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,
#401
Lipman Bers
#8680
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
Lipman Bers was a Latvian-American mathematician, born in Riga, who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. He was also known for his work in human rights activism.
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Gerhard Hochschild
#10007
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Gerhard Paul Hochschild was a German-born American mathematician who worked on Lie groups, algebraic groups, homological algebra and algebraic number theory. Early life On April 29, 1915, Hochschild was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, the son of Lilli and Heinrich Hochschild. Hochschild had an older brother. His father was a patent attorney who had an engineering degree. After the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1933, his father sent him to South Africa where he was able to enroll in school with funding from the Hochschild Family Foundation es...
Go to Profile#403
David Gabai
#10001
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David Gabai is an American mathematician and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Focused on low-dimensional topology and hyperbolic geometry, he is a leading researcher in those subjects.
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Shun'ichi Amari
#1047
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Shun'ichi Amari, is a Japanese scholar born in 1936 in Tokyo, Japan. Overviews He majored in Mathematical Engineering in 1958 from the University of Tokyo then graduated in 1963 from the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo.
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András Hajnal
#6446
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
András Hajnal was a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences known for his work in set theory and combinatorics. Biography Hajnal was born on 13 May 1931, in Budapest, Hungary.
Go to Profile#406
Hugh Lowell Montgomery
#7174
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Hugh Lowell Montgomery is an American mathematician, working in the fields of analytic number theory and mathematical analysis. As a Marshall scholar, Montgomery earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. For many years, Montgomery has been teaching at the University of Michigan.
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Alexandre Kirillov
#8966
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirilloff is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, known for his works in the fields of representation theory, topological groups and Lie groups. In particular he introduced the orbit method into representation theory. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Arne Meurman
#8627
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Arne Meurman is a Swedish mathematician working on finite groups and vertex operator algebras. Currently, he is a professor at Lund University. He is best known for constructing the monster vertex algebra together with Igor Frenkel and James Lepowsky.
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David Donoho
#5442
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
David Leigh Donoho is an American statistician. He is a professor of statistics at Stanford University, where he is also the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. His work includes the development of effective methods for the construction of low-dimensional representations for high-dimensional data problems , development of wavelets for denoising and compressed sensing. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
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Fernando Codá Marques
#9958
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Fernando Codá dos Santos Cavalcanti Marques is a Brazilian mathematician working mainly in geometry, topology, partial differential equations and Morse theory. He is a professor at Princeton University. In 2012, together with André Neves, he proved the Willmore conjecture.
Go to Profile#411
M. S. Raghunathan
#7116
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Madabusi Santanam Raghunathan FRS is an Indian mathematician. He is currently Head of the National Centre for Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Formerly Professor of eminence at TIFR in Homi Bhabha Chair. Raghunathan received his PhD in Mathematics from , University of Mumbai; his advisor was M. S. Narasimhan. Raghunathan is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Third World Academy of Sciences, and of the American Mathematical Society and a recipient of the civilian honour of Padma Bhushan. He has also been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2016.
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Herman Chernoff
#4313
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Herman Chernoff is an American applied mathematician, statistician and physicist. He was formerly a professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford, and MIT, currently emeritus at Harvard University.
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James Ax
#6108
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
James Burton Ax was an American mathematician who made groundbreaking contributions in algebra and number theory using model theory. He shared, with Simon B. Kochen, the seventh Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory, which was awarded for a series of three joint papers on Diophantine problems.
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Claude Berge
#4644
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Claude Jacques Berge was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory. Biography and professional history Claude Berge's parents were André Berge and Geneviève Fourcade. André Berge was a physician and psychoanalyst who, in addition to his professional work, had published several novels. He was the son of the René Berge, a mining engineer, and Antoinette Faure. Félix François Faure was Antoinette Faure's father; he was President of France from 1895 to 1899. André Berge married Geneviève in 1924, and Claude was the second of their six children.
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George F. R. Ellis
#2540
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, Hon. FRSSAf , is the emeritus distinguished professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. From 1989 to 1992 he served as president of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He...
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Gerhard Huisken
#8701
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Gerhard Huisken is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and partial differential equations. He is known for foundational contributions to the theory of the mean curvature flow, including Huisken's monotonicity formula, which is named after him. With Tom Ilmanen, he proved a version of the Riemannian Penrose inequality, which is a special case of the more general Penrose conjecture in general relativity.
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James Demmel
#6168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Weldon Demmel Jr. is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Edward F. Moore
#3883
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Edward Forrest Moore was an American professor of mathematics and computer science, the inventor of the Moore finite state machine, and an early pioneer of artificial life. Biography Moore received a B.S. in chemistry from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia in 1947 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in June 1950. He worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1950 to 1952 and was a visiting professor at MIT and visiting lecturer at Harvard University simultaneously in 1961-1962. He worked at Bell Labs from 1952 to 1966.
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Neil Chriss
#7278
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Neil A. Chriss is a mathematician, academic, hedge fund manager, philanthropist and a founding board member of the charity organization "Math for America" which seeks to improve math education in the United States. Chriss also serves on the board of trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Hans Grauert
#9992
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Hans Grauert was a German mathematician. He is known for major works on several complex variables, complex manifolds and the application of sheaf theory in this area, which influenced later work in algebraic geometry. Together with Reinhold Remmert he established and developed the theory of complex-analytic spaces. He became professor at the University of Göttingen in 1958, as successor to C. L. Siegel. The lineage of this chair traces back through an eminent line of mathematicians: Weyl, Hilbert, Riemann, and ultimately to Gauss. Until his death, he was professor emeritus at Göttingen.
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Benny Sudakov
#10211
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Benny Sudakov is an Israeli mathematician, who works mainly on extremal and probabilistic combinatorics. He was born in Tbilissi, Georgia, and completed his undergraduate studies at Tbilisi State University in 1990. After emigrating to Israel, he received his PhD from Tel Aviv University in 1999, under the supervision of Noga Alon. From 1999 until 2002 he held a Veblen Research Instructorship, a joint position between Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. Until 2007 he was an assistant professor at Princeton University. Until 2014, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Yuri Burago
#9373
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Yuri Dmitrievich Burago is a Russian mathematician. He works in differential and convex geometry. Education and career Burago studied at Leningrad University, where he obtained his Ph.D. and Habilitation degrees. His advisors were Victor Zalgaller and Aleksandr Aleksandrov.
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Jürgen Neukirch
#10017
Overall Influence
1937 - 1997 (60 years)
Jürgen Neukirch was a German mathematician known for his work on algebraic number theory. Education and career Neukirch received his diploma in mathematics in 1964 from the University of Bonn. For his Ph.D. thesis, written under the direction of Wolfgang Krull, he was awarded in 1965 the Felix-Hausdorff-Gedächtnis-Preis. He completed his habilitation one year later. From 1967 to 1969 he was guest professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which he was a professor in Bonn. In 1971 he became a professo...
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Michel Demazure
#8776
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Michel Demazure is a French mathematician. He made contributions in the fields of abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, and computer vision, and participated in the Nicolas Bourbaki collective. He has also been president of the French Mathematical Society and directed two French science museums.
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Christopher Zeeman
#7615
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS , was a British mathematician, known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory. Overview Zeeman's main contributions to mathematics were in topology, particularly in knot theory, the piecewise linear category, and dynamical systems.
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Melvyn B. Nathanson
#9612
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Melvyn Bernard Nathanson is an American mathematician, specializing in number theory, and a Professor of Mathematics at Lehman College and The Graduate Center . His principal work is in additive and combinatorial number theory. He is the author of over 200 research papers in mathematics, and author or editor of 27 books.
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Wendell Fleming
#10554
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Wendell Helms Fleming was an American mathematician, specializing in geometrical analysis and stochastic differential equations. Fleming received in 1951 his PhD under Laurence Chisholm Young at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a thesis entitled Boundary and related notions for generalized parametric surfaces. Fleming was a professor at Brown University, where he retired in 2009 as professor emeritus.
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Günter M. Ziegler
#5538
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Günter Matthias Ziegler is a German mathematician who has been serving as president of the Free University of Berlin since 2018. Ziegler is known for his research in discrete mathematics and geometry, and particularly on the combinatorics of polytopes.
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William W. Cooper
#2513
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
William Wager Cooper was an American operations researcher, known as a father of management science and as "Mr. Linear Programming". He was the founding president of The Institute of Management Sciences, founding editor-in-chief of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , founding dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs at CMU, the former Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University, and the Foster Parker Professor Emeritus of Management, F...
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Steven Roman
#9757
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Steven Roman is a mathematician, currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at California State University, Fullerton and Visiting Professor of Mathematics at University of California, Irvine. He is one of the main developers of umbral calculus. He has written about 40 books on mathematics and computer programming.
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Elon Lindenstrauss
#5124
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Elon Lindenstrauss is an Israeli mathematician, and a winner of the 2010 Fields Medal. Since 2004, he has been a professor at Princeton University. In 2009, he was appointed to Professor at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University.
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Andrew Gelman
#2956
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
#433
Dikran Tahta
#4444
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Dikran Tahta was a British mathematician, teacher and author. He was also the maths teacher of Stephen Hawking. Early life Dikran Tahta was a descendant of Istanbul-based Armenian family of cotton merchants. His father, Kevork Tahtabrounian, , settled in Manchester with his wife in 1927, after the First World War and the Armenian genocide, shortening his surname to Tahta. Kevork run a branch of the business which took the name Manchester Textile Exporters and was able to donate £100,000 to the Armenian Community Council, which enabled the community to set up a Trust for the benefit of the Co...
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Masayoshi Nagata
#9753
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Masayoshi Nagata was a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in the field of commutative algebra. Work Nagata's compactification theorem shows that varieties can be embedded in complete varieties. The Chevalley–Iwahori–Nagata theorem describes the quotient of a variety by a group.
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June Huh
#7633
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
June Huh is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor at Stanford University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He has been noted for the linkages that he has found between algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
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Ken Ono
#7216
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#437
Xiuxiong Chen
#11126
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Xiuxiong Chen is a Chinese-American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and differential equations. A professor at Stony Brook University since 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 and awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2019. In 2019, he was awarded the Simons Investigator award.
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George Mostow
#9995
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
George Daniel Mostow was an American mathematician, renowned for his contributions to Lie theory. He was the Henry Ford II Professor of Mathematics at Yale University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the 49th president of the American Mathematical Society , and a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1982 to 1992.
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Paul Garabedian
#7290
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Paul Roesel Garabedian was a mathematician and numerical analyst. Garabedian was the Director-Division of Computational Fluid Dynamics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computational fluid dynamics and plasma physics, which ranged from elegant existence proofs for potential theory and conformal mappings to the design and optimization of stellarators. Garabedian was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.
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Olga Taussky-Todd
#5099
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Olga Taussky-Todd was an Austrian and later Czech-American mathematician. She published more than 300 research papers on algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis.
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Enrico Giusti
#10644
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Enrico Giusti , is an Italian mathematician mainly known for his contributions to the fields of calculus of variations, regularity theory of partial differential equations, minimal surfaces and history of mathematics. He has been professor of mathematics at the Università di Firenze; he also taught and conducted research at the Australian National University at Canberra, at the Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley. After retirement, he devoted himself to the managing of the "Giardino di Archimede", a museum entirely dedicated to mathematics and its applications. Gi...
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Dimitri Bertsekas
#3018
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Friedrich L. Bauer
#682
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. He coined the term Software engineering Life Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. From 1946 to 1950, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Bauer received his Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Fritz Bopp for his thesis Gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Spinwellengleichungen in 1952. He completed his habilitation thesis Über q...
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Robert D. Richtmyer
#5082
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Robert Davis Richtmyer was an American physicist, mathematician, educator, author, and musician. Biography Richtmyer was born on October 10, 1910, in Ithaca, New York. His father was physicist Floyd K. Richtmyer and mother was Bernice Davis Richtmyer. He studied physics at the University of Göttingen and Cornell University, graduating in 1932 when his father was dean of the graduate school. He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1935 under advisor John C. Slater. He taught at Stanford University as an instructor in the physics department from 1936 through 1940.
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André Haefliger
#10902
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
André Haefliger was a Swiss mathematician who worked primarily on topology. Education and career Haefliger went to school in Nyon and then attended his final years at Collège de Genève in Geneva. He studied mathematics at the University of Lausanne from 1948 to 1952. He worked for two years as a teaching assistant at École Polytechnique de l'Université de Lausanne. He then moved to University of Strasbourg, then he followed Charles Ehresmann in Paris, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1958. His thesis was entitled "Structures feuilletées et cohomologie à valeurs dans un faisceau de groupo...
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Wu Wenjun
#5795
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Wu Wenjun , also commonly known as Wu Wen-tsün, was a Chinese mathematician, historian, and writer. He was an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences , best known for Wu class, Wu formula, and Wu's method of characteristic set.
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Albert Shiryaev
#8997
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Albert Nikolayevich Shiryaev is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is known for his work in probability theory, statistics and financial mathematics. Career He graduated from Moscow State University in 1957. From that time until now he has been working in Steklov Mathematical Institute. He earned his candidate degree in 1961 and a doctoral degree in 1967 for his work "On statistical sequential analysis". He is a professor of the department of mechanics and mathematics of Moscow State University, since 1971. Shiryaev holds a 20% permanent professorial position at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester.
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Michael Sipser
#5029
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Fredric Sipser is an American theoretical computer scientist who has made early contributions to computational complexity theory. He is a professor of applied mathematics and was the Dean of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Kazuya Kato
#9632
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese mathematician who works at the University of Chicago and specializes in number theory and arithmetic geometry. Early life and education Kazuya Kato grew up in the prefecture of Wakayama in Japan. He attended college at the University of Tokyo, from which he also obtained his master's degree in 1975, and his PhD in 1980.
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Wei-Liang Chow
#10201
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Chow Wei-Liang was a Chinese mathematician and stamp collector born in Shanghai, known for his work in algebraic geometry. Biography Chow was a student in the US, graduating from the University of Chicago in 1931. In 1932 he attended the University of Göttingen, then transferred to the Leipzig University where he worked with van der Waerden. They produced a series of joint papers on intersection theory, introducing in particular the use of what are now generally called Chow coordinates .
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