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,

#3901

Donald A. Dawson

#59054
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Donald Andrew Dawson is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in probability. Education and career Dawson received in 1958 his bachelor's degree and in 1959 his master's degree from McGill University and in 1963 his PhD from MIT under Henry McKean with thesis Constructions of Diffusions with Specified Mean Hitting Times and Hitting Probabilities. In 1962/63 he was an engineer in the aerospace department of Raytheon. At McGill University he became in 1963 an assistant professor and in 1967 an associate professor. At Carleton University he became in 1970 an associate professor and in 1971 a pr...
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#3902

Laura Gardini

#52198
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Laura Gardini is an Italian mathematician who studies chaos in dynamical systems, with applications in mathematical finance. She is professor in mathematics for economic applications at the University of Urbino.
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#3903

Anne Greenbaum

#73268
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Anne Greenbaum is an American applied mathematician and professor at the University of Washington. She was named a SIAM Fellow in 2015 "for contributions to theoretical and numerical linear algebra". She has written graduate and undergraduate textbooks on numerical methods.
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#3904

George Seligman

#74078
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
George Benham Seligman is an American mathematician who works on Lie algebras, especially semi-simple Lie algebras. Biography Seligman received his bachelor's degree in 1950 from the University of Rochester and his PhD in 1954 from Yale University under Nathan Jacobson with thesis Lie algebras of prime characteristic. After he received his PhD he was a Henry Burchard Fine Instructor at Princeton University from 1954–1956. In 1956 he became an instructor and from 1965 a full professor at Yale, where he was chair of the mathematics department from 1974 to 1977.
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#3905

Bruno Courcelle

#56189
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Bruno Courcelle is a French mathematician and computer scientist, best known for Courcelle's theorem in graph theory. Life Courcelle earned his Ph.D. in 1976 from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, then called IRIA, under the supervision of Maurice Nivat. He then joined the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique at the University of Bordeaux 1, where he remained for the rest of his career. He has been a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2007.
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#3906

Anna Romanowska

#70249
Overall Influence
Anna B. Romanowska is a Polish mathematician specializing in abstract algebra. She is professor emeritus of algebra and combinatorics at the Warsaw University of Technology, and was the first convenor of European Women in Mathematics.
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#3907

Marc G. Genton

#40302
Overall Influence
Marc G. Genton, is currently a Distinguished Professor of Statistics with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, , Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is known as a specialist in Spatio-Temporal Statistics, Data Science and their applications in geophysics, climate science, and marine science. The International Association for Mathematical Geosciences awarded him the Georges Matheron Lectureship in 2020. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association , Elected member to the International Statistical Institute , Fellow member of the Royal Statistical Society , Fellow of the Inst...
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#3908

Edward Bierstone

#75244
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Edward Bierstone is a Canadian mathematician at the University of Toronto who specializes in singularity theory, analytic geometry, and differential analysis. Education and career He received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 1972. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 1973. He served as the Director of the Fields Institute from 2009 to 2013.
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#3909

Robert J. Elliott

#55309
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Robert James Elliott is a British-Canadian mathematician, known for his contributions to control theory, game theory, stochastic processes and mathematical finance. He was schooled at Swanwick Hall Grammar School in Swanwick, Derbyshire and studied mathematics in which he earn a B.A. and M.A. at the University of Oxford, as well as a Ph.D and Sc.D. from the University of Cambridge.
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#3910

Neil J. Risch

#82768
Overall Influence
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#3911

Eric Anders Carlen

#75354
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Eric Anders Carlen is a mathematician who is a professor at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2016, for "contributions to functional analysis, mathematical physics, and probability".
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#3912

Joan Hutchinson

#71361
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Joan Prince Hutchinson is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College. Education Joan Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; her father was a demographer and university professor, and her mother a mathematics teacher at the Baldwin School, which Joan also attended. She studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1967 summa cum laude with an honors paper directed by Prof. Alice Dickinson. After graduation she worked as a computer programmer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and at the Harvard University Computing Center then studied mathematics at the University of Warwick in Coventry England.
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#3913

Aimee Johnson

#49091
Overall Influence
Aimee Sue Anastasia Johnson is an American mathematician who works in dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at Swarthmore College, the winner of the George Pólya Award, and the co-author of the book Discovering Discrete Dynamical Systems.
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#3914

Mary Schaps

#30552
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Mary Elizabeth Schaps , also known as Malka Elisheva Schaps, is an Israeli-American mathematician. She is Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences at Bar Ilan University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has published in deformation theory, group theory, and representation theory. She is also a writer, authoring several novels under the pseudonym Rachel Pomerantz.
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#3915

Ritabrata Munshi

#65781
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Ritabrata Munshi is an Indian mathematician specialising in number theory. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2015 in mathematical science category.
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#3916

Bryna Kra

#73826
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Bryna Rebekah Kra is an American mathematician and Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor at Northwestern University who is on the board of trustees of the American Mathematical Society and was elected the president of American Mathematical Society in 2021. As a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences, Kra has made significant contributions to the structure theory of characteristic factors for multiple ergodic averages. Her academic work centered on dynamical systems and ergodic theory, and uses dynamical methods to address problems in number theory and combin...
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#3917

Richard Nickl

Richard Nickl
#68190
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Richard Nickl is an Austrian mathematician and Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He grew up in Vienna, attended secondary school at the Theresianum there and obtained his academic degrees from the University of Vienna, including a PhD in 2005. He has made contributions to various areas of mathematical statistics; including non-parametric and high-dimensional statistics, empirical process theory, and Bayesian inference for statistical inverse problems and partial differential equations. Jointly with Evarist Giné...
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#3918

Ngamta Thamwattana

#68634
Overall Influence
Ngamta "Natalie" Thamwattana is a Thai mathematician who works in Australia as a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Newcastle . In 2014 she won the J. H. Michell Medal of ANZIAM for her "pioneering contributions in the areas of granular materials and nanotechnology".
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#3919

Maria-Carme Calderer

#74342
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Maria-Carme T. Calderer is a professor of mathematics at University of Minnesota. Her research concerns applied mathematics. Career Calderer received her Ph.D. from Heriot-Watt University in 1980. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications from 1984 to 1987, first as a postdoctoral researcher, and then as a visiting professor. She worked at Penn State from 1989 until 2001, when she joined the faculty of University of Minnesota.
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#3920

Khalida Inayat Noor

Khalida Inayat Noor
#66936
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Khalida Inayat Noor is a Pakistani mathematician who was awarded with Pride of Performance award by the President of Pakistan in 2011. Her research topics include mathematical analysis, variational inequalities, and integral operators.
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#3921

Walter Gottschalk

#53351
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Walter Helbig Gottschalk was an American mathematician, one of the founders of topological dynamics. Biography Gottschalk was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, on November 3, 1918, and moved to Salem, Virginia as a child. His father, Carl Gottschalk, was a German immigrant who worked as a machinist and later owned several small businesses in Salem; his younger brother, Carl W. Gottschalk, became a notable medical researcher.
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#3922

Stephen Halperin

#81026
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
John Stephen Halperin is a Canadian mathematician who deals with differential geometry and algebraic topology. A son of the mathematician Israel Halperin, Stephen Halperin studied at the University of Toronto with a bachelor's degree in 1966 and a master's degree in 1967. He received in 1970 his PhD from Cornell University under the supervision of Hsien Chung Wang with thesis Real Cohomology and Smooth Transformation Groups. He then became an assistant professor and in 1979 a full professor at the University of Toronto.
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#3923

Shrawan Kumar

Shrawan Kumar
#71433
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Shrawan Kumar is the John R. and Louise S. Parker distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written two books: Kac-Moody groups, their flag varieties, and representation theory and Frobenius splitting methods in geometry and representation theory .
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#3924

Rainer Burkard

#60041
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Rainer Ernst Burkard is an Austrian mathematician. His research interests include discrete optimization, graph theory, applied discrete mathematics, and applied number theory. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1967 and received his habilitation from the University of Graz in 1971. From 1973–1981 Rainer Burkard was full professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cologne . Since 1981 Rainer Burkard is full professor with the Graz University of Technology.
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#3925

Márta Svéd

#68941
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Márta Svéd was a Hungarian mathematician who moved to Australia in the 1930s and became a teacher of mathematics at the University of Adelaide. She was 75 years old when she completed her PhD in 1985. She wrote the textbook Journey into Geometries , and won the BH Neumann Award in 1994 for her contributions to mathematics learning in Australia.
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#3926

Lawrence C. Biedenharn

#83046
Overall Influence
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#3927

Daniel Ocone

#78303
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Daniel Leonard Ocone is a Professor in the Mathematics Department at Rutgers University, where he specializes in probability theory and stochastic processes. He obtained his Ph.D. at MIT in 1980 under the supervision of Sanjoy K. Mitter. He is known for the Clark–Ocone theorem in stochastic analysis. The continuous Ocone martingale is also named after him; it is a continuous martingale that is conditionally Gaussian, given its quadratic variation process.
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#3928

Daniele C. Struppa

#21477
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Daniele C. Struppa is an Italian mathematician, academic, and the 13th President of Chapman University in Orange County, California. Prior to assuming the Office of the President, Struppa was Chancellor at Chapman University for nine years and had also served as provost.
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#3929

Ágnes Szendrei

#43429
Overall Influence
Ágnes Szendrei is a Hungarian-American mathematician whose research concerns clones, the congruence lattice problem, and other topics in universal algebra. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the author of the well-cited book Clones in Universal Algebra . In May 2022, Dr. Szendrei was elected as an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; such external memberships are for Hungarian scientists who live outside of Hungary and who have made exceptional contributions to scientific research.
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#3930

Tanya Christiansen

#57807
Overall Influence
Tanya Julie Christiansen is an American mathematician who works in scattering theory and the theory of partial differential equations. She is Luther Marion Defoe Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Missouri.
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#3931

Stephanie van Willigenburg

#70872
Overall Influence
Stephanie van Willigenburg is a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia whose research is in the field of algebraic combinatorics and concerns quasisymmetric functions. Together with James Haglund, Kurt Luoto and Sarah Mason, she introduced the quasisymmetric Schur functions, which form a basis for quasisymmetric functions.
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#3932

Eleanor Jones

#64192
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Eleanor Green Dawley Jones was an American mathematician. She was one of the first African-American women to achieve a Ph.D. in mathematics. Jones worked as a consultant for the development of college mathematics curriculums, and as a speaker at events to encourage women and minorities to pursue careers in science and mathematics.
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#3933

Tim Holt

#32972
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
David Holt CB was a British statistician who was Professor Emeritus of Social Statistics at the University of Southampton. He had been the president of the Royal Statistical Society , the last director of the Central Statistical Office of the United Kingdom, and the first director of the Office for National Statistics .
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#3934

David J. Thomson

#31351
Overall Influence
David J. Thomson is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen's University in Ontario and a Canada Research Chair in statistics and signal processing, formerly a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs. He is a professional engineer in the province of Ontario, a fellow of the IEEE and a chartered statistician. He holds memberships of the Royal Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Statistical Society of Canada and the American Geophysical Union and, in 2009, received a Killam Research Fellowship . In 2010, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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#3935

Aldridge Bousfield

#81612
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Aldridge Knight Bousfield , known as "Pete", was an American mathematician working in algebraic topology, known for the concept of Bousfield localization. Work and life Bousfield obtained both his undergraduate degree and his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis, entitled "Higher Order Suspension Maps for Non-Additive Functors", was written under the supervision of Daniel Kan. He was a lecturer and assistant professor at Brandeis University and moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago where he worked from 1972 to his retirement in 2000.
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#3936

Brigitte Servatius

#72722
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Brigitte Irma Servatius is a mathematician specializing in matroids and structural rigidity. She is a professor of mathematics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and has been the editor-in-chief of the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal since 1999.
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#3937

Muneer Ahmad Rashid

#42304
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Muneer Ahmad Rashid, FPAS , also spelled as Munir Ahmad Rashid, is a Pakistani mathematical physicist and emeritus professor of applied and mathematical physics at the Centre for Advanced Mathematics and Physics of the National University of Sciences and Technology.
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#3938

Willem van Zwet

#68239
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Willem Rutger van Zwet was a Dutch mathematical statistician. He was a professor at Leiden University between 1968 and 1999. Biography Van Zwet was born on 31 March 1934 in Leiden. Van Zwet obtained his doctoral degree in 1964 under the supervision of Jan Hemelrijk at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis titled "Convex Transformations of Random Variables". After that, he worked at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, and became a lector of statistics at Leiden University in 1964 and was named professor in 1968. He retired in 1999.
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#3939

Chantal David

#72862
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Chantal David is a French Canadian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Concordia University. Her interests include analytic number theory, arithmetic statistics, and random matrix theory, and she has shown interest in elliptic curves and Drinfeld modules. She is the 2013 winner of the Krieger–Nelson Prize, given annually by the Canadian Mathematical Society to an outstanding female researcher in mathematics.
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#3940

Richard Elman

#77973
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Richard Steven Elman is an American mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for his work in algebra. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, under the supervision of Tsit Yuen Lam.
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#3941

David Richeson

#75062
Overall Influence
David S. Richeson is an American mathematician whose interests include the topology of dynamical systems, recreational mathematics, and the history of mathematics. He is a professor of mathematics at Dickinson College, where he holds the John J. & Ann Curley Faculty Chair in the Liberal Arts.
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#3942

Jan S. Hesthaven

Jan S. Hesthaven
#47975
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jan S. Hesthaven is a Danish mathematician, currently Vice President for Academic Affairs at EPFL . He is Professor of Mathematics, holds the Chair of Computational Mathematics and Simulation Science , and was appointed Vice President for Academic Affairs at EPFL . He is particularly known for contributions to the development, analysis and application of high-order accurate computational methods for time-dependent partial differential equations. He has also contributed substantially to the development of reduced order models and the application of neural networks and machine learning techniqu...
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#3943

Donald G. Higman

#76842
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Donald G. Higman was an American mathematician known for his discovery, in collaboration with Charles C. Sims, of the Higman–Sims group. Higman did his undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, and received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under Reinhold Baer. He served on the faculty of mathematics at the University of Michigan from 1956 to 1998.
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#3944

José A. Carrillo

#75293
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
José Antonio Carrillo de la Plata is a Spanish mathematician primarily known for his contributions in applied partial differential equations, numerical analysis, many particle systems and kinetic theory. His works make use of methods from functional analysis, calculus of variations, optimal transport, gradient descent and entropy methods. Currently he is Professor of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford where he started in April 2020. He is also Tutorial Fellow at The Queen's College Oxford in Applied Mathematics. He was previousl...
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#3945

István Gyöngy

#71991
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
István Gyöngy is a Hungarian mathematician working in the fields of stochastic differential equations, stochastic partial differential equations and their applications to nonlinear filtering and stochastic control. Recently, he has focused his attention on numerical analysis and especially accelerated numerical methods, making use of Richardson extrapolation .
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#3946

Lê Thị Thanh Nhàn

#73820
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Lê Thị Thanh Nhàn is a Vietnamese mathematician who is a professor of mathematics and vice rector for the College of Science at Thái Nguyên University. Her research concerns commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.
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#3947

John Pelesko

#37314
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
John A. Pelesko is an American mathematician. He is provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware and a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.
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#3948

Sergei Ivanov

#74786
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Sergei Vladimirovich Ivanov is a leading Russian mathematician working in differential geometry and mathematical physics. Education and career For each of the three years, 1987, 1988, and 1989, Ivanov won a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He studied at the Saint Petersburg State University, where he received his Ph.D. with advisor Yuri Burago. Ivanov has worked for many years at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. There in 2009 he habilitated .
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#3949

Darinka Dentcheva

Darinka Dentcheva
#53130
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Darinka Dentcheva is a Bulgarian-American mathematician, noted for her contributions to convex analysis, stochastic programming, and risk-averse optimization. Schooling and positions Dentcheva was born in Bulgaria. She received her MsC and PhD degrees in mathematics from Humboldt University of Berlin in 1981 and 1989, respectively. In 2006 she was granted Habilitation from Humboldt University of Berlin, for a dissertation on set-valued analysis.
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#3950

Mihai Nadin

#9476
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Mihai Nadin is a scholar and researcher in electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, semiotics, human-computer interaction , computational design, post-industrial society, and anticipatory systems. His publications on these topics number over 200, and he has lectured throughout the world.
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