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.

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#3501

Ram Prakash Bambah

#63062
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Ram Prakash Bambah is an Indian mathematician working in number theory and discrete geometry. Education and career Bambah earned a bachelor's degree from Government College University, Lahore, and a master's degree from the University of the Punjab, Lahore. He then went to England for his doctoral studies, earning his Ph.D. in 1950 from St John's College, Cambridge under the supervision of Louis J. Mordell. Returning to India, he became a reader at Panjab University, Chandigarh, in 1952, and was promoted to professor there in 1957. Maintaining his position at Panjab University, he also held a position as professor at Ohio State University in the US from 1964 to 1969.
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#3502

Urs Stammbach

#70112
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Urs Stammbach is a Swiss mathematician, specializing in homological algebra. Stammbach studied at ETH Zurich, where he obtained his Diplom in 1964 and received his doctorate in 1966 under the supervision of Beno Eckmann with dissertation Anwendungen der Homologietheorie der Gruppen auf Zentralreihen und auf Invarianten von Präsentierungen . As a postdoc Stammbach was from 1966 to 1967 at ETH Zurich and from 1967 to 1969 at Cornell University. At ETH Zurich, he was from 1969 to 1972 an assistant professor, from 1972 to 1979 an associate professor, and from 1979 to 2005 a full professor, retir...
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#3503

Adriana Neumann de Oliveira

#24798
Overall Influence
Adriana Neumann de Oliveira is a Brazilian mathematician specializing in interacting particle systems, awarded by the L'Oréal-UNESCO Prizes for women in science in 2016. She is a professor in the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
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#3504

Nesmith Ankeny

#71714
Overall Influence
1927 - 1993 (66 years)
Nesmith Cornett Ankeny was an American mathematician specialising in number theory. After Army service, he studied at Stanford University and obtained his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1950 under the supervision of Emil Artin. He was a Fellow at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study, then assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University from 1952 to 1955, when he joined MIT. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1958; he became a full professor in 1964 and retired in 1992.
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#3505

Jamshid Gharajedaghi

#24007
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jamshid Gharajedaghi is an Iranian-American organizational theorist, management consultant, and Adjunct Professor of Systems thinking at Villanova University. He is known for his work of systems thinking, managing complexity, and business architecture.
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#3506

Yael Tauman Kalai

Yael Tauman Kalai
#20074
Overall Influence
Yael Tauman Kalai is a cryptographer and theoretical computer scientist who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and as an adjunct professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
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#3507

Florin Diacu

#47601
Overall Influence
1959 - 2018 (59 years)
Florin Nicolae Diacu was a Romanian Canadian mathematician and author. Education and career He graduated with a Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1983. Between 1983 and 1988 he worked as a math teacher in Mediaș. In 1989 he obtained his doctoral degree at the Heidelberg University in Germany with a thesis in celestial mechanics written under the direction of Willi Jäger.
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#3508

Jo Ellis-Monaghan

#62020
Overall Influence
Joanna Anthony Ellis-Monaghan is an American mathematician and mathematics educator whose research interests include graph polynomials and topological graph theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics of the University of Amsterdam.
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#3509

Jane Ye

#66192
Overall Influence
Jane Ye （叶娟娟）is a Chinese-Canadian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at University of Victoria. Her interests include variational analysis and optimization constraint problems. She is the 2015 winner of the Krieger–Nelson Prize, given annually by the Canadian Mathematical Society to an outstanding female researcher in mathematics.
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#3510

Laura Grigori

#60153
Overall Influence
Laura Grigori is a French-Romanian applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research on numerical linear algebra and communication-avoiding algorithms. She is a director of research for the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Paris, and heads the "Alpines" scientific computing project jointly affiliated with INRIA and the of Sorbonne University.
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#3511

Leroy Milton Kelly

#73726
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Leroy Milton Kelly was an American mathematician whose research primarily concerned combinatorial geometry. In 1986 he settled a conjecture of Jean-Pierre Serre by proving that n points in complex 3-space, not all lying on a plane, determine an ordinary line—that is, a line containing only two of the n points. He taught at Michigan State University.
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#3512

Fridrikh Karpelevich

#76439
Overall Influence
1927 - 2000 (73 years)
Fridrikh Israilevich Karpelevich was a Russian mathematician known for his work on semisimple Lie algebras, geometry, and probability theory. Together with Simon Gindikin, he discovered the Gindikin–Karpelevich formula.
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#3513

S. B. Rao

#62244
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Siddani Bhaskara Rao is a graph theorist, Professor Emeritus, and director of the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. Rao is the first director of the CR Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. S. B. Rao is known for his work on line graphs, frequency partitions and degree sequences.
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#3514

Helena J. Nussenzveig Lopes

#51213
Overall Influence
Helena Judith Nussenzveig Lopes is a Brazilian mathematician, known for her work on the Euler equations for incompressible flow in fluid dynamics. She is a professor titular in the Department of Mathematical Methods at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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#3515

David Lindley

#76468
Overall Influence
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#3516

Magda Peligrad

#57564
Overall Influence
Magda Peligrad is a Romanian mathematician and mathematical statistician known for her research in probability theory, and particularly on central limit theorems and stochastic processes. She works at the University of Cincinnati, where she is Distinguished Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Mathematical Sciences.
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#3517

Michael Handel

#52747
Overall Influence
Michael Handel is an American mathematician known for his work in Geometric group theory. He is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Lehman College of The City University of New York and a Professor of Mathematics at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York.
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#3518

Enzo Martinelli

Enzo Martinelli
#61434
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Enzo Martinelli was an Italian mathematician, working in the theory of functions of several complex variables: he is best known for his work on the theory of integral representations for holomorphic functions of several variables, notably for discovering the Bochner–Martinelli formula in 1938, and for his work in the theory of multi-dimensional residues.
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#3519

Simion Filip

Simion Filip
#70125
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Simion Filip is a mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago who works in dynamical systems and algebraic geometry. Early life and education Filip was born in Chișinău, where he grew up and attended the Moldo-Turkish "Orizont" Lyceum, graduating in 2005. He is a dual citizen of Romania and Moldova. In 2004 and 2005, Filip won a bronze medal and a silver medal respectively while representing Moldova at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
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#3520

Grace Yang

#62856
Overall Influence
Grace Lo Yang is a Chinese statistician whose research areas include stochastic processes in the physical sciences, asymptotic theory, and survival analysis. She is a professor of statistics in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She was president of the International Chinese Statistical Association for 1990–1991 and program director for statistics at the National Science Foundation from 2005 to 2008.
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#3521

Julie Bergner

Julie Bergner
#48834
Overall Influence
Julia Elizabeth Bergner is a mathematician specializing in algebraic topology, homotopy theory, and higher category theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia. Education and career Bergner graduated from Gonzaga University in 2000. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2005. Her dissertation, Three Models for the Homotopy Theory of Homotopy Theories, was supervised by William Gerard Dwyer.
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#3522

Kristin Umland

#66012
Overall Influence
Kristin Umland is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. She was on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico for nearly two decades before leaving to help build the nonprofit organization Illustrative Mathematics .
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#3523

Raymond L. Johnson

Raymond L. Johnson
#64036
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Raymond Lewis Johnson is an American mathematician, currently a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Rice University. He was the first African-American student at Rice University, and the first African-American mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. His research concerns non-well-posed problems and harmonic analysis.
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#3524

Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge
#2005
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Vernor Steffen Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He has won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep , A Deepness in the Sky , Rainbows End , and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High , and The Cookie Monster .
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#3525

Sumio Watanabe

#68938
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Sumio Watanabe is a Japanese mathematician and engineer working in probability theory, applied algebraic geometry and Bayesian statistics. He is currently a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology in the Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science. He is the author of the text, Algebraic Geometry and Statistical Learning Theory, which proposes a generalization of Fisher's regular statistical theory to singular statistical models.
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#3526

Candice Renee Price

#63761
Overall Influence
Candice Renee Price is an African-American mathematician and is an Associate professor at Smith College. She, along with Erica Graham, Raegan Higgins, and Shelby Wilson created the website Mathematically Gifted and Black which features the contributions of modern-day black mathematicians. She is an advocate for greater representation of females and people of color in the STEM fields. Price's area of mathematical research is DNA topology.
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#3527

Harold Levine

#48351
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Harold I. Levine was an American mathematician who was professor at Stanford University. He specialized in wave motion and optics. Levine was born in New York City. After he graduated from the City College of New York, he earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University. In 1954, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Levine died on December 10, 2017 at the age of 95.
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#3528

Gábor Domokos

#36402
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Gábor Domokos is a Hungarian mathematician and engineer. He is best known for his 2006 discovery of the Gömböc, a class of three-dimensional convex bodies that have one stable and one unstable point of balance. Their shape helped to relate the body structure of some tortoises and their ability to recover after being placed upside down.
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#3529

William Bigelow Easton

#51725
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
William Bigelow Easton was an American mathematician who proved Easton's theorem about the possible values of the continuum function. His advisor at Princeton was the famed mathematician and computer scientist Alonzo Church.
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#3530

Cynthia Wyels

#46569
Overall Influence
Cynthia Jean Wyels is an American mathematician whose interests include linear algebra, combinatorics, and mathematics education, and who is known for her research in graph pebbling and radio coloring of graphs. She is a professor of mathematics at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, California, where she also co-directs the Alliance for Minority Participation.
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#3531

Meike Akveld

#57687
Overall Influence
Meike Maria Elisabeth Akveld is a Swiss mathematician and textbook author, whose professional interests include knot theory, symplectic geometry, and mathematics education. She is a tenured senior scientist and lecturer in the mathematics and teacher education group in the Department of Mathematics at ETH Zurich. She is also the organizer of the Mathematical Kangaroo competitions in Switzerland, and president of the Association Kangourou sans Frontières, a French-based international society devoted to the popularization of mathematics.
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#3532

Franz Thomas Bruss

#48319
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Franz Thomas Bruss is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he had been director of "Mathématiques Générales" and co-director of the probability chair, and where he continues his research as invited professor. His main research activities in mathematics are in the field of probability:1/e-law of best choiceOdds algorithm of optimal stoppingGalton–Watson processesResource Dependent Branching ProcessesBorel–Cantelli lemmaRobbins' problem Pascal processesBRS-inequality
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#3533

Vladimir Gerdt

#55305
Overall Influence
1947 - 2021 (74 years)
Vladimir P. Gerdt was a Russian mathematician and a full professor at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research where he was the head of the Group of Algebraic and Quantum Computations. His research interests were concentrated in computer algebra, symbolic and algebraic computations, algebraic and numerical analysis of nonlinear differential equations, polynomial equations, applications to mathematics and physics, and quantum computation with over 210 published articles.
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#3534

Rimhak Ree

#24474
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Rimhak Ree , alternatively Im-hak Ree, was a Korean Canadian mathematician. He contributed in the field of group theory, most notably with the concept of the Ree group in . Early life Ree received his early education in Hamhung, South Hamgyong, Korea, Empire of Japan. His birthplace is now in North Korea. He attended the Hamhung #1 Public Ordinary School , and in 1934 entered the Hamhung Public High School . He went onto Keijō Imperial University, where he studied physics, which was an unusual choice for Koreans at the time. Ree graduated in 1944 with a physics degree; he then went to Fengtian...
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#3535

Rhonda Hughes

#54808
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Rhonda Jo Hughes is an American mathematician, the Helen Herrmann Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Education Hughes grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She attended Gage Park High School, where she was a cheerleader and valedictorian of her class. She studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for one and a half years, then left school and worked for six months before resuming her education at the University of Illinois at Chicago on an Illinois State Scholarship studying mathematics. There, she came under the mentorship of Yoram Sagher, who encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in mathematics.
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#3536

Marie-France Vignéras

Marie-France Vignéras
#53357
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marie-France Vignéras is a French mathematician. She is a Professor Emeritus of the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. She is known for her proof published in 1980 of the existence of isospectral non-isometric Riemann surfaces. Such surfaces show that one cannot hear the shape of a hyperbolic drum. Another highlight of her work is the establishment of the mod-l local Langlands correspondence for GL in 2000. Her current work concerns the p-adic Langlands program.
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#3537

Christel Rotthaus

#66622
Overall Influence
Christel Rotthaus is a professor of mathematics at Michigan State University. She is known for her research in commutative algebra. Career Rotthaus received her Ph.D. from Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 1975 under Hans-Joachim Nastold. Rotthaus now works at Michigan State University.
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#3538

Lowell E. Jones

#75699
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Lowell Edwin Jones is an American professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University. Jones' primary fields of interest are topology and geometry. Jones is most well known for his collaboration with F. Thomas Farrell on the Farrell-Jones conjecture.
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#3539

Sylvie Corteel

#64006
Overall Influence
Sylvie Corteel is a French mathematician at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Paris Diderot University and the University of California, Berkeley, who was an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. Her research concerns the enumerative combinatorics and algebraic combinatorics of permutations, tableaux, and partitions.
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#3540

Stephen Rallis

Stephen Rallis
#68880
Overall Influence
1942 - 2012 (70 years)
Stephen James Rallis was an American mathematician who worked on group representations, automorphic forms, the Siegel–Weil formula, and Langlands L-functions. Career Rallis received a B.A. in 1964 from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent 1968–1970 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After two years at Stony Brook, two years at Universite de Strasbourg, and several visiting positions, he joined the faculty at Ohio State University in 1977 and stayed there for the rest of his career.
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#3541

Haim Hanani

#67691
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Haim Hanani was a Polish-born Israeli mathematician, known for his contributions to combinatorial design theory, in particular for the theory of pairwise balanced designs and for the proof of an existence theorem for Steiner quadruple systems. He is also known for the Hanani–Tutte theorem on odd crossings in non-planar graphs.
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#3542

Peter Schneider

#38310
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter Bernd Schneider is a German mathematician, specializing in the p-adic aspects of algebraic number theory, arithmetic algebraic geometry, and representation theory. Education and career Peter Schneider studied mathematics in Karlsruhe and Erlangen. After his Diplom in 1977 from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, he was an assistant from 1977 to 1983 at the University of Regensburg. There he received in 1980 his PhD with advisor Jürgen Neukirch and dissertation -adischer Darstellungen über Zahlkörpern . Schneider habilitated in 1982 at the University of Regensburg. He was a postdoc at ...
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#3543

Tosun Terzioğlu

#63566
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Tosun Terzioğlu was a Turkish mathematician and academic administrator. Terzioğlu was born in Istanbul, Turkey. He graduated from Robert College in 1961. He studied mathematics at Newcastle University, UK and received his BS in 1965. He earned his PhD from Frankfurt University in Germany in 1968. Between 1968-1994, he taught at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He worked as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan between 1975–1976 and University of Wuppertal in Germany between 1982-1983. He had been the president of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey between 1992-1997.
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#3544

Néstor Otero

#55238
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Néstor William Otero Carvajal is a Colombian football manager. Career Born in Cali, Otero studied mathematics at Universidad Santiago de Cali, earning him the nickname Matemático. Otero began his football coaching career with Deportes Tolima in 1999. In eighteen years managing Colombian professional football clubs, Otero has worked for a total of twelve teams .
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#3545

Michael Weiss

Michael Weiss
#74473
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Weiss is a German mathematician and an expert in algebraic and geometric topology. He is a professor at the University of Münster. Life He completed his PhD in 1982 at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Brian Sanderson. He was then affiliated as a researcher with the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies near Paris and the universities of Bielefeld, Edinburgh, and Göttingen. In 1999, he joined the faculty of Aberdeen University where he stayed until 2011, when he was awarded a Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at the University of Münster.
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#3546

Bakhadyr Khoussainov

#27742
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Bakhadyr M. Khoussainov is a computer scientist and mathematician, who was born and educated in the Soviet Union, works in the fields of mathematical logic, computability theory, computable model theory and theoretical computer science. With Anil Nerode, he is the co-founder of the theory of automatic structures, which is an extension of the theory of automatic groups.
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#3547

Victoria Powers

#53916
Overall Influence
Victoria Ann Powers is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and known for her work on positive polynomials and on the mathematics of electoral systems. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at Emory University.
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#3548

Ed Posner

#34119
Overall Influence
1933 - 1993 (60 years)
Edward Charles "Ed" Posner was an American information theorist and neural network researcher who became chief technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
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#3549

Thomas Goodwillie

#76599
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Thomas G. Goodwillie is an American mathematician and professor at Brown University who has made fundamental contributions to algebraic and geometric topology. He is especially famous for developing the concept of calculus of functors, often also named Goodwillie calculus.
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#3550

Ewa Damek

#67320
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ewa Damek is a Polish mathematician at the University of Wrocław whose research interests include harmonic analysis, branching processes, and Siegel domains. Education and career Damek is a professor in the mathematical institute of the University of Wrocław, which she directed from 2002 to 2007.
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