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,
#3401
Zinovy Reichstein
#69422
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Zinovy Reichstein is a Russian-born American mathematician. He is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He studies mainly algebra, algebraic geometry and algebraic groups. He introduced the concept of essential dimension.
Go to Profile#3402
Hubert Lilliefors
#73258
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Hubert Whitman Lilliefors was an American statistician, noted for his introduction of the Lilliefors test. Lilliefors received a BA in mathematics from George Washington University in 1952 and his PhD at the George Washington University in 1964 under the supervision of Solomon Kullback. At the same university, he was a professor of statistics for 39 years. In the 1970s he participated in the randomizing process for the US military draft.
Go to Profile#3403
Egon Zakrajšek
#40366
Overall Influence
1941 - 2002 (61 years)
Egon Zakrajšek was a Slovene mathematician and computer scientist. Zakrajšek was born in Ljubljana, SFR Yugoslavia . He became an orphan even before he started school. He went to elementary school and gymnasium in Jesenice. He was a good student and he soon showed his talents and abilities. He graduated from technical mathematics at the Department of mathematics and physics of the then Faculty for natural sciences and technology of the University of Ljubljana. He received his Master's degree from the University of Zagreb for his work Numerična realizacija Ritzovega procesa and his doctorate...
Go to Profile#3404
Mikhail Samuilovich Livsic
#67139
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Mikhail Samuilovich Livsic was a Ukrainian-born Israeli mathematician who specialized in functional analysis. Biography Born in Pokotilova, Uman district on 4 July 1917, Livsic moved to Odessa with his family when he was four years old. His father was an associate professor of mathematics who frequented leading Soviet mathematicians in Odessa like Nikolai Chebotaryov, Veniamin Fedorovich Kagan, Mark Krein and Samuil O. Shatunovsky.
Go to Profile#3405
Suzanne Weekes
#52998
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Suzanne L. Weekes is the Executive Director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is also Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute . She is a co-founder of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program.
Go to Profile#3406
Takashi Ono
#32965
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Takashi Ono is a retired Japanese-born American mathematician, specializing in number theory and algebraic groups. Early life and education Ono was born in Nishinomiya, Japan. He received his Ph.D. in 1958 at Nagoya University.
Go to Profile#3407
Ralf J. Spatzier
#74246
Overall Influence
Ralf Jürgen Spatzier is a mathematician specialising in differential geometry, dynamical systems, and ergodic theory. Spatzier received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Warwick in 1983 under the joint supervision of Caroline Series and Anatole Katok and joined Stony Brook University as an assistant professor. In 1990 he moved to the University of Michigan where he is now a full professor. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#3408
Roman Holowinsky
#73092
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Roman Holowinsky is an American mathematician known for his work in number theory and, in particular, the theory of modular forms. He is currently an associate professor with tenure at the Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#3409
Mark W. Spong
#31965
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mark W. Spong is an American roboticist. He is a professor of systems engineering and electrical and computer engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas . He served as dean of the Jonsson School and the Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair in Electrical Engineering from 2008 to 2017. Before he joined UTD, he was the Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, professor of electrical engineering, research professor of Coordinated Science Laboratory and Information Trust Institute, and director of Center for Autonomous Engineering Sy...
Go to Profile#3410
Edgar H. Brown
#61966
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Edgar Henry Brown, Jr. was an American mathematician specializing in algebraic topology, and for many years a professor at Brandeis University. Life Brown was born in Oak Park, Illinois. He completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in 1949. He completed his master's degree in mathematics at Washington State University in 1951.
Go to Profile#3411
Thomas Hou
#33475
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Thomas Yizhao Hou is the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in numerical analysis and mathematical analysis.
Go to Profile#3412
François Baccelli
#31589
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
François Louis Baccelli is senior researcher at INRIA Paris, in charge of the ERC project NEMO on network mathematics. Education and career Baccelli obtained his PhD at the University of Paris-Sud in 1983 under the supervision of Erol Gelenbe. Between 1991 and 2003, he was a faculty member at the applied mathematics department at École polytechnique. He was Simons Chair in mathematics and electrical and computer engineering at University of Texas at Austin between 2012 and 2021. Between 2012 and 2019, he was the head of the Simons Center on Communication, Information and Network Mathematics.
Go to Profile#3413
Auguste Dick
#39077
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Auguste Franziska Dick was an Austrian mathematician, historian of mathematics, and handwriting expert, known for her research on the history of mathematics under the Nazis, and for her biography of Emmy Noether.
Go to Profile#3414
Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro
#42042
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro is a Brazilian engineer, mathematician and statistician who has made significant contributions to the theory of statistical inference, mainly through asymptotic theory and applied probability.
Go to Profile#3415
Siddhartha Chib
#29601
Overall Influence
Siddhartha Chib is an econometrician and statistician, the Harry C. Hartkopf Professor of Econometrics and Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. His work is primarily in Bayesian statistics, econometrics, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
Go to Profile#3416
David Evans
#36714
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
David V. Evans is a British applied mathematician noted for his contributions to water waves and acoustics. He is the father of British actress Alice Evans. Together with John Nicholas Newman, he initiated the International Workshop on Water Waves and Floating Bodies. He is also known for the Bristol cylinder, a wave energy converter. He is currently an emeritus professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol.
Go to Profile#3417
Viacheslav Belavkin
#47450
Overall Influence
1946 - 2012 (66 years)
Viacheslav Pavlovich Belavkin was a Russian-British professor in applied mathematics at the University of Nottingham. An active researcher, he was one of the pioneers of quantum probability. His research spanned areas such as quantum filtering, quantum information and quantum chaos.
Go to Profile#3418
Mathieu Lewin
#61377
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Mathieu Lewin is a French mathematician and mathematical physicist who deals with partial differential equations, mathematical quantum field theory, and mathematics of quantum mechanical many-body systems.
Go to Profile#3419
Robert Hanssen
#668
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".
Go to Profile#3420
Mamokgethi Phakeng
#27496
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Rosina Mamokgethi Phakeng is a South African professor of mathematics education who in 2018 became a vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town . She has been the vice principal of research and innovation, at the University of South Africa and acting executive dean of the College of Science, Engineering and Technology at UNISA. In 2018 she was an invited speaker at the International Congresses of Mathematicians. In February 2023 it was announced that she would leave her position as vice-chancellor of UCT and take early retirement. She was succeeded by Professor Daya Reddy on 13 March 202...
Go to Profile#3421
Claude Lemaréchal
#56020
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Claude Lemaréchal is a French applied mathematician, and former senior researcher at INRIA near Grenoble, France. In mathematical optimization, Claude Lemaréchal is known for his work in numerical methods for nonlinear optimization, especially for problems with nondifferentiable kinks. Lemaréchal and Philip Wolfe pioneered bundle methods of descent for convex minimization.
Go to Profile#3422
Sandrine Péché
#58829
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Sandrine Péché is a French mathematician who works as a professor in the Laboratoire de Probabilités, Statistique et Modélisation of Paris Diderot University. Her research concerns probability theory, mathematical physics, and the theory and applications of random matrices.
Go to Profile#3423
Elizabeth Wilmer
#49033
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Lee Wilmer is an American mathematician known for her work on Markov chain mixing times. She is a professor, and former department head, of mathematics at Oberlin College. As a 16-year-old high school student at Stuyvesant High School and captain of the school mathematics team, Wilmer won second place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1987, for a project involving 3-coloring of graphs. The first-place winner that year was also female, marking the first year that the top two prizes both went to women. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, she led the university's team tha...
Go to Profile#3424
Geoffrey McLachlan
#62016
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Geoffrey John McLachlan FAA is an Australian researcher in computational statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. McLachlan is best known for his work in classification and finite mixture models. He is the joint author of five influential books on the topics of mixtures and classification, as well as their applications. Currently, McLachlan is a Professor of statistics within the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland.
Go to Profile#3425
John W. Dawson Jr.
#37721
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John W. Dawson Jr. is an American academic who is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Penn State York. Early life and education Born in Wichita, Kansas, Dawson attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a National Merit Scholar before earning a doctorate in mathematical logic from the University of Michigan in 1972.
Go to Profile#3426
Jens Høyrup
#60022
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jens Egede Høyrup, born 1943 in Copenhagen, is a Danish historian of mathematics, specializing in pre-modern and early modern mathematics, ancient Mesopotamian mathematics in particular. He is especially known for his interpretation of what has often been referred to as Old Babylonian "algebra" as consisting of concrete, geometric manipulations.
Go to Profile#3427
V. Lakshmibai
#66983
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Venkatraman Lakshmibai is an Indian mathematician who is a professor emerita of mathematics at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research concerns algebraic geometry, the theory of algebraic groups, and representation theory, including in particular the theory of flag varieties and Schubert varieties.
Go to Profile#3428
Eve Oja
#60374
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
Eve Oja was an Estonian mathematician specializing in functional analysis. She was a professor at the University of Tartu. Early life and education Oja was born in Tallinn and studied at the Tartu State University , completing her undergraduate studies in 1972 and earning a doctorate in 1975. Her dissertation, Безусловные шаудеровы разложения в локально выпуклых пространствах was supervised by Gunnar Kangro.
Go to Profile#3429
Tara E. Brendle
#63542
Overall Influence
Tara Elise Brendle is an American mathematician who works in geometric group theory, which involves the intersection of algebra and low-dimensional topology. In particular, she studies mapping class group of surfaces, including braid groups, and their relationship to automorphism groups of free groups and arithmetic groups. She is a professor of mathematics and head of mathematics at the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#3430
John Aston
#50250
Overall Influence
Sir John Alexander David Aston is a British statistician, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Home Office , and Professor of Statistics, Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. From 2021 he is the Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life. And from July 2021 he has also served as a non-executive director on the board of the UK Statistics Authority.
Go to Profile#3431
Amin Shokrollahi
#14972
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Amin Shokrollahi is a German-Iranian mathematician who has worked on a variety of topics including coding theory and algebraic complexity theory. He is best known for his work on iterative decoding of graph based codess for which he received the IEEE Information Theory Paper Award of 2002 . He is one of the inventors of a modern class of practical erasure codes known as tornado codes, and the principal developer of raptor codes, which belong to a class of rateless erasure codes known as Fountain codes. In connection with the work on these codes, he received the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award in 20...
Go to Profile#3432
Wei-Ming Ni
#71095
Overall Influence
Wei-Ming Ni is a Taiwanese mathematician at the University of Minnesota, Presidential Chair Professor of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and was formerly the director of the Center for PDE at the East China Normal University. He works in the field of elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. He did undergraduate work at National Taiwan University and obtained his Ph.D. at New York University, in 1979, under the supervision of Louis Nirenberg. He is an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Differential Equations, and was an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in 2002. As said b...
Go to Profile#3433
Alexandre Borovik
#67038
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alexandre V. Borovik is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He was born in Russia and graduated from Novosibirsk State University in 1978. His principal research lies in algebra, model theory, and combinatorics—topics on which he published several monographs and a number of papers. He also has an interest in mathematical practice: his book Mathematics under the Microscope: Notes on Cognitive Aspects of Mathematical Practice examines a mathematician's outlook on psychophysiological and cognitive issues in mathematics.
Go to Profile#3434
Marie Farge
#44209
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Marie Farge is a French mathematician and physicist who works as a director of research at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She is known for her research on wavelets and turbulence in fluid mechanics.
Go to Profile#3435
Eric Priest
#32980
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eric Ronald Priest is Emeritus Professor at St Andrews University, where he previously held the Gregory Chair of Mathematics and a Bishop Wardlaw Professorship. Career and research Priest is a recognised authority in solar magnetohydrodynamics , the study of the subtle, and often nonlinear, interaction between the Sun's magnetic field and its plasma interior or atmosphere, treated as a continuous medium. Priest is an applied mathematician and, along with the other members of his research group at St Andrews, is currently investigating a large number of solar phenomena, including sunspots, co...
Go to Profile#3436
Pamela Gorkin
#53749
Overall Influence
Pamela Gorkin is an American mathematician specializing in complex analysis and operator theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Bucknell University. Education and career Gorkin earned bachelor's and master's degrees in statistics from Michigan State University in 1976. She then shifted to pure mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing her Ph.D. at Michigan State in 1982, the same year she joined the Bucknell Faculty. Her dissertation, Decompositions of the Maximal Ideal Space of L, was supervised by Sheldon Axler.
Go to Profile#3437
Alexei Semenov
#50554
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alexei L. Semenov is a Russian mathematician, educationalist, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician of the Russian Academy of Education, Head of the Department of Mathematical Logic and Theory of Algorithms, Lomonosov State University, Professor, and Dr. Sc.
Go to Profile#3438
Michael Makkai
#45903
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Makkai is Canadian mathematician of Hungarian origin, specializing in mathematical logic. He works in model theory, category theory, algebraic logic, type theory and the theory of topoi. Career
Go to Profile#3439
Edward H. Kaplan
#31154
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research at the Yale School of Management, Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine, and Professor of Engineering in the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Go to Profile#3440
Messoud Efendiev
#46024
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Messoud Efendiev is an Azerbaijani scientist. He was born in Zaqatala, Azerbaijan. Career His distinguish thesis work was written in 1974/75 in the Moscow State University under supervision of Professors Mark Vishik and A.I.Snirelmann on topological methods in nonlinear analysis. His PhD thesis was written in the Moscow State University 1975/76–1978/79 on a global solvability of nonlinear Riemann–Hilbert problems which was defended in 1980. His habilitation thesis was titled "Geometrical properties of nonlinear mapping related to pseudodifferential operators and their topological degree" an...
Go to Profile#3441
Christoph Scriba
#57599
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Christoph J. Scriba was a German historian of mathematics. Life and work Scriba was born in Darmstadt and studied at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. He read James Gregory's early writings on the calculus with Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann, and was awarded his doctorate in 1957. Continuing with J.E. Hofmann, and with Bernard Sticker, he investigated the papers of John Wallis in Oxford in 1966, contributing to Studies on the Mathematics of John Wallis.
Go to Profile#3442
Trevor Wooley
#72275
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Trevor Dion Wooley FRS is a British mathematician and currently Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University. His fields of interest include analytic number theory, Diophantine equations and Diophantine problems, harmonic analysis, the Hardy-Littlewood circle method, and the theory and applications of exponential sums. He has made significant breakthroughs on Waring's problem, for which he was awarded the Salem Prize in 1998.
Go to Profile#3443
Hans Petter Langtangen
#50418
Overall Influence
1962 - 2016 (54 years)
Hans Petter Langtangen was a Norwegian scientist trained in mechanics and scientific computing. Langtangen was the director of the Centre for Biomedical Computing, a Norwegian Center of Excellence hosted by Simula Research Laboratory. He was a professor of scientific computing at the University of Oslo, and was editor-in-chief of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 2011–2015.
Go to Profile#3444
Francis Allotey
#13968
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Francis Kofi Ampenyin Allotey was a Ghanaian mathematical physicist. Together with Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong, he became the first Ghanaian to obtain a doctorate in mathematical sciences, earned in 1966.
Go to Profile#3445
John B. Cosgrave
#38070
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Dr. John B. Cosgrave is an Irish mathematician specialising in number theory. Born in Bailieborough, County Cavan, he was educated at Royal Holloway College, London, he lectured in Carysfort College and St Patrick's College of Education .
Go to Profile#3446
Nayandeep Deka Baruah
#57054
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Nayandeep Deka Baruah is an Indian mathematician and at present professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Tezpur University, India. He is known for his work related to the mathematics of Ramanujan, in particular he and his collaborators have found several Ramanujan type congruences using different methods.
Go to Profile#3447
Lara Alcock
#40607
Overall Influence
Lara Alcock is a British mathematics educator. She is a reader in mathematics education at Loughborough University, head of the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough, and the author of several books on mathematics. Alcock won the Selden Prize for her research in mathematics education and the inaugural John Blake University Teaching Medal in 2021. Alcock is a National Teaching Fellow.
Go to Profile#3448
Karl W. Gruenberg
#63220
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Karl W. Gruenberg was a British mathematician who specialised in group theory, in particular with the cohomology theory of groups. Education and career At the age of eleven, Gruenberg was one of the many Jewish children sent from Austria to Great Britain as part of the Kindertransport in 1939. Most of the Kindertransport children never saw their parents again but Karl was lucky and his mother soon joined him, and they moved to London in 1943 where he entered Kilburn Grammar School. In 1946 he won a scholarship to study mathematics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he received a BA degree...
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Mirabbas Gasimov
#63878
Overall Influence
1939 - 2008 (69 years)
Mirabbas Geogja Gasimov was a mathematician of the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan, doctor of physics-mathematics, professor, an active member of Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. Biography Mirabbas Gasimov was born in Narimankend village of Shamakhy in 1939. In 1956, Gasimov had entered the faculty of physics-mathematics of Azerbaijan State University . In 1958, he was transferred to the appropriate faculty of M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 1961, after graduating from his education, he was kept in post-graduate courses of MSU. From this period, M. Gasimov's scientific work was beginning and mainly it consisted from B.
Go to Profile#3450
James Oxley
#74204
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
James G. Oxley is an Australian–American mathematician, Boyd Professor of Mathematics at Louisiana State University. He is known for his expertise in matroid theory and graph theory. Oxley did his undergraduate studies in Australia, and earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1978, under the supervision of Dominic Welsh. He joined the Louisiana State University faculty in 1982.
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