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,
#3951
Jean-Charles Schwartz
#69065
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Jean-Charles Schwartz, born on May 28, 1936, in Paris, is a French neurobiologist, pharmacist and researcher. Husband of Ketty Schwartz, née Gersen and father of Olivier, Marc and Emmanuelle. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences. He developed pitolisant, the first clinically approved antagonist for H3 receptors.
Go to Profile#3952
Mihaela Ignatova
#70809
Overall Influence
Mihaela Ignatova is a Bulgarian mathematician who won the 2020 Sadosky Prize of the Association for Women in Mathematics for her research in mathematical analysis, and in particular in partial differential equations and fluid dynamics.
Go to Profile#3953
Talitha Washington
#52536
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Talitha Washington is an American mathematician and academic who specializes in applied mathematics and STEM education policy. She was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree. Washington became the 26th president of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2023.
Go to Profile#3954
Irene Moroz
#71303
Overall Influence
Irene Margaret Moroz is a British applied mathematician whose research interests include differential equations including the Schrödinger–Newton equation, attractors, synchronization of chaos, and applications to geophysical fluid dynamics, voice analysis, the population dynamics of plankton, and dynamo theory. She is Professor of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics in the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Senior Mathematics Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#3955
Helmut Koch
#74006
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Helmut V. Koch is a German mathematician specializing in number theory. Education and career Koch was born in Potsdam. Koch studied from 1952 to 1957 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From 1957 to 1959 he worked in the semiconductor plant at Teltow. From 1959 he was a member of the Institute for Mathematics of the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, where he received in 1964 his promotion and in 1965 his habilitation. He studied under Hans Reichardt and Igor Shafarevich . The famous "Number Theory" textbook by Shafarevich and Borevich was translated by Koch from Russian into German. Ko...
Go to Profile#3956
Marie Charpentier
#61270
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Jeanne Radegonde Marie Charpentier was a French mathematician. She was the first woman to obtain a doctorate in pure mathematics in France, and the second woman, after Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin, to obtain a faculty position in mathematics at a university in France.
Go to Profile#3957
Moshe Goldberg
#76782
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Moshe Goldberg is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Early life Moshe Goldberg was born and raised in Tel Aviv. His parents, Gad and Rachel Raya Goldberg, immigrated from Poland and Lithuania to Palestine shortly after Hitler became Germany's chancellor in 1933. After completing his undergraduate studies, Goldberg served in the Israel Defense Forces for three years. Released at the rank of captain, he resumed his studies, earning his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 1973 under the supervision of Saul Abarbane...
Go to Profile#3958
Mircea Mustață
#72093
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mircea Immanuel Mustață is a Romanian-American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Mustață received from the University of Bucharest a bachelor's degree in 1995 and a master's degree in 1996 and from the University of California, Berkeley a PhD in 2001 with thesis advisor David Eisenbud and thesis Singularities and Jet Schemes. As a postdoc he was at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis , at the Isaac Newton Institute , and at Harvard University ; he was from 2001 to 2004 a Clay Research Fellow. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor he became in 2004 an associate profes...
Go to Profile#3959
Ron Buckmire
#64555
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ron Buckmire is a Grenadian-born mathematician, former chess champion of Barbados and LGBT activist. He is the past chair of the Occidental College Department of Mathematics. Starting in August 2018, he served as the Associate Dean for Curricular Affairs and Director of the Core Program at Occidental College for four years.
Go to Profile#3960
Margit Voigt
#71162
Overall Influence
Margit Voigt is a German mathematician specializing in graph theory and graph coloring. She is a professor of operations research at the University of Applied Sciences Dresden. Voigt completed her Ph.D. in 1992 at the Technische Universität Ilmenau. Her dissertation, Über die chromatische Zahl einer speziellen Klasse unendlicher Graphen [On the chromatic number of a special class of infinite graphs] was jointly supervised by Rainer Bodendiek and Hansjoachim Walther.
Go to Profile#3961
Song-Chun Zhu
#53304
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Song-Chun Zhu is a Chinese computer scientist and applied mathematician known for his work in computer vision, cognitive artificial intelligence and robotics. Zhu currently works at Peking University and was previously a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zhu also previously served as Director of the UCLA Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy .
Go to Profile#3962
Günter Lumer
#62578
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Günter Lumer was a mathematician known for his work in functional analysis. He is the namesake of the Lumer–Phillips theorem on semigroups of operators on Banach spaces, and was the first to study L-semi-inner products. Born in Germany and raised in France and Uruguay, he spent his professional career in the United States and Belgium.
Go to Profile#3963
Ruriko Yoshida
#69062
Overall Influence
Ruriko Yoshida is a Japanese-American mathematician and statistician whose research topics have ranged from abstract mathematical problems in algebraic combinatorics to optimized camera placement in sensor networks and the phylogenomics of fungi. She works at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California as a professor of operations research. She was promoted as a rank of professor on July 1st 2023.
Go to Profile#3964
Lowell Schoenfeld
#74634
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Lowell Schoenfeld was an American mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory. Career Schoenfeld received his Ph.D. in 1944 from University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Hans Rademacher.
Go to Profile#3965
Andrea Bertozzi
#65686
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Andrea Louise Bertozzi is an American mathematician. Her research interests are in non-linear partial differential equations and applied mathematics. Education and career She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Princeton University, followed by her PhD from Princeton in 1991; her dissertation was titled Existence, Uniqueness, and a Characterization of Solutions to the Contour Dynamics Equation. Prior to joining UCLA in 2003, Bertozzi was an L. E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago, and then Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Duke University. She spent one year a...
Go to Profile#3966
Mary Beisiegel
#69019
Overall Influence
Mary D. Beisiegel is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Oregon State University. She is a Whiteley Faculty scholar for Teaching Excellence. Her research is in math education. Education and career Beisiegel received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Alberta in 2009. Her dissertation, Being a Mathematician: Teacher Identity Formation in Post-Secondary Mathematics, was supervised by Elaine Simmt, David Pimm, and Terrance Ronald Carson.
Go to Profile#3967
Victor Wickerhauser
#49996
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mladen Victor Wickerhauser was born in Zagreb, SR Croatia, in 1959. He is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and Yale University. He is currently a professor of Mathematics and of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He has six U.S. patents and more than 100 publications. One of these, "Entropy-based Algorithms for Best Basis Selection," led to the Wavelet Scalar Quantization image compression algorithm, used by the FBI to encode fingerprint images.
Go to Profile#3968
Karen Rhea
#62266
Overall Influence
Karen Rhea is an American mathematics educator, a Collegiate Lecturer Emerita in the mathematics department of the University of Michigan. Before joining the University of Michigan faculty, she was on the faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Go to Profile#3969
Igor Kluvánek
#68319
Overall Influence
1931 - 1993 (62 years)
Igor Kluvánek was a Slovak-Australian mathematician. Academic career Igor Kluvánek obtained his first degree in electrical engineering from the Slovak Polytechnic University, Bratislava, in 1953. His first appointment was in the Department of Mathematics of the same institution. At the same time he worked for his C.Sc. degree obtained from the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In the early 60's he joined the Department of Mathematical Analysis of the University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik in Košice. During 1967–68 he held a visiting position at The Flinders University of South Australia. The events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia made it impossible for him and his family to return to their homeland.
Go to Profile#3970
Minerva Cordero
#68626
Overall Influence
Minerva Cordero Braña is a Puerto Rican mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also the university's Senior Associate Dean for the College of Science, where she is responsible for the advancement of the research mission of the college. President Biden awarded her the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring on February 8, 2022.
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Bernard Maskit
#82711
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Bernard Maskit is an American mathematician known for his expertise in Kleinian groups. The Maskit slice through the moduli space of Kleinian groups is named after him; he is the author of the book Kleinian Groups and gave an invited talk about Kleinian groups at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Go to Profile#3972
Marie-Claude Arnaud
#54749
Overall Influence
Marie-Claude Arnaud-Delabrière is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems. She is University Professor of Mathematics at the University of Avignon and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Go to Profile#3973
Florence Merlevède
#38219
Overall Influence
Florence Merlevède is a French probability theorist whose research interests focus on dependent and weakly dependent random variables, including Bernstein inequalities and central limit theorems for these variables. She is a professor in the laboratory for analysis and applied mathematics at Gustave Eiffel University, associated with the research group on probability and statistics there.
Go to Profile#3974
John Rognes
#65150
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
John Rognes is a Norwegian mathematician. He is a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oslo. Rognes mathematical talent was visible from a young age; in 1984 he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Prague.
Go to Profile#3975
Nicanor Parra
#4527
Overall Influence
1914 - 2018 (104 years)
Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval was a Chilean poet and physicist. He was considered one of the most influential Chilean poets of the Spanish language in the 20th century, often compared with Pablo Neruda. Parra described himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function; after recitations he would exclaim "Me retracto de todo lo dicho" .
Go to Profile#3976
Eugénie Hunsicker
#53788
Overall Influence
Eugénie Lee Hunsicker is an American mathematician who works at Loughborough University in England as a senior lecturer in pure mathematics and as director of equality and diversity for the school of science. Her research in pure mathematics has concerned topics "at the intersection of analysis, geometry and topology"; she has also worked on more applied topics in data science and image classification.
Go to Profile#3977
J. Barkley Rosser Jr.
#14290
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Barkley Rosser Jr. was a mathematical economist and Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia since 1988. He was known for work in nonlinear economic dynamics, including applications in economics of catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory . With Marina V. Rosser he invented the concept of the "new traditional economy". He introduced into economic discourse the concepts of chaotic bubbles, chaotic hysteresis , and econochemistry. He also invented the concepts of the megacorpstate and hypercyclic morphogenesis. He was the first to provide a mathematical model of the period of financial distress in a speculative bubble.
Go to Profile#3978
Wilhelm Leber
#28851
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Wilhelm Leber is a German mathematician and formerly chief apostle in the New Apostolic Church. Life Wilhelm Leber was born in Herford in Westphalia. In 1975 he earned his doctorate in mathematics at the Goethe University Frankfurt with a dissertation entitled Konvergenzbegriffe für lineare Operatoren und Stabilitätsaussagen. After earning his degree, he began working at the University of Hamburg.
Go to Profile#3979
Margaret M. Robinson
#62925
Overall Influence
Margaret Maher Robinson is an American mathematician specializing in number theory and the theory of zeta functions. She is the Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College.
Go to Profile#3980
Pericles S. Theocaris
#84069
Overall Influence
#3981
Alina Bucur
#66372
Overall Influence
Alina Ioana Bucur is a Romanian-born mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Bucur's research is in analytic number theory with an emphasis on arithmetic statistics.
Go to Profile#3982
Francis Buekenhout
#84028
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Francis Buekenhout is a Belgian mathematician who introduced Buekenhout geometries and the concept of quadratic sets. Career Buekenhout studied at the University of Brussels under Jacques Tits and Paul Libois.
Go to Profile#3983
Cristina Manolache
#71343
Overall Influence
Cristina Manolache is a mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield. Education and career Manolache received her PhD in Mathematics from SISSA in 2009. Her dissertation, Virtual Intersections, was supervised by Barbara Fantechi. Manolache specializes in algebraic geometry and has expertise in birational geometry and wall crossings. She has contributed to publications of the American Mathematical Society and Cambridge University Press. Notable publications include Reduced invariants from cuspidal maps , co-authored with Luca Batti...
Go to Profile#3984
Daniela Calvetti
#55386
Overall Influence
Daniela Calvetti is an Italian-American applied mathematician whose work concerns scientific computing, and connects Bayesian statistics to numerical analysis. She is the James Wood Williamson Professor of Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University.
Go to Profile#3985
K. B. Reid
#83871
Overall Influence
Kenneth Brooks Reid, Jr. is a graph theorist and the founder faculty professor at California State University, San Marcos . He specializes in combinatorial mathematics. He is known for his work in tournamentss, frequency partitions and aspects of voting theory. He is known on a disproof of a conjecture on tournaments by Erdős and Moser.
Go to Profile#3986
David Albright
#10169
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David Albright, M.Sc., is an American physicist and a weapons expert who is the founder of the non-governmental Institute for Science and International Security , its current president, and author of several books on proliferation of atomic weapons. Albright holds a Master of Science in physics from Indiana University in 1980, Master of Science in mathematics from Wright State University in 1977 and a bachelor of science from Wright State University in 1975. He has taught physics at George Mason University in Virginia.
Go to Profile#3987
Chris Freiling
#74017
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Christopher Francis Freiling is a mathematician responsible for Freiling's axiom of symmetry in set theory. He has also made significant contributions to coding theory, in the process establishing connections between that field and matroid theory.
Go to Profile#3988
Shirley Pledger
#69426
Overall Influence
Shirley Pledger is a New Zealand mathematician and statistician known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating wildlife populations. She is an emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics of Victoria University of Wellington.
Go to Profile#3989
Eileen Poiani
#63152
Overall Influence
Eileen Louise Poiani is an American mathematician. She was the first female mathematics instructor at Saint Peter's University in New Jersey, where she is a professor of mathematics, former vice president, and special assistant to the president of the university. She was the first female president of Pi Mu Epsilon.
Go to Profile#3990
Takashi Kadowaki
#84249
Overall Influence
#3991
John R. Hendricks
#59657
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
John Robert Hendricks was a Canadian amateur mathematician notable for his work in magic squares and hypercubess. He published many articles in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics as well as other mathematics-related journals.
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Stanisław Trybuła
#32549
Overall Influence
1932 - 2008 (76 years)
Stanisław Czesław Trybuła was a Polish mathematician and statistician. He was a pupil of state high school in Rypin, Poland, and he graduated from The First High School in Toruń in 1950. He studied mathematics in Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and Wrocław University. He defended his master thesis on some problems of the game theory prepared under supervision of Hugo Steinhaus at Wrocław University in 1955. In 1955 he became a faculty member at Department of Mathematics, Wrocław University of Technology. In 1959 he was distinguished as the candidate of science and in 1960 he defended his PhD on minimax estimation under supervision of Hugo Steinhaus.
Go to Profile#3993
Sergio Campanato
#51782
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Sergio Campanato was an Italian mathematician who studied the theory of regularity for elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. Career He graduated in mathematics and physics at the University of Modena in the academic year 1952/54 with a thesis relating to the heat equation. In 1956, he became an assistant to Enrico Magenes, with whom he worked on a problem of Picone relating to the equilibrium state of an elastic body, and on other differential equations related to electrostatics.
Go to Profile#3994
Hamlet Isakhanli
#24458
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hamlet Abdulla oglu Isayev is an Azerbaijani polymath, mathamatician, professor, poet, publicist, translator, entrepreneur, writer, author specialist in science, culture and history of education, founder of Khazar University who served as University president from April 1991 to September 2010. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Trustees, founder of Dunya School, and founder of a publishing house as well as a translator of poetry, lecturer, and editor. He is a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.
Go to Profile#3995
Ewa Kubicka
#66631
Overall Influence
Ewa Maria Kubicka is a Polish mathematician interested in graph theory and actuarial science. She is known for introducing the concept of the chromatic sum of a graph, the minimum possible sum when the vertices are labeled by natural numbers with no two adjacent vertices having equal labels.
Go to Profile#3996
Beatrice Pelloni
#69551
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Beatrice Pelloni is an Italian mathematician specialising in applied mathematical analysis and partial differential equations. She is a professor of mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, the editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Section A: Mathematics, and the chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures.
Go to Profile#3997
Srinivasacharya Raghavan
#59439
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Srinivasacharya Raghavan was an Indian mathematician who worked in number theory. He was born on 11 April 1934 in Thillaisthanam, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. After completing B.A. from St. Joseph's College, Tiruchirapalli, he joined TIFR in 1954 as research student, and completed his Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Professors K. Chandrasekharan and K.G. Ramanathan. He was affiliated with TIFR from 1956 until retirement in 1994, and served as Dean of Mathematics Faculty during 1986-89. He played an important role in the development of the TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics at Bangalore in its initial years.
Go to Profile#3998
Rosa Orellana
#52696
Overall Influence
Rosa C. Orellana is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic combinatorics and representation theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. Early life and education Orellana's excitement for mathematics was recognized early, by one of her elementary school teachers. She is a graduate of California State University, Los Angeles, and was the first in her family to earn a college degree. Her undergraduate education also included summer research with Kenneth Millett at the University of California, Santa Barbara on knot theory and its applications to biomolecules.
Go to Profile#3999
Kathleen Madden
#49012
Overall Influence
Kathleen Marie Madden is an American mathematician who works in dynamical systems. She was the dean of the School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering at California State University, Bakersfield. She won the George Pólya Award and is the co-author of the book Discovering Discrete Dynamical Systems.
Go to Profile#4000
Annie Selden
#69595
Overall Influence
Annie Laurer Alexander Selden is an expert in mathematics education. She is a professor emeritus at Tennessee Technological University, and an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University. She was one of the original founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971.
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