantitative behavior genetics, test theory and mathematical tools for social scientists. He published around 90 papers dealing mainly with the subjects of psychometrics and mathematical scaling. Schönemann's influences included Louis Guttman, Lee Cronbach, Oscar Kempthorne and Henry Kaiser.

#3400

Leo Corry

#34905

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Leo Corry is an Israeli historian of mathematics. Biography Corry migrated with his Jewish family to Venezuela when he was two years old. He attended primary and secondary school at Colegio Moral y Luces of Caracas and then at the Universidad Simón Bolívar studied mathematics with licentiate's degree in 1977. He attended graduate school at the University of Tel Aviv. There he received in 1983 his master's degree in mathematics with master's thesis Splitting data in cohomology classes, supervised by Shmuel Rosset, and in 1990 his Ph.D. in the history of science with Ph.D. thesis The origins of category theory as a mathematical discipline, supervised by Sabetai Unguru and Shmuel Rosset.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions