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,
#3701
Leslie Cheng
#52356
Overall Influence
Leslie C. Cheng is an American mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis. She holds the Rachel C. Hale Chair in Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Cheng did poorly in calculus in high school, and began her undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr in 1988 intending to study the humanities. However, she was converted to mathematics by faculty member Rhonda Hughes and graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1992. She went to the University of Pittsburgh for graduate study, completing her Ph.D. there in 1998. Her dissertation, Estimates for Oscillatory Integral Operators, was supervis...
Go to Profile#3702
Pilar Bayer
#60636
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pilar Bayer Isant is a Spanish mathematician specializing in number theory. She is a professor emerita in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Barcelona. Education and career Bayer was born in Barcelona on February 13, 1946. Before becoming a mathematician, she was certified as a piano teacher by the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona in 1967.
Go to Profile#3703
Helena C Kraemer
#79834
Overall Influence
#3704
Piotr Kowalski
#28990
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Piotr Kowalski was a Polish artist, sculptor, and architect. Kowalski worked in non-traditional materials including electronic and mechanical devices, neon art, large earth works, explosions and other natural phenomena including plant growth and gravity. Kowalski attended MIT in order to study mathematics, but turned to architecture, and then to sculpture. He immigrated to France as an architect for UNESCO and spent most of the rest of his life in Paris. Along with gallery works, he installed several large outdoors projects.
Go to Profile#3705
Adam Harper
#51525
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Adam Harper is a mathematician specialising in number theory, particularly in analytic, combinatorial and probabilistic number theory, and serving as Professor with University of Warwick, England. Harper was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2019 "for several outstanding contributions to analytic and probabilistic number theory." This annual prize is awarded for outstanding contributions by individuals not exceeding the age of 32 in areas of mathematics influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit has been set at 32 because Ramanujan died at the age of 32 years.
Go to Profile#3706
Dianne P. O'Leary
#46394
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dianne Prost O'Leary is an American mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns scientific computing, computational linear algebra, and the history of scientific computing. She is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the author of the book Scientific Computing with Case Studies .
Go to Profile#3707
Matthias Aschenbrenner
#58184
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Matthias Aschenbrenner is a German-American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics and director of the logic group at the University of Vienna. His research interests include differential algebra and model theory.
Go to Profile#3708
Charles Dunnett
#63762
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Charles William Dunnett was a Canadian statistician. He was the Statistical Society of Canada 1986 Gold Medalist and Professor Emeritus of the Departments of Mathematics, Statistics, Clinical Epidemiology, and Biostatistics of McMaster University.
Go to Profile#3709
Danuta Gierulanka
#52041
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Danuta Gierulanka was a Polish mathematics educator, psychologist, philosopher, and translator. She was associated with Roman Ingarden and known for her work in phenomenology and the philosophy of mathematics.
Go to Profile#3710
Nerida Ellerton
#61706
Overall Influence
Nerida Fay Ellerton is an Australian mathematics educator and historian of mathematics. She is professor of mathematics education at Illinois State University. As well as studying the present state of mathematics education, she and her husband McKenzie A. Clements have researched the history of mathematics education, in the process discovering school worksheets in the Harvard Library that are among the oldest known writings of Abraham Lincoln.
Go to Profile#3711
Mark Hersam
#23228
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Mark Christopher Hersam is a professor of Chemistry and Materials Science Engineering at Northwestern University who, according to the National Science Foundation, has made "major breakthrough[s]" in the field of nanotechnology. He is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award and a 1996 Marshall Scholar. He is also an Executive Editor of ACS Nano. As of October 2023, he has been cited over 68,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#3712
Eva Miranda
#54576
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eva Miranda Galcerán is a Spanish mathematician specializing in dynamical systems, especially in symplectic geometry. Her research includes work with Victor Guillemin on the mathematics underlying the three-body problem in celestial mechanics.
Go to Profile#3713
Boáz Klartag
#75836
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Boáz Klartag is an Israeli mathematician. He currently is a professor at the Weizmann Institute, and prior to that he was a professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics of Tel Aviv University, where he earned his doctorate under the supervision of Vitali Milman. Klartag made contributions in asymptotic geometric analysis and won the 2008 EMS Prize, as well as the 2010 Erdős Prize. He is an editor of the Journal d'Analyse Mathématique.
Go to Profile#3714
John Hinch
#53925
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Edward John Hinch is a Professor of fluid dynamics at the University of Cambridge, and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His research covers a wide range of fluid dynamics, including micro-hydrodynamics, colloidal dispersion, flow through porous media, polymer rheology and non-Newtonian fluid dynamics. He also works on industrial problems involving fluid dynamics, including collaborating with experimental groups in Paris, Marseille and Toulouse. He lectures undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, is a Director of Studies for Trinity College, and supervises PhD students.
Go to Profile#3715
Max A. Viergever
#80010
Overall Influence
#3716
Robert V. Hogg
#38014
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Robert Vincent Hogg was an American statistician and professor of statistics of the University of Iowa. Hogg is known for his widely used textbooks on statistics and on mathematical statistics . Hogg has received recognition for his research on robust and adaptive nonparametric statistics and for his scholarship on total quality management and statistics education.
Go to Profile#3717
Boris Mordukhovich
#58939
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Boris Mordukhovich is an American mathematician recognized for his research in the areas of nonlinear analysis, optimization, and control theory. Mordukhovich is one of the founders of modern variational analysis and generalized differentiation. Currently he is Distinguished University Professor and Lifetime Scholar of the Academy of Scholars at Wayne State University .
Go to Profile#3718
Barbara Fantechi
#74320
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Barbara Fantechi is an Italian mathematician and Professor at the International School for Advanced Studies. Her research area is algebraic geometry. She is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. Early life and education Fantechi received her Laurea from the University of Pisa in 1988, with thesis Secanti di varietà proiettive e applicazioni. Her doctoral advisor was Fabrizio Catanese.
Go to Profile#3719
Irene Fischer
#32728
Overall Influence
1907 - 2009 (102 years)
Irene Kaminka Fischer was an Austrian-American mathematician and geodesist. She was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and inductee of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency Hall of Fame. Fischer became one of two internationally known women scientists in the field of geodesy during the golden age of the Project Mercury and the Apollo program. Her Mercury datum , as well as her work on the lunar parallax, were instrumental in conducting these missions. "In his preface to the ACSM publication, Fischer's former colleague, Bernard Chovit...
Go to Profile#3720
Ailsa Keating
#56640
Overall Influence
Ailsa Macgregor Keating is a French and British mathematician specialising in symplectic geometry and homological mirror symmetry. She is a lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3721
Paul Monsky
#79981
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Paul Monsky is an American mathematician and professor at Brandeis University. After earning a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College, he received his Ph.D. in 1962 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Walter Lewis Baily, Jr. He has introduced the Monsky–Washnitzer cohomology and he has worked intensively on Hilbert–Kunz functions and Hilbert–Kunz multiplicity. In 2007, Monsky and Holger Brenner gave an example showing that tight closure does not commute with localization.
Go to Profile#3722
Concha Gómez
#67095
Overall Influence
Concha Maria Gómez is an American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at Diablo Valley College. Gómez is known for being one of the co-founders of the women's organization The Noetherian Ring at the University of California Berkeley in 1991 while attending as a doctoral student. She is an advocate for diversity in the STEM fields and worked for the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, whose goal was to promote retention of minority students in STEM.
Go to Profile#3723
Gloria Ford Gilmer
#66873
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Gloria C. Gilmer was an American mathematician and educator, notable for being the first African American woman to publish a non-PhD thesis. Early life and education Gilmer was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 28, 1928. She studied for her Bachelor of Science degree at Morgan State University, where she was part of the class of 1949. While there, she published two papers with her supervisor Luna Mishoe; these were the first two research papers published by an African American woman, being published in 1956, under her maiden name of Gloria C. Ford. She was also a student of Clarence Stephe...
Go to Profile#3724
Mara Alagic
#68176
Overall Influence
Mara Alagic is a Serbian mathematics educator and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Graduate Coordinator at Wichita State University.
Go to Profile#3725
Glenn F. Webb
#53542
Overall Influence
Glenn F. Webb is a mathematician based in Vanderbilt University. His research interests include mathematical biology and the use of differential equations to model population dynamics and tumor growth.
Go to Profile#3726
Catherine Greenhill
#66894
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Catherine Greenhill is an Australian mathematician known for her research on random graphs, combinatorial enumeration and Markov chains. She is a professor of mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, and an editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.
Go to Profile#3727
Lesley Ward
#68820
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Lesley Ann Ward is an Australian mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis, complex analysis, and industrial applications of mathematics. She is a professor in the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences of the University of South Australia, director of the Mathematics Clinic at the university, and former chair of the Women in Mathematics Group of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#3728
Caroline Klivans
#67672
Overall Influence
#3729
Kenneth Fredrick Schulz
#80244
Overall Influence
#3730
Ted Bastin
#54080
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Edward William "Ted" Bastin was a physicist and mathematician who held doctorate degrees in mathematics from Queen Mary College, London University and physics from King's College, Cambridge, to which he won an Isaac Newton studentship. For a time, he was visiting fellow at Stanford University, California and a research fellow, King's College, Cambridge, England.
Go to Profile#3731
Günter Pilz
#70099
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Günter Pilz is professor of mathematics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. Until his retirement in 2013 he was the head of the Institute of Algebra. Vita After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and his PhD , Günter Pilz was assistant professor at several institutions: at the department of mathematics of the University of Vienna , at the department of statistics at the University of Technology of Vienna , as research associate at the department of mathematics, University of Arizona, United States and at the department of mathematics at the University of Linz .
Go to Profile#3732
Bettye Anne Case
#68126
Overall Influence
Bettye Anne Busbee Case is Olga Larson Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Florida State University. Her mathematical research concerns complex variables; she has also published on mathematics education and the history of mathematics. She is the editor of the books A Century of Mathematical Meetings and Complexities: Women in Mathematics .
Go to Profile#3733
Semyon Alesker
#75291
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Semyon Alesker is an Israeli mathematician at Tel Aviv University. For his contributions in convex geometry and integral geometry, in particular his work on valuations, he won the EMS Prize in 2000, and the Erdős Prize in 2004.
Go to Profile#3734
Ursula Hamenstädt
#72972
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ursula Hamenstädt is a German mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Bonn. Her primary research subject is differential geometry. Education and career Hamenstädt earned her PhD from the University of Bonn in 1986, under the supervision of Wilhelm Klingenberg. Her dissertation, Zur Theorie der Carnot-Caratheodory Metriken und ihren Anwendungen [The theory of Carnot–Caratheodory metrics and their applications], concerned the theory of sub-Riemannian manifolds.
Go to Profile#3735
Hasibun Naher
#68977
Overall Influence
Hasibun Naher is a Bangladeshi applied mathematics researcher and educator. In February 2018, she was one of five young women from developing countries to receive the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Award. Her research has included the application of mathematics to tsunamis in order to improve predictions of how they develop. She is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at BRAC University, Dhaka.
Go to Profile#3736
David B. Hertz
#15020
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
David Bendel Hertz was an operations research practitioner and academic, known for various contributions to the discipline, and specifically, and more widely, for pioneering the use of Monte Carlo methods in finance. He developed innovative modeling approaches for the solution of complex management issues. His earliest publications added insights to the industrial process of research and development.
Go to Profile#3737
Dragan Marušič
#41131
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dragan Marušič is a Slovene mathematician. Marušič obtained his BSc in technical mathematics from the University of Ljubljana in 1976, and his PhD from the University of Reading in 1981 under the supervision of Crispin Nash-Williams.
Go to Profile#3738
Albrecht Böttcher
#56749
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Albrecht Böttcher is a German mathematician. His field of research is functional analysis. History Böttcher was born in Oberwiesenthal, Saxony, GDR. Between 1971 and 1973, he was in an elite class for mathematics at the Chemnitz University of Technology. In 1973, he won a silver medal at the 15th International Math Olympiad in Moscow. Böttcher studied mathematics from 1975 to 1979 in Chemnitz and then went to Rostov on Don in 1980 to study and earned a PhD there in 1984. After completing his dissertation, The finite section method for the Wiener-Hopf integral operator, he worked as scientist assistance at the university of Chemnitz.
Go to Profile#3739
Jeffery J. Leader
#50722
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jeffery J. Leader is an American academic applied mathematician specializing in numerical analysis. He is a member of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Biography Leader received a B.S. in mathematics; B.S.E.E. in electrical engineering from Syracuse University; Sc.M. ; and Ph.D. from the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University under Philip J. Davis. He has also taught at Harvey Mudd College, the Naval Postgraduate School, the United States Military Academy, and Santa Clara University. He was a distinguished visiting professor of mathematical sciences at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Go to Profile#3740
Shaher Momani
#74158
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Shaher Momani is a Jordanian distinguished professor of applied mathematics and one of the top ten scientists in the world in the field of fractional calculus according to Web of Science several times between 2009 and 2013. he was selected as one of the world's most influential scientific minds according to Thomson Reuters in 2014 and 2015. Momani was also selected by Thomson Reuters as one of the highly cited researchers between 2014 and 2018. Al Momani was honored by King Abdullah II Bin Al Hussein among the Jordanian Stars of Science for his contributions to his field of specialization dur...
Go to Profile#3741
Eva Kallin
#69126
Overall Influence
Eva Marianne Kallin Pohlmann is a professor emerita of mathematics at Brown University. Her research concerns function algebrass, polynomial convexity, and Tarski's axioms for Euclidean geometry. Kallin attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate, and graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1953 and an M.S. in 1956. In 1956–1957, working as a student of Alfred Tarski, Kallin helped simplify Tarski's axioms for the first-order theory of Euclidean geometry, by showing that several of the axioms originally presented by Tarski did not need to be stated as axioms, but could...
Go to Profile#3742
Ursula Martin
#28013
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ursula Hilda Mary Martin is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics. Since 2019, she has served as a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#3743
Andy Magid
#66840
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Andy Roy Magid is an American mathematician. Magid received in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley his bachelor's degree and in 1969 from Northwestern University his PhD under the direction of Daniel Zelinsky with thesis Separable Subalgebras of Commutative Algebras and Other Applications of the Boolean Spectrum. From 1969 to 1972 Magid was a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University. At the University of Oklahoma he was from 1972 to 1974 an assistant professor, from 1974 to 1977 an associate professor, and from 1977 to 2012 a full professor, retiring as professor emeritus in 2012.
Go to Profile#3744
Leland Wilkinson
#15070
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Leland Wilkinson was an American statistician and computer scientist at H2O.ai and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago. Wilkinson developed the SYSTAT statistical package in the early 1980s, sold it to SPSS in 1995, and worked at SPSS for 10 years recruiting and managing the visualization team. He left SPSS in 2008 and became Executive VP of SYSTAT Software Inc. in Chicago. He then served as the VP of Data Visualization at Skytree, Inc and VP of Statistics at Tableau Software before joining H2O.ai. His research focused on scientific visualization and statistical graphics.
Go to Profile#3745
David Gregory Ebin
#80517
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Gregory Ebin is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Ebin received in 1964 from Harvard University his bachelor's degree and in 1967 his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Isadore Singer with thesis On the space of Riemannian metrics. From 1968 to 1969 Ebin was a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He became in 1969 an associate professor and in 1978 a full professor at the Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#3746
Brigitte Vallée
#40998
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Brigitte Vallée is a French mathematician and computer scientist. She entered the École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles in 1970, and received her PhD in 1986 at the University of Caen . Her doctoral advisor was Jacques Stern.
Go to Profile#3747
Geraldine Claudette Darden
#55250
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Geraldine Claudette Darden is an American mathematician. She was the fourteenth African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Early life and education Darden was born in Nansemond County, Virginia. Darden earned a bachelor's degrees in mathematics in 1957 from the Hampton Institute, a historically black institute, and took a teaching position at S.H. Clarke Junior High School in Portsmouth, Virginia. In the summer of 1958, Darden saw an opportunity for aspiring mathematicians created by the launch of Russian satellite Sputnik and ensuing US interest in mathematics and science a yea...
Go to Profile#3748
Joyce Snell
#45699
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
E. Joyce Snell is a British statistician who taught in the mathematics department at Imperial College London. She is known for her work on residuals and ordered categorical data, and for her books on statistics.
Go to Profile#3749
Richard D. Gill
#53321
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Richard David Gill is a British-Dutch mathematician. He has held academic positions in the Netherlands. As a probability theorist and statistician, Gill has researched counting processes. He is also known for his consulting and advocacy on behalf of alleged victims of statistical misrepresentation, including the reversal of the murder conviction of a Dutch nurse who had been jailed for six years.
Go to Profile#3750
Gordana Matic
#69073
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gordana Matic is a Croatian-American mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Georgia. Her research concerns low-dimensional topology and contact geometry. Matic earned her doctorate from the University of Utah in 1986, under the supervision of Ronald J. Stern, and worked as a C.L.E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the University of Georgia faculty.
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