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,
#3551
John Robert Ringrose
#54415
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John Robert Ringrose is an English mathematician working on operator algebras who introduced nest algebras. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977. In 1962, Ringrose won the Adams Prize.
Go to Profile#3552
Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein
#31677
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Genevieve Marie Grotjan Feinstein was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst. She worked for the Signals Intelligence Service throughout World War II, during which time she played an important role in deciphering the Japanese cryptography machine Purple, and later worked on the Cold War-era Venona project.
Go to Profile#3553
Miriam Leiva
#66014
Overall Influence
Miriam Almaguer Leiva is a Cuban-American mathematician and mathematics educator, the first American Hispanic woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics and mathematics education. She is the Bonnie Cone Distinguished Professor for Teaching Emerita in the Department of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the founder of TODOS: Mathematics for All, an organization devoted to advocacy for and encouragement of Latinx students in mathematics. She is also an author of many secondary-school mathematics textbooks.
Go to Profile#3554
Hans Wussing
#56763
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Hans-Ludwig Wußing was a German historian of mathematics and science. Life Wussing graduated from high school, and from 1947 to 52 studied mathematics and physics at the University of Leipzig. Ernst Hölder was one of his teachers. In 1952 he took the state examination, and received his doctorate in 1957. His dissertation was on embedding finite groups. From 1956 to 1966 he was assistant at the Karl-Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and Science at the University of Leipzig. He qualified as a professor there in 1966 with a ground-breaking work on the genesis of the abstract group concept.
Go to Profile#3555
Apala Majumdar
#50686
Overall Influence
Apala Majumdar is a British applied mathematician specialising in the mathematics of liquid crystals. She is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Strathclyde. Education and career Majumdar did her undergraduate studies at the University of Bristol. As a graduate student at Bristol, she also worked with Hewlett Packard Laboratories. She was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Bristol in 2006; her dissertation, Liquid crystals and tangent unit-vector fields in polyhedral geometries, was jointly supervised by Jonathan Robbins and Maxim Zyskin.
Go to Profile#3556
Naomi Jochnowitz
#49804
Overall Influence
Naomi G. Jochnowitz is an American mathematician interested in algebraic number theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester. Jochnowitz earned her Ph.D. in 1976 from Harvard University. Her dissertation, Congruences Between Modular Forms and Implications for the Hecke Algebra, was supervised by Barry Mazur. At Rochester, she is known for her enthusiastic encouragement and support for incoming students to participate in the mathematics program, which contributed to a tripled number of mathematics majors from 1999 to 2002.
Go to Profile#3557
Donald Kingsbury
#14612
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Donald MacDonald Kingsbury is an American–Canadian science fiction author. Kingsbury taught mathematics at McGill University, Montreal, from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. Bibliography Books Courtship Rite. New York : Simon and Schuster, July 1982. . Published in UK as Geta.The Moon Goddess and the Son. New York : Baen Books, December 1986. . Psychohistorical Crisis. New York : Tor Books, December 2001. . The Finger Pointing Solward has been awaited ever since the publication of Courtship Rite. Kingsbury has never finished the story, noting as far back as September 1982 that he was still "polishing" it and as recently as his self-supplied Readercon biography in July 2006.
Go to Profile#3558
Jean-Marie De Koninck
#57278
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jean-Marie De Koninck, is a Canadian mathematician. He has served as a professor at Université Laval since 1972 and is the creator of the road safety program Opération Nez Rouge, or "Red Nose Operation", a system preventing people from drinking and driving.
Go to Profile#3559
Martin Scharlemann
#58007
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martin George Scharlemann is an American topologist who is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Robion Kirby in 1974.
Go to Profile#3560
Anne Bourlioux
#50410
Overall Influence
Anne Bourlioux is a Canadian mathematician whose research involves the numerical simulation of turbulent combustion. She is a winner of the Richard C. DiPrima Prize, and a professor of mathematics and statistics at the Université de Montréal.
Go to Profile#3561
Ginestra Bianconi
#60106
Overall Influence
Ginestra Bianconi is a network scientist and mathematical physicist, known for her work on statistical mechanics, network theory, multilayer and higher-order networks, and in particular for the Bianconi–Barabási model of growing of complex networks and for the Bose–Einstein condensation in complex networks. She is a professor of applied mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Physics: Complexity.
Go to Profile#3562
William Lawrence Kocay
#60567
Overall Influence
William Lawrence Kocay is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at St. Paul's College of the University of Manitoba and a graph theorist. He is known for his work in graph algorithms and the reconstruction conjecture and is affectionately referred to as "Wild Bill" by his students. Bill Kocay is a former managing editor of Ars Combinatoria, a Canadian journal of combinatorial mathematics, is a founding fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.
Go to Profile#3563
Robert Riley
#69216
Overall Influence
1935 - 2000 (65 years)
Robert F. Riley was an American mathematician. He is known for his work in low-dimensional topology using computational tools and hyperbolic geometry, being one of the inspirations for William Thurston's later breakthroughs in 3-dimensional topology.
Go to Profile#3564
Xavier Fernique
#35682
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Xavier Fernique was a mathematician, noted mostly for his contributions to the theory of stochastic processes. Fernique's theorem, a result on the integrability of Gaussian measures, is named after him.
Go to Profile#3565
Wallace Smith Martindale
#59895
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Wallace Smith Martindale III is an American mathematician, known for Martindale's Theorem and the Martindale ring of quotients introduced in the proof of the theorem. His 1969 paper generalizes Posner's theorem and a theorem of Amitsur and gives an independent, unified proof of the two theorems.
Go to Profile#3566
Jacqui Ramagge
#60583
Overall Influence
Jacqui Ramagge is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science at Durham University and Honorary Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sydney. She was born in London, emigrated to Australia in 1991, and returned to the UK to take up the position at Durham University in 2020.
Go to Profile#3567
Wotao Yin
#59935
Overall Influence
Wotao Yin is an applied mathematician and professor of Mathematics department at the University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. He currently conducts research in optimization, parallel and distributed computing, and inverse problems.
Go to Profile#3568
Frédérique Lenger
#58373
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Frédérique Papy-Lenger was a Belgian mathematician and mathematics educator active in the New Math movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Early life and education Frédérique Lenger was born on August 12, 1921, in Arlon, Belgium, one of three daughters of a lawyer. After studying classics in the Lycée Royal d’Arlon, she studied for a licentiate in mathematics at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 1939 to 1943. The University officially closed in 1941 to prevent its takeover by the German occupation, and her studies continued underground.
Go to Profile#3569
Janet Beery
#52792
Overall Influence
Janet Lynn Beery is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics who serves as a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Redlands. She also served as the editor-in-chief of mathematics history journal Convergence from 2009 to 2019, and has authored a book on the mathematics of Thomas Harriot.
Go to Profile#3570
Liliana Borcea
#55607
Overall Influence
Liliana Borcea is the Peter Field Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in scientific computing and applied mathematics, including the scattering and transport of electromagnetic waves.
Go to Profile#3571
Sherry Li
#38216
Overall Influence
Xiaoye Sherry Li is a researcher in numerical methods at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she works as a senior scientist. She is responsible there for the SuperLU package, a high-performance parallel system for solving sparse systems of linear equations by using their LU decomposition. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she heads the Scalable Solvers Group.
Go to Profile#3572
Alan Frank Beardon
#75069
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Alan Frank Beardon is a British mathematician. Education and career Beardon obtained his doctorate at Imperial College London in 1964, supervised by Walter Hayman. In 1970 he was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, with promotions to readership and professorship until his retirement in 2007. He is an emeritus fellow of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3573
Lorraine Foster
#50970
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lorraine Lois Foster is an American mathematician. In 1964 she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from California Institute of Technology. Her thesis advisor at Caltech was Olga Taussky-Todd. Foster's Erdos number is 2.
Go to Profile#3574
Joseph Hilbe
#28689
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Joseph Michael Hilbe was an American statistician and philosopher, founding President of the International Astrostatistics Association and one of the most prolific authors of books on statistical modeling in the early twenty-first century. Hilbe was an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute , for which he founded the ISI astrostatistics committee in 2009. Hilbe was also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Full Member of the American Astronomical Society.
Go to Profile#3575
Abraham Ziv
#45394
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Abraham Ziv was an Israeli mathematician, known for his contributions to the Zero-sum problem as one of the discoverers of the Erdős–Ginzburg–Ziv theorem. Biography Abraham Zubkowski was born in Avihayil to Haim and Zila Zubkovski. In the 1950s, he changed his surname as part of the widespread Hebraization of surnames trend. He studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics, after receiving his master's degree from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#3576
Sixto Ríos
#67971
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Sixto Ríos García , was a Spanish mathematician, known as the father of Spanish statistics. Biography The son of José María Ríos Moreiro and Maria Cristina Garcia Martin, he was taught by his parents, who were teachers. When the family moved to Madrid, he attended St. Maurice School and the IES San Isidro, being always the valedictorian.
Go to Profile#3577
Anne Broadbent
#53440
Overall Influence
Anne Lise Broadbent is a mathematician at the University of Ottawa who won the 2016 Aisenstadt Prize for her research in quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum information. Early life and education Broadbent specialised in music at De La Salle High School in Ottawa, graduating in 1997. Her interest in science led her to major in mathematics for her undergraduate degree.
Go to Profile#3578
Cynthia A. Phillips
#55469
Overall Influence
Cynthia A. Phillips is a researcher at the Center for Computing Research of Sandia National Laboratories, known for her work in combinatorial optimization. Education Phillips earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1985, and a doctorate in computer science from MIT in 1990. Her dissertation, on parallel algorithms, was supervised by Charles Leiserson.
Go to Profile#3579
Gerald Meehl
#75450
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gerald Allen "Jerry" Meehl is a climate scientist who has been a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research since 2001. Early life and education Meehl, who was born in Denver, is the son of a family of wheat farmers from Hudson. It was the conversations Meehl had with his father about the future weather, and how that might affect their crops, that sparked his interest in the weather and climate. He received his B.S. , M.S., and PhD from the University of Colorado.
Go to Profile#3580
Rachel Ward
#41523
Overall Influence
Rachel Ward is an American applied mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin. She is known for work on machine learning, optimization, and signal processing. At the University of Texas, she is W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Distinguished Professor in Computational Engineering and Sciences—Data Science, and professor of mathematics.
Go to Profile#3582
Éric Leichtnam
#77770
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Éric Leichtnam is director of research at the CNRS at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. His fields of interest are noncommutative geometry, ergodic theory, Dirichlet problem, non-commutative residue.
Go to Profile#3583
Suzan Kahramaner
#39897
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Suzan Kahramaner was one of the first female mathematicians in Turkish academia. Education Kahramaner was born in Üsküdar, in Istanbul. Her mother was Müzeyyen Hanım, the daughter of Halep's district treasurer, and her father was surgeon Dr. Rifki Osman Bey. She studied at the Moda Nümune Inas primary school between 1919 and 1924. After enrolling in Notre Dame De Sion in 1924, she completed her secondary education and obtained her French bachelor's degree in 1934.
Go to Profile#3584
Christine Proust
#53123
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Christine Proust is a French historian of mathematics and Assyriologist known for her research on Babylonian mathematics. She is a senior researcher at the SPHERE joint team of CNRS and Paris Diderot University, where she and Agathe Keller are co-directors of the SAW project headed by Karine Chemla .
Go to Profile#3585
Jessica Utts
#24461
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jessica Utts is a parapsychologist and statistics professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is known for her textbooks on statistics and her investigation into remote viewing. Statistics education In 2003, Utts published an article in American Statistician, a journal published by the American Statistical Association, calling for significant changes to collegiate level statistics education. In the article she argued that curricula do a fine job of covering the mathematical side of statistics, but do a poor job of teaching students the skills necessary to properly interpret statistical results in scientific studies.
Go to Profile#3586
Maurice A. de Gosson
#55039
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Maurice A. de Gosson , is an Austrian mathematician and mathematical physicist, born in 1948 in Berlin. He is currently a Senior Researcher at the Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group of the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#3587
Petar V. Kokotovic
#30222
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Petar V. Kokotovic is professor emeritus in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He has made contributions in the areas of adaptive control, singular perturbation techniques, and nonlinear control especially the backstepping stabilization method.
Go to Profile#3588
Kathryn Roeder
#60402
Overall Influence
Kathryn M. Roeder is an American statistician known for her development of statistical methods to uncover the genetic basis of complex disease and her contributions to mixture models, semiparametric inference, and multiple testing. Roeder holds positions as professor of statistics and professor of computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads a project focused on discovering genes associated with autism.
Go to Profile#3589
Helen Byrne
#61324
Overall Influence
Helen M. Byrne is a mathematician based at the University of Oxford. She is Professor of Mathematical Biology in the university's Mathematical Institute and a Professorial Fellow in Mathematics at Keble College. Her work involves developing mathematical models to describe biomedical systems including tumours. She was awarded the 2019 Society for Mathematical Biology Leah Edelstein-Keshet Prize for exceptional scientific achievements and for mentoring other scientists and was appointed a Fellow of the Society in 2021.
Go to Profile#3590
Soottawat Benjakul
#77857
Overall Influence
#3591
Anna Seigal
#49891
Overall Influence
Anna Seigal is a British mathematician who conducts research in applied algebraic geometry at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. She was awarded the 2020 SIAM Richard C. DiPrima Prize and the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#3592
Rhonda Hatcher
#64230
Overall Influence
Rhonda Lee Hatcher is an American mathematician whose research topics include analytic number theory and L-functions as well as topics in recreational mathematics. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Texas Christian University.
Go to Profile#3593
Peter B. Gilkey
#66128
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Peter Belden Gilkey is an American mathematician, working in differential geometry and global analysis. Gilkey graduated from Yale University with a master 's degree in 1967 and received a doctoral degree in 1972 from the Harvard University under the supervision of Louis Nirenberg . From 1971 to 1972 he was an instructor in computer science at the New York University and from 1972 to 1974 was a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1974 to 1980 he was assistant professor at Princeton University, he spent one year at U.S.C., and in 1981 he became associate professor and in ...
Go to Profile#3594
Gábor Halász
#76951
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Gábor Halász is a Hungarian mathematician. He specialised in number theory and mathematical analysis, especially in analytic number theory. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Since 1985, he is professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Go to Profile#3595
Colva Roney-Dougal
#62350
Overall Influence
Colva Mary Roney-Dougal is a British mathematician specializing in group theory and computational algebra. She is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra at St Andrews. She is also known for her popularization of mathematics on BBC radio shows, including appearances on In Our Time about the mathematics of Emmy Noether and Pierre-Simon Laplace and on The Infinite Monkey Cage about the nature of infinity and numbers in the real world.
Go to Profile#3596
David Goss
#77970
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
David Mark Goss was a mathematician, a professor in the department of mathematics at Ohio State University, and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Number Theory. He received his B.S. in mathematics in 1973 from University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in 1977 from Harvard University under the supervision of Barry Mazur; prior to Ohio State he held positions at Princeton University, Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and Brandeis University. He worked on function fields and introduced the Goss zeta function.
Go to Profile#3597
Frank J. Ayres
#77811
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Frank Ayres, Jr. was a mathematics professor, best known as an author for the popular Schaum's Outlines. Biography Ayres earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Washington College, Maryland and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago. He taught during 1921–4 at Ogden College and another four years at Texas A&M before coming to Dickinson College in 1928. He was promoted to associate professor in June, 1935. In 1943 he was named the Susan Powers Hoffman Professor of Mathematics. From 1938 until his retirement in June, 1958, he served as chairman of the mathematics department.
Go to Profile#3598
Richard L. Thompson
#14374
Overall Influence
1947 - 2008 (61 years)
Richard Leslie Thompson, also known as Sadaputa Dasa , was an American mathematician, author and Gaudiya Vaishnava religious figure. Historian Meera Nanda described him as a driving intellectual force of 'Vedic creationism' as co-author of Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race , a work that has attracted significant criticism from the scientific community. Thompson also published several books and articles on the relationship between religion and science, Hindu cosmology and astronomy. He was a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and a founding ...
Go to Profile#3599
Panayotis G. Kevrekidis
#61925
Overall Influence
Panayotis G. Kevrekidis is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kevrekidis earned his B.Sc. in physics in 1996 from the University of Athens. He obtained his M.S. in 1998 and Ph.D. in 2000 from Rutgers University, the latter under the joint supervision of Joel Lebowitz and Panos G. Georgopoulos. His thesis was entitled “Lattice Dynamics of Solitary Wave Excitations”. He then assumed a post-doctoral position split between the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics of Princeton University and the Theoretical Division and the Center for Nonlinear Studies of Los Alamos National Laboratory .
Go to Profile#3600
Lida Barrett
#65687
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Lida Baker Kittrell Barrett was an American mathematics professor and administrator. She served on many committees and boards and contributed to mathematics, mathematics education, and increasing the participation of members of underrepresented groups in mathematics. She served as president of the Mathematical Association of America in 1989 and 1990.
Go to Profile