The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#3601
Steffen Lauritzen
#33929
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Steffen Lilholt Lauritzen FRS is former Head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and currently Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Copenhagen. He is a leading proponent of mathematical statistics and graphical models.
Go to Profile#3602
Moss Sweedler
#66959
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Moss Eisenberg Sweedler is an American mathematician, known for Sweedler's Hopf algebra, Sweedler's notation, measuring coalgebras, and his proof, with Harry Prince Allen, of a conjecture of Nathan Jacobson.
Go to Profile#3603
George Stanley Rushbrooke
#24866
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Prof George Stanley Rushbrooke FRS FRSE was a 20th century British theoretical physicist. Biography Rushbrooke was born in Willenhall, one of twin sons of George Henry Rushbrooke, baker and confectioner, and Frances Isabel . After attending a small private school he moved, at age 10, to Wolverhampton Grammar School, from where he gained a State Scholarship and passed the entrance scholarship exam to St John's College, Cambridge. He entered the college in October 1933, where he read mathematics and gained Firsts throughout his examinations. He and Fred Hoyle were jointly awarded the Mayhew P...
Go to Profile#3604
Roderick J. A. Little
#78103
Overall Influence
#3605
Anne Gelb
#57990
Overall Influence
Anne E. Gelb is a mathematician interested in numerical analysis, partial differential equations and Fourier analysis of images. She is John G. Kemeny Parents Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#3606
Judith D. Sally
#67897
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Judith D. Sally is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Northwestern University. Her research is in commutative algebra, particularly in the study of Noetherian local rings and graded rings. Life and education Judith Donovan was born to Dr. and Mrs. Edward J. Donovan in Manhattan, New York in 1937. She finished high school at the Convent of Sacred Heart in New York and pursued her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, earning her bachelor's degree in 1958. After graduating from Barnard, she began graduate studies in mathematics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. At Brandeis, she met Paul J.
Go to Profile#3607
Wilhelm Schlag
#61724
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Wilhelm Schlag is a mathematician and Phillips Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. He is known for his work in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Career Schlag obtained his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1996 under the supervision of Thomas Wolff. Since then, he has held positions at Princeton University, California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago where he was H. J. Livingston Professor of Mathematics before moving to Yale University in 2018. He has done extensive work in Fourier Analysis, Spectral theory and dispersive partial differential equations.
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Moedomo Soedigdomarto
#73091
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Moedomo Soedigdomarto, also spelled Mudomo Sudigdomarto, was an Indonesian mathematician, educator and professor at the Bandung Institute of Technology, of which he was rektor. Soedigdomarto was one of the first Indonesians to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics, which he earned from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with a dissertation titled "A Representation Theory for the Laplace Transform of Vector-Valued Functions", in 1959 at the age of 32, under the orientation of Robert Gardner Bartle.
Go to Profile#3609
Gábor N. Sárközy
#65482
Overall Influence
Gábor N. Sárközy, also known as Gabor Sarkozy, is a Hungarian-American mathematician, the son of noted mathematician András Sárközy. He is currently on faculty of the Computer Science Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA, United States and is also a senior research fellow at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#3610
Dragoslav Mitrinović
#38773
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Dragoslav S. Mitrinović was a Serbian mathematician known for his work in differential equations, functional equations, complex analysis. He authored near 300 scientific journal papers and more than twelve books in his area.
Go to Profile#3611
Arjan van der Schaft
#71884
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Abraham Jan van der Schaft is emeritus professor of systems and control theory at the Bernoulli Institute of Mathematics Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen. He is notable for his contributions to network modelling and control of complex physical systems, specifically in the areas of Port-Hamiltonian systems, passivity-based control, nonlinear H∞ control, hybrid systems, and port-thermodynamical systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Go to Profile#3612
Uwe Jannsen
#73166
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Uwe Jannsen is a German mathematician, specializing in algebra, algebraic number theory, and algebraic geometry. Education and career Born in Meddewade, Jannsen studied mathematics and physics at the University of Hamburg with Diplom in mathematics in 1978 and with Promotion in 1980 under Helmut Brückner and Jürgen Neukirch with thesis Über Galoisgruppen lokaler Körper . In the academic year 1983–1984 he was a postdoc at Harvard University. From 1980 to 1989 he was an assistant and then docent at the University of Regensburg, where he received in 1988 his habilitation. From 1989 to 1991 he held a research professorship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn.
Go to Profile#3613
Peter Landrock
#28080
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Landrock is a Danish cryptographer and mathematician. He is known for his contributions to data encryption methods and codes. Landrock has been active since the 1970s as research scientist and faculty member for Cambridge University and the University of Aarhus and others, and was active for Microsoft and Cryptomathic. He has been visiting professor at Oxford University, Leuven University and Princeton University.
Go to Profile#3614
Michelle Schatzman
#44088
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Michelle Schatzman was a French mathematician, specializing in applied mathematics, who combined research as a CNRS research director and teaching as a professor at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1.
Go to Profile#3615
John D. Storey
#44391
Overall Influence
John D. Storey is the William R. Harman '63 and Mary-Love Harman Professor in Genomics at Princeton University. His research is focused on statistical inference of high-dimensional data, particularly genomic data. Storey was the founding director of the Princeton University Center for Statistics and Machine Learning.
Go to Profile#3616
Howard Rasmussen
#78310
Overall Influence
#3617
Edward Barbeau
#72841
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Edward Barbeau is a Canadian mathematician and a Canadian Mathematical Educator. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics. Awards Fellowship of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.David Hilbert Award from the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions.Adrien Pouliot Award from the Canadian Mathematical Society.Inaugural fellow of the Canadian Mathematical Society, 2018
Go to Profile#3618
David M. Jackson
#46770
Overall Influence
David M.R. Jackson is a professor at the University of Waterloo in the department of combinatorics and optimization. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1969. Jackson has been responsible for many developments in enumerative combinatorics in his career, as well as being a mathematical consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary Project.
Go to Profile#3619
Bruno Nachtergaele
#68163
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Bruno Leo Zulma Nachtergaele is a Belgian mathematical physicist. Nachtergaele studied physics with a licentiate degree in 1984 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. There he was awarded in 1987 a doctorate in theoretical physics under André Verbeure with dissertation Exacte resultaten voor het spin-Boson model , written in Dutch. From 1989 to 1990 Nachtergaele was an instructor at the University of Chile. At Princeton University, where he worked with Elliott Lieb, Nachtergaele was from 1991 to 1993 an instructor and from 1993 to 1996 an assistant professor of physics. At the University of...
Go to Profile#3620
Lynn Batten
#66522
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lynn Margaret Batten was a Canadian-Australian mathematician known for her books about finite geometry and cryptography, and for her research on the classification of malware. Education and career Batten earned her Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in 1977. Her dissertation was D-Partition Geometries.
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Josef Stoer
#30467
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Josef Stoer is a German mathematician specializing in numerical analysis and professor emeritus of the Institut für Mathematik of Universität Würzburg. He was born in Meschede, and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz under Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson. He has advised over 20 doctoral students.
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Irène Gijbels
#63596
Overall Influence
Irène Gijbels is a mathematical statistician at KU Leuven in Belgium, and an expert on nonparametric statistics. She has also collaborated with TopSportLab, a KU Leuven spin-off, on software for risk assessment of sports injuries.
Go to Profile#3623
Fritz Herzog
#45524
Overall Influence
1902 - 2001 (99 years)
Fritz Herzog was an American mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis and power series. He was born in Germany and studied at the University of Berlin until 1934 when he moved to United States. He received his Ph.D. degree at Columbia University on a thesis entitled Systems of Algebraic Mixed Difference Equations advised by Joseph Ritt . Herzog was an electrical engineering research associate at Cornell University , working with Michel G. Malti on dynamo research. Together they solved an important electric power problem on balancing dynamos, which had remained open since the days of Michael Faraday a century before.
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Hélène Frankowska
#61950
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Hélène Frankowska, or Halina Frankowska is a Polish and French mathematician known for her research in control theory and set-valued analysis. She is a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and works in the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu of Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Go to Profile#3625
Jacques Vanneste
#63956
Overall Influence
Jacques Vanneste is a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, whose main research area is fluid dynamics. His particular research interest is in analytic methods for handling systems with dynamics on two distinct time or length scales. This is relevant, for example, for the interaction between weather and ocean circulation, where fast inertial waves can be generated by slow underlying flows; see for example his work on the tropopause, and his most-cited paper. He is also interested in the dynamics of stirring.
Go to Profile#3626
Craige Schensted
#65146
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Craige Schensted , who formally changed his name to Ea Ea, was an American physicist and mathematician who first formulated the insertion algorithm that defines the Robinson–Schensted correspondence. Under a different form, that correspondence had earlier been described by Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson in 1938, but it is due to the Schensted insertion algorithm that the correspondence has become widely known in combinatorics. Schensted also designed several board games including *Star, Star, and Y. In 1995, he changed his name to Ea, the Babylonian name for the Sumerian god Enki, and in 1999 changed it to Ea Ea.
Go to Profile#3627
Claudia Sagastizábal
#60529
Overall Influence
Claudia Alejandra Sagastizábal is an applied mathematician known for her research in convex optimization and energy management, and for her co-authorship of the book Numerical Optimization: Theoretical and Practical Aspects. She is a researcher at the University of Campinas in Brazil. Since 2015 she has been editor-in-chief of the journal Set-Valued and Variational Analysis.
Go to Profile#3628
Christian Genest
#63153
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Christian Genest is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University , where he holds a Canada Research Chair. He is the author of numerous research papers in multivariate analysis, nonparametric statistics, extreme-value theory, and multiple-criteria decision analysis.
Go to Profile#3629
Anna Mazzucato
#66476
Overall Influence
Anna Laura Mazzucato is a professor of mathematics, distinguished senior scholar, and associate head of the mathematics department at Pennsylvania State University. Her mathematical research involves functional analysis, function spaces, partial differential equations, and their applications in fluid mechanics and elasticity.
Go to Profile#3630
A. Wayne Wymore
#29395
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Albert Wayne Wymore was an American mathematician, systems engineer, Professor Emeritus of Systems and Industrial Engineering of the University of Arizona, and one of the founding fathers of systems engineering.
Go to Profile#3631
Clàudia Valls
#66290
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Clàudia Valls Anglés is a mathematician and an expert in dynamical systems. She is an associate professor in the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Education Valls completed a doctorate at the University of Barcelona in 1999. Her dissertation, The Classical Arnold Example of Diffusion with Two Equal Parameters, was supervised by .
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Jörg-Rüdiger Sack
#41467
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jörg-Rüdiger Wolfgang Sack is a professor of computer science at Carleton University, where he is Chancellor's Professor. </ref> Sack received a master's degree from the University of Bonn in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1984 from McGill University, under the supervision of Godfried Toussaint. He is co-editor-in-chief and executive editor of the journal Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, co-editor of the Handbook of Computational Geometry , and co-editor of the proceedings of the biennial Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium . He was a co-founding editor-in-chief of the open access Journal of Spatial Information Science but is no longer an editor there.
Go to Profile#3633
Nanny Wermuth
#52859
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nanny Wermuth is the Professor emerita of Statistics, Chalmers University of Technology/University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are Multivariate statistical models and their properties, especially graphical Markov models, as well as their applications in the life sciences and in the natural sciences.
Go to Profile#3634
Boris Moishezon
#67873
Overall Influence
1937 - 1993 (56 years)
Boris Gershevich Moishezon was a Soviet mathematician. He left the Soviet Union in 1972 for Tel Aviv, and in 1977 moved to Columbia University, where he was a professor of mathematics until his death sixteen years later. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1983.
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Rachel Whiteread
#5078
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Dame Rachel Whiteread is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993. Whiteread was one of the Young British Artists who exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997. Among her most renowned works are House, a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house; the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, resembling the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards; and Untitled Monument, her resin sculpture for the empty fourth plinth in London's...
Go to Profile#3636
Edwin R. Fisher
#78798
Overall Influence
#3637
Juan J. Manfredi
#71705
Overall Influence
Juan J. Manfredi is a [Spanish] mathematician. From 2010 to 2017 he served as vice provost for undergraduate studies at University of Pittsburgh. Prior to that, he served as an associate dean and professor of mathematics. He received his bachelor's degree from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1979 and his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1986. His scholarly work focuses on nonlinear partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#3638
William Beckner
#69409
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William Beckner is an American mathematician, known for his work in harmonic analysis, especially geometric inequalities. He is the Paul V. Montgomery Centennial Memorial Professor in Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#3639
Harald Bergström
#63332
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Harald Bergström was a Swedish mathematician, specializing in probability theory. Education and career Harald Bergström studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Uppsala University and received in 1931 his master's degree. From 1932 to 1934 he taught at secondary schools and then worked as a research assistant at the Uppsala University. There he received his Ph.D. in 1938 and taught until 1945.
Go to Profile#3640
Phoolan Prasad
#69051
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Phoolan Prasad is an Indian mathematician who specialised in Partial differential equations, fluid mechanics. He was awarded in 1983 the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the mathematical sciences category. He is Fellow of all Indian Science Academies: The National Academy of Sciences, India , Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy .
Go to Profile#3641
Christina Goldschmidt
#33309
Overall Influence
Christina Anna Goldschmidt is a British probabilist known for her work in probability theory including coalescent theory, random minimum spanning trees, and the theory of random graphs. She is professor of probability in the department of statistics, University of Oxford and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
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David Wolfe
#35487
Overall Influence
David Wolfe is a mathematician and amateur Go player. Education and career Wolfe graduated from Cornell University in 1985, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, with a dissertation Mathematics of Go: Chilling Corridors combining both subjects and supervised by Elwyn Berlekamp.
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Vladimir Andrunakievich
#61947
Overall Influence
1917 - 1997 (80 years)
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Andrunakievich was a Soviet and Moldovan mathematician, known for his work in abstract algebra. He was a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences , academician and vice-president of the Moldavian Soviet Academy of Sciences. Laureate of the State Prize of the Moldavian SSR .
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Robert Gentleman
#9026
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Robert Clifford Gentleman is a Canadian statistician and bioinformatician who is currently the founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously the vice president of computational biology at 23andMe. Gentleman is recognized, along with Ross Ihaka, as one of the originators of the R programming language and the Bioconductor project.
Go to Profile#3645
Yuri Petunin
#78908
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Yuri Ivanovich Petunin was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician. Petunin was born in the city of Michurinsk on September 30, 1937. After graduating from the Tambov State Pedagogical Institute he began his studies at Voronezh State University under the supervision of S.G Krein. He completed his postgraduate studies in 1962, and in 1968 he received his Doctor of Science Degree, the highest scientific degree awarded in the Soviet Union. In 1970 he joined the faculty of the computational mathematics department at Kyiv State University.
Go to Profile#3646
Rafail Ostrovsky
#30238
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Rafail Ostrovsky is a distinguished professor of computer science and mathematics at UCLA and a well-known researcher in algorithms and cryptography. Biography Rafail Ostrovsky received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1992.
Go to Profile#3647
Alexander A. Voronov
#61780
Overall Influence
Alexander A. Voronov is a Russian-American mathematician specializing in mathematical physics, algebraic topology, and algebraic geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota and a Visiting Senior Scientist at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.
Go to Profile#3648
Nira Dyn
#63423
Overall Influence
Nira Dyn is an Israeli mathematician who studied geometric modeling, subdivision surfaces, approximation theory, and image compression. She is a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and has been called a "pioneer and leading researcher in the subdivision community".
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Alexander Gorban
#35589
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alexander Nikolaevich Gorban is a scientist of Russian origin, working in the United Kingdom. He is a professor at the University of Leicester, and director of its Mathematical Modeling Centre. Gorban has contributed to many areas of fundamental and applied science, including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, machine learning and mathematical biology.
Go to Profile#3650
Jing-Rebecca Li
#62296
Overall Influence
Jing-Rebecca Li is an applied mathematician known for her work on magnetic resonance imaging and Lyapunov equations. She is a researcher with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation , at their Saclay research center.
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