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.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#351
M. S. Bartlett
#6196
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Maurice Stevenson Bartlett FRS was an English statistician who made particular contributions to the analysis of data with spatial and temporal patterns. He is also known for his work in the theory of statistical inference and in multivariate analysis.
Go to Profile#352
Robion Kirby
#7202
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robion Cromwell Kirby is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in low-dimensional topology. Together with Laurent C. Siebenmann he developed the Kirby–Siebenmann invariant for classifying the piecewise linear structuress on a topological manifold. He also proved the fundamental result on the Kirby calculus, a method for describing 3-manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds by surgery on framed links. Along with his significant mathematical contributions, he has over 50 doctoral students and is the editor of an influential problem list.
Go to Profile#353
Benjamin Weiss
#8581
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Benjamin Weiss is an American-Israeli mathematician known for his contributions to ergodic theory, topological dynamics, probability theory, game theory, and descriptive set theory. Biography Benjamin Weiss was born in New York City. In 1962 he received B.A. from Yeshiva University and M.A. from the Graduate School of Science, Yeshiva University. In 1965, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton under the supervision of William Feller.
Go to Profile#354
Augustin Banyaga
#9224
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Augustin Banyaga is a Rwandan-born Americann mathematician whose research fields include symplectic topology and contact geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.
Go to Profile#355
Fred Diamond
#9136
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Fred Irvin Diamond is a mathematician, known for his role in proving the modularity theorem for elliptic curves. His research interest is in modular forms and Galois representations. Life Diamond received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1984, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1988 as a doctoral student of Andrew Wiles. He has held positions at Brandeis University and Rutgers University, and is currently a professor at King's College London.
Go to Profile#356
Tristan Needham
#6266
Overall Influence
Tristan Needham is a British mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of San Francisco. Education, career and publications Tristan is the son of social anthropologist Rodney Needham of Oxford, England. He attended the Dragon School. Later Needham attended the University of Oxford and studied physics at Merton College, and then transferred to the Mathematical Institute where he studied under Roger Penrose. He obtained his D.Phil. in 1987 and in 1989 took up his post at University of San Francisco.
Go to Profile#357
Chia-Chiao Lin
#4128
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Chia-Chiao Lin was a Chinese-born American applied mathematician and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lin made major contributions to the theory of hydrodynamic stability, turbulent flow, mathematics, and astrophysics.
Go to Profile#358
Heinrich Heesch
#6334
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Heinrich Heesch was a German mathematician. He was born in Kiel and died in Hanover. In Göttingen he worked on Group theory. In 1933 Heesch witnessed the National Socialist purges of university staff. Not willing to become a member of the National Socialist organization of university teachers as required, he resigned from his university position in 1935 and worked privately at his parents' home in Kiel until 1948.
Go to Profile#359
Bertrand Toën
#9011
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Bertrand Toën is a mathematician who works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. He received his PhD in 1999 from the Paul Sabatier University, where he was supervised by Carlos Simpson and Joseph Tapia.
Go to Profile#360
Rahul Pandharipande
#6941
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Rahul Pandharipande is a mathematician who is currently a professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich working in algebraic geometry. His particular interests concern moduli spaces, enumerative invariants associated to moduli spaces, such as Gromov–Witten invariants and Donaldson–Thomas invariants, and the cohomology of the moduli space of curves. His father Vijay Raghunath Pandharipande was a renowned theoretical physicist who worked in the area of nuclear physics.
Go to Profile#361
Boris Khesin
#8909
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Boris Aronovich Khesin is a Russian and Canadian mathematician working on infinite-dimensional Lie groups, Poisson geometry and hydrodynamics. He is a professor at the University of Toronto. Khesin obtained his Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1990 under the supervision of Vladimir Arnold .
Go to Profile#362
János Kollár
#9822
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#363
U. S. R. Murty
#7441
Overall Influence
Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty , is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo. U. S. R. Murty received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, with a thesis on extremal graph theory; his advisor was C. R. Rao. Murty is well known for his work in matroid theory and graph theory, and mainly for being a co-author with J. A. Bondy of a textbook on graph theory. Murty has served as a managing editor and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B.
Go to Profile#364
Solomon W. Golomb
#1815
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Solomon Wolf Golomb was an American mathematician, engineer, and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, best known for his works on mathematical games. Most notably, he invented Cheskers in 1948. He also fully described polyominoes and pentominoes in 1953. He specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory, and communications. Pentomino boardgames, based on his work, would go on to inspire Tetris.
Go to Profile#365
R. Duncan Luce
#1478
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Robert Duncan Luce was an American mathematician and social scientist, and one of the most preeminent figures in the field of mathematical psychology. At the end of his life, he held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#366
Luis Vega
#9334
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Luis Vega González is a Spanish mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations. Vega graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid with a bachelor's degree in 1982 and received his doctorate in 1988 from Autonomous University of Madrid under Antonio Barba with thesis El multiplicador de Shrödinger la función maximal y los operadores de restriction. Vega was a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago as a postdoc. He taught, as an assistant professor, until 1993 at the UAM and then at the University of the Basque Country, where he received a full professorship in 1995.
Go to Profile#367
Gustave Choquet
#6051
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Gustave Choquet was a French mathematician. Choquet was born in Solesmes, Nord. His contributions include work in functional analysis, potential theory, topology and measure theory. He is known for creating the Choquet theory, the Choquet integral and the theory of capacities.
Go to Profile#368
Rudy Rucker
#1310
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb.
Go to Profile#369
Laurent Lafforgue
#4585
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Laurent Lafforgue is a French mathematician. He has made outstanding contributions to Langlands' program in the fields of number theory and analysis, and in particular proved the Langlands conjectures for the automorphism group of a function field. The crucial contribution by Lafforgue to solve this question is the construction of compactifications of certain moduli stacks of shtukas. The proof was the result of more than six years of concentrated efforts.
Go to Profile#370
Michio Jimbo
#8269
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michio Jimbo is a Japanese mathematician working in mathematical physics and is a professor of mathematics at Rikkyo University. He is a grandson of the linguist . Career After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1974, he studied under Mikio Sato at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto University. He has made important contributions to mathematical physics, including the initial development of the study of quantum groups-functions for the KP integrable hierarchy, and other related integrable hierarchies , and development of the theory of isomonodromic deformation ...
Go to Profile#371
Solomon Kullback
#3553
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Solomon Kullback was an American cryptanalyst and mathematician, who was one of the first three employees hired by William F. Friedman at the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service in the 1930s, along with Frank Rowlett and Abraham Sinkov. He went on to a long and distinguished career at SIS and its eventual successor, the National Security Agency . Kullback was the Chief Scientist at the NSA until his retirement in 1962, whereupon he took a position at the George Washington University.
Go to Profile#372
Kenji Fukaya
#8865
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kenji Fukaya is a Japanese mathematician known for his work in symplectic geometry and Riemannian geometry. His many fundamental contributions to mathematics include the discovery of the Fukaya category. He is a permanent faculty member at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#373
Alexei Kostrikin
#9634
Overall Influence
1929 - 2000 (71 years)
Alexei Ivanovich Kostrikin was a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebra and algebraic geometry. Life Kostrikin graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1952. In 1960, he earned a Doctor of Sciences degree under Igor Shafarevich at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics with a thesis on the Burnside problem. He became a faculty member at Moscow State University in 1963 and became a professor at the same university in 1976. In 1998, he became Honoured Professor of Moscow State University.
Go to Profile#374
Jordan Ellenberg
#6480
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
#375
Roy Kerr
#3700
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Roy Patrick Kerr is a New Zealand mathematician who discovered the Kerr geometry, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity. His solution models the gravitational field outside an uncharged rotating massive object, including a rotating black hole. His solution to Einstein's equations predicted spinning black holes before they were discovered.
Go to Profile#376
Trevor Hastie
#1985
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Trevor John Hastie is an American statistician and computer scientist. He is currently serving as the John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Hastie is known for his contributions to applied statistics, especially in the field of machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics. He has authored several popular books in statistical learning, including The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction. Hastie has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge.
Go to Profile#377
Simon Brendle
#9947
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Simon Brendle is a German-American mathematician working in differential geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations. He received his Dr. rer. nat. from Tübingen University under the supervision of Gerhard Huisken . He was a professor at Stanford University , and is currently a professor at Columbia University. He has held visiting positions at MIT, ETH Zürich, Princeton University, and Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#378
Ruth Lawrence
#5946
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark is a British–Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. In the public eye, she is best known for having been a child prodigy in mathematics.
Go to Profile#379
Sergey Nikolsky
#6114
Overall Influence
1905 - 2012 (107 years)
Sergey Mikhailovich Nikolsky was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Biography Nikolsky was born in Talitsa, which was at that time located in Kamyshlovsky Uyezd of the Russian Empire. He had been an Academician since 28 November 1972. He also had won many scientific awards. At the age of 92 he was still actively giving lectures in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 2005, he was only giving talks at scientific conferences, but was still working in MIPT, at the age of 100. He died in Moscow in November 2012 at the age of 107.
Go to Profile#380
Volker Strassen
#2384
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Volker Strassen is a German mathematician, a professor emeritus in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Konstanz. For important contributions to the analysis of algorithms he has received many awards, including the Cantor medal, the Konrad Zuse Medal, the Paris Kanellakis Award for work on randomized primality testing, the Knuth Prize for "seminal and influential contributions to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms."
Go to Profile#381
Vera T. Sós
#9179
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Vera Turán Sós was a Hungarian mathematician who specialized in number theory and combinatorics. She was a student and close collaborator of both Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi. She also collaborated frequently with her husband Pál Turán, an analyst, number theorist, and combinatorist. Until 1987, she worked at the Department of Analysis at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Afterwards, she was employed by the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1997, Sós was awarded the Széchenyi Prize.
Go to Profile#382
Beno Eckmann
#9439
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Beno Eckmann was a Swiss mathematician who made contributions to algebraic topology, homological algebra, group theory, and differential geometry. Life Born in Bern, Eckmann received his master's degree from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich in 1939. Later, he studied there under Heinz Hopf, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1941. Eckmann was the 2008 recipient of the Albert Einstein Medal.
Go to Profile#383
Bernard Malgrange
#6963
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Bernard Malgrange is a French mathematician who works on differential equations and singularity theory. He proved the Ehrenpreis–Malgrange theorem and the Malgrange preparation theorem, essential for the classification theorem of the elementary catastrophes of René Thom. He received his Ph.D. from Université Henri Poincaré in 1955. His advisor was Laurent Schwartz. He was elected to the Académie des sciences in 1988. In 2012 he gave the Łojasiewicz Lecture at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Go to Profile#384
Eliyahu Rips
#3972
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician of Latvian origin known for his research in geometric group theory. He became known to the general public following his co-authoring a paper on what is popularly known as Bible code, the supposed coded messaging in the Hebrew text of the Torah.
Go to Profile#385
Victor Guillemin
#8337
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Victor William Guillemin is an American mathematician. He works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of symplectic geometry, and he has also made contributions to the fields of microlocal analysis, spectral theory, and mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#386
Clifford A. Pickover
#3429
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Clifford Alan Pickover is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he was editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 700 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.
Go to Profile#387
Yurii Nesterov
#3677
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Yurii Nesterov is a Russian mathematician, an internationally recognized expert in convex optimization, especially in the development of efficient algorithms and numerical optimization analysis. He is currently a professor at the University of Louvain .
Go to Profile#388
John Stillwell
#7496
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#389
James Maynard
#7047
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
#390
José Enrique Moyal
#5977
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
José Enrique Moyal was an Australian mathematician and mathematical physicist who contributed to aeronautical engineering, electrical engineering and statistics, among other fields. Career Moyal helped establish the phase space formulation of quantum mechanics in 1949 by bringing together the ideas of Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Hip Groenewold.
Go to Profile#391
Edmund F. Robertson
#7335
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Edmund Frederick Robertson is a professor emeritus of pure mathematics at the University of St Andrews. Work Robertson is one of the creators of the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, along with John J. O'Connor. Robertson has written over 100 research articles, mainly on the theory of groups and semigroups. He is also the author or co-author of 17 textbooks.
Go to Profile#392
Michiel Hazewinkel
#7616
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michiel Hazewinkel is a Dutch mathematician, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science and the University of Amsterdam, particularly known for his 1978 book Formal groups and applications and as editor of the Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#393
Tetsuji Miwa
#9037
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Tetsuji Miwa is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in mathematical physics. Career Miwa received his undergraduate degree in 1971 and his master's degree in 1973 from the University of Tokyo. He studied microlocal analysis and hyperfunctions in the early 1970s under the influence of Mikio Satō and Masaki Kashiwara. In 1973 Miwa moved to RIMS at Kyoto University and joined the mathematicians of the Satō school. He received his PhD in 1981 from Kyoto University. There he was a research assistant from 1973 to 1984, an associate professor from 1984 to 1993, and a full professor from 1993, retiring as professor emeritus in 2013.
Go to Profile#394
Olga Ladyzhenskaya
#7714
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002. She is the author of more than two hundred scientific works, among which are six monographs.
Go to Profile#395
Kenneth Appel
#6570
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Kenneth Ira Appel was an American mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.
Go to Profile#396
László Fejes Tóth
#9140
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
László Fejes Tóth was a Hungarian mathematician who specialized in geometry. He proved that a lattice pattern is the most efficient way to pack centrally symmetric convex sets on the Euclidean plane . He also investigated the sphere packing problem. He was the first to show, in 1953, that proof of the Kepler conjecture can be reduced to a finite case analysis and, later, that the problem might be solved using a computer.
Go to Profile#397
Keith Devlin
#4833
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#398
Jean-Michel Bismut
#9976
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jean-Michel Bismut is a French mathematician who has been a professor at the Université Paris-Sud since 1981. His mathematical career covers two apparently different branches of mathematics: probability theory and differential geometry. Ideas from probability play an important role in his works on geometry.
Go to Profile#399
C. S. Seshadri
#6496
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Conjeevaram Srirangachari Seshadri was an Indian mathematician. He was the founder and director-emeritus of the Chennai Mathematical Institute, and is known for his work in algebraic geometry. The Seshadri constant is named after him. He was also known for his collaboration with mathematician M. S. Narasimhan, for their proof of the Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem which proved the necessary conditions for stable vector bundles on a Riemann surface.
Go to Profile#400
Edwin Hewitt
#8573
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Edwin Hewitt was an American mathematician known for his work in abstract harmonic analysis and for his discovery, in collaboration with Leonard Jimmie Savage, of the Hewitt–Savage zero–one law.
Go to Profile