The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#3451

Burt Kaliski

#16022
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Burton S. "Burt" Kaliski, Jr. is a cryptographer, who is currently the chief technology officer and senior vice president at Verisign. Before joining Verisign in 2011, he was the founding director of the EMC Innovation Network at EMC Corporation since its 2006 acquisition of RSA Security where he was Chief Scientist for RSA Laboratories. His notable work includes the development of such public key cryptography standards as PKCS and IEEE P1363, the extension of linear cryptanalysis to use multiple approximations, and the design of the block cipher Crab.
Go to Profile
#3452

Earl Hugh Dowell

#75267
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#3453

George F. D. Duff

#71225
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
George Francis Denton Duff was a Canadian mathematician who did research in partial differential equations and wave phenomena. He took an interest in harnessing the extraordinarily large tides in the Bay of Fundy for generating electricity.
Go to Profile
#3454

Nancy Hingston

#37028
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Burgess Hingston is a mathematician working in differential geometry. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at The College of New Jersey. Early life and education Nancy Hingston's father William Hingston was superintendent of the Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania; her mother was a high school mathematics and computer science teacher. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in mathematics and physics. After a year studying physics as a graduate student, she switched to mathematics, and completed her PhD in 1981 from Harvard University under th...
Go to Profile
#3455

Stephan Luckhaus

Stephan Luckhaus
#67629
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stephan Luckhaus is a German mathematician who is a professor at the University of Leipzig working in pure and applied analysis. His PhD was obtained in 1978 under the supervision of Willi Jäger at the University of Heidelberg. He was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2007.
Go to Profile
#3456

Søren Galatius

Søren Galatius
#68716
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Søren Galatius is a Danish mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Copenhagen. He works in algebraic topology, where one of his most important results concerns the homology of the automorphisms of free groups. He is also known for his joint work with Oscar Randal-Williams on moduli spaces of manifolds, comprising several papers.
Go to Profile
#3457

Domenico Ribatti

#75369
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Go to Profile
#3458

Elena Marchisotto

#40685
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Elena Anne Corie Marchisotto is a mathematician, mathematics educator, and historian of mathematics. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at California State University, Northridge. Education and career Marchisotto graduated from Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in 1967 and earned a master's degree from California State University, Northridge in 1977. She completed a Ph.D. in 1990 from New York University. Her dissertation, The contributions of Mario Pieri to mathematics and mathematics education, was jointly supervised by Kenneth P. Goldberg and Anneli Cahn Lax.
Go to Profile
#3459

Margaret Brown

#58322
Overall Influence
Margaret Louise Brown is a British mathematics educator known for her research on numeracy and the learning stages of mathematics. She is an emeritus professor of mathematics education at King's College London, the former head of the School of Education at King's College London, the former president of the British Educational Research Association, , the former director of Graded Assessment in Mathematics , the former chair of the trustees of the School Mathematics Project, and the former president of the Mathematical Association.
Go to Profile
#3460

Xihong Lin

#22687
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Xihong Lin is a Chinese–American statistician known for her contributions to mixed models, nonparametric and semiparametric regression, and statistical genetics and genomics. , she is the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Coordinating Director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics.
Go to Profile
#3461

Marco Antonio Raupp

Marco Antonio Raupp
#34320
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Marco Antonio Raupp was a Brazilian mathematician and politician. He served as Director of the National Institute for Space Research, President of the Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência, and Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Go to Profile
#3462

Francis Bretherton

#26333
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Francis Patton Bretherton was an applied mathematician and a professor emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Early career After graduating from Cambridge University, he worked in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1962–1969, progressing from senior assistant in research, to assistant director of research, to university lecturer. In 1964, he introduced the Bretherton equation in applied mathematics. From 1969–1974, he was associated with the Johns Hopkins University...
Go to Profile
#3463

Stanley Tennenbaum

#47861
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Stanley Tennenbaum was an American mathematician who contributed to the field of logic. In 1959, he published Tennenbaum's theorem, which states that no countable nonstandard model of Peano arithmetic can be recursive, i.e. the operations + and × of a nonstandard model of PA are not recursively definable in the + and × operations of the standard model. He was a professor at Yeshiva University in the 1960s.
Go to Profile
#3464

Annette Huber-Klawitter

Annette Huber-Klawitter
#68421
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Annette Huber-Klawitter is a German mathematician at the University of Freiburg. Her research interests includes algebraic geometry, in particular the Bloch–Kato conjectures. A native of Frankfurt am Main, Huber-Klawitter began her academic career at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Münster in 1994, under the supervision of Christopher Deninger. In 1996 Huber-Klawitter won an EMS Prize. She was an invited speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile
#3465

Henry Landau

#46261
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Henry Jacob Landau is an American mathematician known for his contributions to information theory, including the theory of bandlimited functions and on moment issues. Landau attended the Bronx High School of Science. He received an A.B. , A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His thesis On Canonical Conformal Maps of Multiply Connected Regions was advised by Lars Ahlfors and Joseph Leonard Walsh.
Go to Profile
#3466

Philibert Nang

#70379
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Philibert Nang is a Gabonese mathematician known for his work in algebra . Nang won the 2011 ICTP Ramanujan Prize for his research in mathematics, and because he conducted it in Gabon the ICTP declared: "It is hoped that his example will inspire other young African mathematicians working at the highest levels while based in Africa." He was awarded the African Mathematics Millennium Science Initiative-Phillip Griffiths Prize in 2017.
Go to Profile
#3467

Martin Vingron

Martin Vingron
#24248
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Martin Vingron is an Austrian mathematician working in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. Since 2000, he has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. Education Vingron grew up in Vienna, and gained his Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1985. He later studied at Heidelberg University and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, gaining his Dr. rer. nat. in Applied Mathematics in 1991. His thesis studied the applications of multiple sequence alignment in molecular biology.
Go to Profile
#3468

John A. Hartigan

#26632
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
John Anthony Hartigan is an Australian-American statistician, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Statistics emeritus at Yale University. He made fundamental contributions to clustering algorithms, including the famous Hartigan-Wong method and biclustering, and Bayesian statistics.
Go to Profile
#3469

Gregory Freiman

#70296
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Gregory Abelevich Freiman is a Russian mathematician known for his work in additive number theory, in particular, for proving Freiman's theorem. He is Professor Emeritus in Tel Aviv University. Biographical sketch Freiman was born in Kazan in 1926. He graduated from Moscow University in 1949, and obtained his Candidate of Sciences in Kazan University in 1956. From 1956 he worked in Elabuga, and in 1965 he defended his Doctor of Sciences degree under the joint supervision of Alexander Gelfond, Alexey G. Postnikov, and Alexander Buchstab. From 1967 he worked in Vladimir, and later in Kalinin .
Go to Profile
#3470

Chikako Mese

#62819
Overall Influence
Chikako Mese is an American mathematician known for her work in differential geometry, geometric analysis and the theory of harmonic maps. She is a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile
#3471

Larry Wos

#21908
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Lawrence T. Wos was an American mathematician, a researcher in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Biography Wos studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1950 and a master's in mathematics in 1954, and went on for doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received PhD in 1957 supervised by Reinhold Baer. He joined the Argonne in 1957, and began using computers to prove mathematical theorems in 1963.
Go to Profile
#3472

Erez Lieberman Aiden

Erez Lieberman Aiden
#22167
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Erez Lieberman Aiden is an American research scientist active in multiple fields related to applied mathematics. He is an associate professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, and formerly a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and visiting faculty member at Google. He is an adjunct assistant professor of computer science at Rice University. Using mathematical and computational approaches, he has studied evolution in a range of contexts, including that of networks through evolutionary graph theory and languages in the field of culturomics. He has published scientific articles in a variet...
Go to Profile
#3473

Kali S. Banerjee

#55393
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Kali S. Banerjee was a math and statistics expert, and a professor of statistics at the University of Delaware. He was born in Dhaka, in 1914. He earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and his master's and doctoral degrees in statistics from the University of Calcutta.
Go to Profile
#3474

Claudia Klüppelberg

Claudia Klüppelberg
#47680
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Claudia Klüppelberg is a German mathematical statistician and applied probability theorist, known for her work in risk assessment and statistical finance. She is a professor emerita of mathematical statistics at the Technical University of Munich.
Go to Profile
#3475

Leonid Bunimovich

Leonid Bunimovich
#51523
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Leonid Abramowich Bunimovich is a Soviet and American mathematician, who made fundamental contributions to the theory of Dynamical Systems, Statistical Physics and various applications. Bunimovich received his bachelor's degree in 1967, master's degree in 1969 and PhD in 1973 from the University of Moscow. His masters and PhD thesis advisor was Yakov G. Sinai. In 1986 he finally received Doctor of Sciences degree in "Theoretical and Mathematical Physics". Bunimovich is a Regents' Professor of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bunimovich is a Fellow of the Institute of Phys...
Go to Profile
#3476

Robert Sinclair MacKay

#26994
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert Sinclair MacKay is a British mathematician and professor at the University of Warwick. He researches dynamical systems, the calculus of variations, Hamiltonian dynamics and applications to complex systems in physics, engineering, chemistry, biology and economics.
Go to Profile
#3477

Georges Glaeser

#40622
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Georges Glaeser was a French mathematician who was director of the IREM of Strasbourg. He worked in analysis and mathematical education and introduced Glaeser's composition theorem and Glaeser's continuity theorem. Glaeser was a Ph.D. student of Laurent Schwartz.
Go to Profile
#3478

Georgia Benkart

#66328
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
Georgia McClure Benkart was an American mathematician who was known for her work in the structure and representation theory of Lie algebras and related algebraic structures. She published over 130 journal articles and co-authored three American Mathematical Society memoirs in four broad categories: modular Lie algebras; combinatorics of Lie algebra representations; graded algebras and superalgebras; and quantum groups and related structures.
Go to Profile
#3479

Yakov Pesin

Yakov Pesin
#61914
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Yakov Borisovich Pesin was born in Moscow, Russia on December 12, 1946. Pesin is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Director of the Anatole Katok Center for Dynamical Systems and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University . His primary areas of research are the theory of dynamical systems with an emphasis on smooth ergodic theory, dimension theory in dynamical systems, and Riemannian geometry, as well as mathematical and statistical physics.
Go to Profile
#3480

Woody Bledsoe

Woody Bledsoe
#45550
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Bledsoe was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. He is one of the founders of artificial intelligence , making early contributions in pattern recognition, facial recognition, and automated theorem proving. He continued to make significant contributions to AI throughout his long career.
Go to Profile
#3481

Toshikazu Kawasaki

#63589
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Toshikazu Kawasaki is a Japanese paperfolder and origami theorist who is known for his geometrically innovative models. He is particularly famous for his series of fourfold symmetry "roses", all based on a twisting maneuver that allows the petals to seem to curl out from the center of the flower. Kawasaki also teaches mathematics at Sasebo Technical Junior College.
Go to Profile
#3482

Marston Conder

#64902
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marston Donald Edward Conder is a New Zealand mathematician, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Auckland University, and the former co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. His main research interests are in combinatorial group theory, graph theory, and their connections with each other.
Go to Profile
#3483

Ralph Gordon Stanton

#59232
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Ralph Gordon Stanton was a Canadian mathematician, teacher, scholar, and pioneer in mathematics and computing education. As a researcher, he made important contributions in the area of discrete mathematics; and as an educator and administrator, was also instrumental in founding the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and for establishing its unofficial mascot of the pink tie.
Go to Profile
#3484

Chia-Kun Chu

#37014
Overall Influence
Chia-Kun Chu was a Chinese-American applied mathematician who was the Fu Foundation Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. He had been on Columbia faculty since 1965 and served as the department chairman of applied physics and nuclear engineering three times .
Go to Profile
#3485

Diederich Hinrichsen

#62700
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Diederich Hinrichsen is a German mathematician who, together with Hans W. Knobloch, established the field of dynamical systems theory and control theory in Germany. Life and work Diederich Hinrichsen was born in 1939, and studied mathematics, physics, literature, philosophy, and economics from 1958 to 1965 in Hamburg.
Go to Profile
#3486

Nikolai Bakhvalov

Nikolai Bakhvalov
#59492
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
Nikolai Sergeevich Bakhvalov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Born in Moscow into the family of Sergei Vladimirovich Bakhvalov, a geometer at Moscow State University, N.S. Bakhvalov was exposed to mathematics from a young age. In 1950, Bakhvalov entered the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University. His supervisors there included Kolmogorov and Sobolev. Bakhvalov defended his doctorate in 1958. He was a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University since 1966, specializing in computational mathematics. Bakhvalov was a member of the Russian Academy of Sc...
Go to Profile
#3487

Robert Fourer

#15829
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Fourer is a scientist working in the area of operations research and management science. He is currently President of AMPL Optimization, Inc and is Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. Robert Fourer is recognized as being the designer of the popular modeling language for mathematical programming called AMPL.
Go to Profile
#3488

Endre Boros

#57556
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Endre Boros is a Hungarian-American mathematician, a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Director of the Center for Operations Research . He is the author of 15 book chapters and edited volumes, and 165 research papers. He is Associate Editor of the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, and Editor-in-Chief of both the Annals of Operations Research and Discrete Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile
#3489

Mitsuhiro Shishikura

Mitsuhiro Shishikura
#42232
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mitsuhiro Shishikura is a Japanese mathematician working in the field of complex dynamics. He is professor at Kyoto University in Japan. Shishikura became internationally recognized for two of his earliest contributions, both of which solved long-standing open problems.In his Master's thesis, he proved a conjecture of Fatou from 1920 by showing that a rational function nonrepelling periodic cycles.He proved that the boundary of the Mandelbrot set has Hausdorff dimension two, confirming a conjecture stated by Mandelbrot and Milnor.For his results, he was awarded the Salem Prize in 1992, and th...
Go to Profile
#3490

Erhard Scholz

#54300
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Erhard Scholz is a German historian of mathematics with interests in the history of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries, historical perspective on the philosophy of mathematics and science, and Hermann Weyl's geometrical methods applied to gravitational theory.
Go to Profile
#3491

Rebecca Goldin

#52015
Overall Influence
Rebecca Freja Goldin is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematical sciences at George Mason University and director of the Statistical Assessment Service, a nonprofit organization associated with GMU that aims to improve the use of statistics in journalism. Her mathematical research concerns symplectic geometry, including work on Hamiltonian actions and symplectic quotients.
Go to Profile
#3492

Daniel Rudolph

Daniel Rudolph
#68638
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Daniel Jay Rudolph was a mathematician who was considered a leader in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. He studied at Caltech and Stanford and taught postgraduate mathematics at Stanford University, the University of Maryland and Colorado State University, being appointed to the Albert C. Yates Endowed Chair in Mathematics at Colorado State in 2005. He jointly developed a theory of restricted orbit equivalence which unified several other theories. He founded and directed an intense preparation course for graduate math studies and began a Math circle for middle-school children. Early in life he was a modern dancer.
Go to Profile
#3493

Víctor Neumann-Lara

#29484
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Víctor Neumann-Lara was a Mexican mathematician and a pioneer in the field of graph theory in Mexico. His work also covers general topology, game theory and combinatorics. Biography Born in the city of Huejutla de Reyes, Hidalgo, Mexico, he soon moved to Mexico City, where he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the School of Sciences, UNAM.
Go to Profile
#3494

Albert Pfluger

Albert Pfluger
#66031
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Albert Pfluger was a Swiss mathematician, specializing in complex function theory. Biography Pfluger, the son of a farmer, attended secondary school in Stans. He then studied mathematics at ETH Zürich, where in 1935 he received his promotion under George Pólya with thesis Über eine Interpretation gewisser Konvergenz- und Fortsetzungseigenschaften Dirichlet’scher Reihen. Afterwards, he became a Gymnasium teacher at the canton school in Zug and the canton school in Solothurn. He received his habilitation qualification in 1938 and in 1939 became a professor extraordinarius for applied mathematics and mathematical physics at the University of Fribourg.
Go to Profile
#3495

Giuliana Davidoff

#65031
Overall Influence
Giuliana P. Davidoff is an American mathematician specializing in number theory and expander graphs. She is the Robert L. Rooke Professor of Mathematics and the chair of mathematics and statistics at Mount Holyoke College.
Go to Profile
#3496

Huguette Delavault

#54606
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Huguette Delavault was a French mathematician, specializing in mathematical physics. Education and career Delavault was born on 15 January 1924, in Andilly, Charente-Maritime; her parents were both teachers. She studied at a school for teachers, the École normale d'instituteurs in La Rochelle, France, from 1940 to 1943, and then became a student at the École normale supérieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses from 1946 to 1949. After interrupting her studies for health reasons, in 1952 she passed her agrégation in mathematics. She became a researcher at CNRS from 1952 to 1958, while earning a doctorate ...
Go to Profile
#3497

Karen Aardal

Karen Aardal
#47537
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Karen I. Aardal is a Norwegian and Dutch applied mathematician, theoretical computer scientist, and operations researcher. Her research involves combinatorial optimization, integer programming, approximation algorithms, and facility location, with applications such as positioning emergency vehicles to optimize their response time. She is a professor in the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Delft University of Technology, and the chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society for the 2016–2019 term.
Go to Profile
#3498

Beverly Anderson

#62074
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Beverly Jacques Anderson is an American mathematician and emeritus professor at the University of the District of Columbia. In the 1990s she worked at the National Academy of Sciences as Director of Minority Programs for the Mathematical Sciences Education Board, and led the Making Mathematics Work for Minorities program.
Go to Profile
#3499

Shmuel Gal

Shmuel Gal
#57228
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Shmuel Gal is a mathematician and professor of statistics at the University of Haifa in Israel. He devised the Gal's accurate tables method for the computer evaluation of elementary functions. With Zvi Yehudai he developed in 1993 a new algorithm for sorting which is used by IBM.
Go to Profile
#3500

Stefan Nemirovski

#72400
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Stefan Yuryevich Nemirovski is a Russian mathematician. He made notable contributions to topology and complex analysis, and was awarded an EMS Prize in 2000. Nemirovski earned his Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1998.
Go to Profile