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,

#4051

Eville Gorham

Eville Gorham
#67510
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Eville Gorham was a Canadian-American scientist whose focus has been understanding the chemistry of fresh waters and the ecology and biogeochemistry of peatlands. In the process, Gorham made a number of practical contributions that included discovering the influence of acid rain in lake acidification, plus the importance of the biological magnification of radioactive fallout isotopes in northern food chains. The former led to legislation and redesign of the power plants of the world to scrub sulfur, and the latter was an early step toward the establishment of an atmospheric nuclear test ban ...
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#4052

Alfredo Noel Iusem

#73124
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alfredo Noel Iusem is an Argentine-born Brazilian mathematician working on mathematical optimization. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1981 under the supervision of George Bernard Dantzig.
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#4053

Yuval Flicker

Yuval Flicker
#72929
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Yuval Zvi Flicker is an American mathematician. His primary research interests include automorphic representations. He received his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in 1978. His thesis advisor was Alan Baker, in the area of transcendental number theory.
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#4054

Matthew Emerton

#73884
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Matthew James Emerton is an Australian mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include number theory, especially the theory of automorphic forms.
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#4055

Mariel Vázquez

Mariel Vázquez
#61468
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mariel Vázquez is a Mexican mathematical biologist who specializes in the topology of DNA. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis, jointly affiliated with the departments of mathematics and of microbiology and molecular genetics.
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#4056

Gail Carpenter

#14979
Overall Influence
Gail Alexandra Carpenter is an American cognitive scientist, neuroscientist and mathematician. She is now a "Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University." She had also been a Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, and the director of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems Technology Lab at Boston University.
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#4057

Steven Vajda

#68009
Overall Influence
1901 - 1995 (94 years)
Steven Vajda was a Hungarian-British mathematician who contributed to the development of mathematical programming and operational research. He was a member of a circle of researchers that included George Dantzig, Abraham Charnes, W.W. Cooper, William Orchard-Hays, Martin Beale and others. He worked and taught as an actuary and as a mathematician in operational research from 1925 to 1995.
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#4058

Malgorzata Dubiel

#69931
Overall Influence
Malgorzata Dubiel is a Polish mathematician and mathematics educator who works as a senior lecturer at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Education and career Dubiel is the daughter of a Polish military rocket scientist and engineer. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw, supervised by theoretical computer scientist and mathematical logician Victor W. Marek. In 1982, she moved to Canada.
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#4059

Eberhard Zeidler

#35463
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Eberhard Hermann Erich Zeidler was a German mathematician, who worked primarily in the field of non-linear functional analysis. Life and work After attending the Leipzig Eberhard Zeidler began studying mathematics at the University of Leipzig in 1959. In 1961, he was exmatriculated because of critical statements, and was forced to work as a transport worker and absolve his military service in the East-German's NVA. In 1964, he was allowed to continue his studies. In 1967, he received his Dr. rer. nat. with his work "" under .
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#4060

Maeve McCarthy

#61843
Overall Influence
C. Maeve Lewis McCarthy is an Irish mathematician whose research interests include inverse problems and modelling biological systems. She is the Jesse D. Jones Endowed Professor of Mathematics at Murray State University in Kentucky.
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#4061

Raymond Lyttleton

#34637
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Raymond Arthur Lyttleton FRS was a British mathematician and theoretical astronomer. He was born in Warley Woods near Birmingham and educated at King Edward VI Five Ways school in Birmingham, going from there to Clare College, Cambridge to read mathematics, graduating in 1933. He was elected a Fellow of St John's College in 1937 and appointed a lecturer in mathematics in the same year . A keen amateur cricketer, he played minor counties cricket for Cambridgeshire from 1946–1949, making fifteen appearances. He was Reader in Theoretical Astronomy from 1959 to 1969, after which he was appointed ...
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#4062

Bonnie Stewart

#83101
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Bonnie Madison Stewart was a professor of mathematics at Michigan State University from 1940 to 1980. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1941, under the supervision of Cyrus Colton MacDuffee.
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#4063

Frank Natterer

Frank Natterer
#40929
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Frank Natterer is a German mathematician. He was born in Wangen im Allgäu, Germany. Natterer pioneered and shaped the field of mathematical methods in imaging including computed tomography , magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasonic imaging.
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#4064

Fa-Yueh Wu

#26425
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Fa-Yueh Wu was a Chinese-born theoretical physicist, mathematical physicist, and mathematician who studied and contributed to solid-state physics and statistical mechanics. Life Early stage Born on January 5, 1932, in Shimen County, Hunan Province, Republic of China, with his father, a member of the Legislature, as his fourth child. The temporary capital of the Chiang Kai-shek administration of Nationalist government was placed in Chongqing in December 1938, but before that, in 1937, he evacuated to Chongqing with his father and stepmother and entered an elementary school there. However, due to repeated Bombing of Chongqing, he was unable to settle in one place.
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#4065

Boris Rozovsky

#85270
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Boris Rozovsky is Ford Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. His research is in stochastic analysis, particularly the study of stochastic partial differential equations. Rozovsky started his studies in art school, but switched to mathematics; he earned a master's degree in 1968 and a Ph.D. in 1973 from Moscow State University. He moved to the U.S. in 1988; after teaching for fourteen years at the University of Southern California, he joined the Brown University faculty in 2006.
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#4066

Ellen Gethner

#71126
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ellen Gethner is a US mathematician and computer scientist specializing in graph theory who won the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize in 2002 with co-authors Stan Wagon and Brian Wick for their paper A stroll through the Gaussian Primes.
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#4067

Paul Balmer

#77881
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Paul Balmer is a Swiss mathematician, working in algebra. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Balmer received his Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne in 1998, under the supervision of Manuel Ojanguren, with a thesis entitled Groupes de Witt dérivés des Schémas .
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#4068

David Clark Dobson

#77541
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
David Clark Dobson is an American mathematician. Dobson received in 1986 his bachelor's degree from Utah State University and his PhD in 1990 from Rice University. He was at the University of Minnesota from 1990 to 1993. He was from 1993 to 1996 an assistant professor, from 1996 to 2000 an assistant Professor and from 1996 to 2000 an associate professor at Texas A&M University. Since 2002 he is a full professor at the University of Utah.
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#4069

Amy Shell-Gellasch

#69386
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Amy Shell-Gellasch is a mathematician, historian of mathematics, and book author. She has written or edited the booksAlgebra in Context: Introductory Algebra from Origins to Applications In Service to Mathematics: The Life and Work of Mina Rees Mathematical Time Capsules: Historical Modules for the Mathematics Classroom Hands on History: A Resource for Teaching Mathematics From Calculus to Computers: Using the Last 200 Years of Mathematics History in the Classroom Her article "The Spirograph & mathematical models from 19th-century Germany" was selected for inclusion in The Best Writing on Mat...
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#4070

Zhihong Xia

#75066
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Zhihong "Jeff" Xia is a Chinese-American mathematician. Education and career Xia received, in 1982, from Nanjing University a bachelor's degree in astronomy and in 1988, a PhD in mathematics from Northwestern University with thesis advisor Donald G. Saari, for his thesis, The Existence of the Non-Collision Singularities. From 1988 to 1990, Xia was an assistant professor at Harvard University and from 1990 to 1994, an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology . In 1994, he became a full professor at Northwestern University and since 2000, he has been the Arthur and Gladys Pancoe ...
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#4071

Susan H. Marshall

#71754
Overall Influence
Susan Hammond Marshall is an American mathematician specializing in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and mathematical proof techniques. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Monmouth University.
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#4072

Mike Hill

#82299
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Michael Anthony "Mike" Hill is an American mathematician known for his research in topology. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Together with Michael J. Hopkins and Douglas Ravenel, he received the American Mathematical Society's Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2022 for the paper "On the nonexistence of elements of Kervaire invariant one."
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#4073

Zoltán Tibor Balogh

#69169
Overall Influence
1953 - 2002 (49 years)
Zoltán "Zoli" Tibor Balogh was a Hungarian-born mathematician, specializing in set-theoretic topology. His father, Tibor Balogh, was also a mathematician. His best-known work concerned solutions to problems involving normality of productss, most notably the first ZFC construction of a small Dowker space. He also solved Nagami's problem , and the second and third Morita conjectures about normality in products.
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#4074

Jennifer Schultens

#80991
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jennifer Carol Schultens is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology and knot theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis. Education Schultens earned her Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, Classification of Heegaard Splittings for Some Seifert Manifolds, was supervised by Martin Scharlemann.
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#4075

Jennifer Mueller

#68346
Overall Influence
Jennifer L. Mueller is an applied mathematician and biomedical engineer whose research concerns inverse problems and their applications, particularly to problems in medical imaging related to electrical impedance tomography. She is a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University, where she also holds a joint appointment in the school of biomedical engineering and the department of electrical and computer engineering.
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#4076

Robert Breusch

#53871
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Robert Hermann Breusch was a German-American number theorist, the William J. Walker Professor of Mathematics at Amherst College. Breusch was born in Freiburg, Germany, and studied mathematics both at the University of Freiburg and the University of Berlin. Unable to secure a university position after receiving his doctorate, Breusch became a schoolteacher near Freiburg, where he met his future wife, Kate Dreyfuss; Breusch was Protestant, but Dreyfuss was Jewish, and the two of them left Nazi Germany for Chile in the mid-1930s. They married there, and Breusch found a faculty position at Federico Santa María Technical University in Valparaiso.
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#4077

Victor Pavlovich Palamodov

#85448
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Victor Pavlovich Palamodov, is a Russian and Israeli mathematician, specializing in analysis. Palamodov received from Moscow State University in 1959 his Russian candidate degree under Georgiy Shilov. Palamodov then taught at Moscow State University. Later he taught at Tel Aviv University.
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#4078

Beatrice Aitchison

Beatrice Aitchison
#46335
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Beatrice Aitchison was an American mathematician, statistician, and transportation economist who directed the Transport Economics Division of the United States Department of Commerce, and later became the top woman in the United States Postal Service and the first policy-level appointee there.
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#4079

William B. Johnson

#75738
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
William Buhmann Johnson is an American mathematician, one of the namesakes of the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma. He is Distinguished Professor and A.G. & M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics at Texas A&M University. His research specialties include the theory of Banach spaces, nonlinear functional analysis, and probability theory. He was born in Palo Alto, California and raised from an early age in Dallas, Texas.
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#4080

John Kelsey

#26187
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Kelsey is a cryptographer who works at NIST. His research interests include cryptanalysis and design of symmetric cryptography primitives , analysis and design of cryptographic protocols, cryptographic random number generation, electronic voting, side-channel attacks on cryptography implementations, and anonymizing communications systems. He previously worked at Certicom and Counterpane Internet Security.
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#4081

Valentina Harizanov

#62093
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Valentina Harizanov is a Serbian-American mathematician and professor of mathematics at The George Washington University. Her main research contributions are in computable structure theory , where she introduced the notion of degree spectra of relations on computable structures and obtained the first significant results concerning uncountable, countable, and finite Turing degree spectra. Her recent interests include algorithmic learning theory and spaces of orderss on groupss.
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#4082

Ioannis Kontoyiannis

#62373
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ioannis Kontoyiannis is a Greek mathematician and information theorist. He is the Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research with the Statistical Laboratory, in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, of the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, an affiliated member of the Division of Information Engineering, Cambridge, a Research Fellow of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, a Senior Member of Robinson College, Cambridge, and a trustee of the Rollo Davidson Trust.
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#4083

Virginia R. Young

#72004
Overall Influence
Virginia Ruth Young is the Cecil J. and Ethel M. Nesbitt Professor of Actuarial Mathematics at the University of Michigan, and an expert on the mathematics of insurance. Education and career Young graduated from Cumberland College in 1981, and completed a PhD in mathematics, specializing in algebraic topology, at the University of Virginia in 1984. Her dissertation, Branched coverings arising from group actions, was supervised by Robert Evert Stong. After postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study, she returned to Cumberland as a faculty member from 1986 to 1990. However, after ...
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#4084

William Duke

#82617
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
William Drexel Duke is an American mathematician specializing in number theory. Duke studied at the University of New Mexico and then at New York University , from which he received his Ph.D. in 1986 under the direction of Peter Sarnak. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California, San Diego he joined the faculty of Rutgers University, where he stayed until becoming a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2015, he has been Chair of the mathematics department at UCLA.
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#4085

Olympia Nicodemi

#71333
Overall Influence
Olympia E. Nicodemi is a mathematician and mathematics educator whose research interests range from wavelets to the history of mathematics. She was a distinguished teaching professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Geneseo until 2020, when she retired.
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#4086

Elaine Kasimatis

#72175
Overall Influence
Elaine Ann Kasimatis was an American mathematician specializing in discrete geometry and mathematics education. She was a professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at California State University, Sacramento.
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#4087

Jeanette McLeod

#65966
Overall Influence
Jeanette Claire McLeod is a New Zealand mathematician specialising in combinatorics, including the theories of Latin squares and random graphs. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury, a principal investigator for Te Pūnaha Matatini, a Centre of Research Excellence associated with the University of Auckland, an honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University, and the president for three terms from 2018 to 2020 of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia.
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#4088

Ina Kersten

Ina Kersten
#82790
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ina Kersten is a German mathematician and former president of the German Mathematical Society. Her research concerns abstract algebra including the theory of field extensions and algebraic groups. She is a professor emerita at the University of Göttingen.
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#4089

Raegan Higgins

#70166
Overall Influence
Raegan J. Higgins is an American mathematician and co-director of the EDGE program for Women. She is also one of the co-founders of the website Mathematically Gifted & Black, which highlights the accomplishments of Black mathematicians.
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#4090

Hamid Naderi Yeganeh

Hamid Naderi Yeganeh
#37891
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
Hamid Naderi Yeganeh is an Iranian mathematical artist and digital artist. He is known for using mathematical formulas to create drawings of real-life objects, intricate and symmetrical illustrations, animations, fractals and tessellations. Naderi Yeganeh uses mathematics as the main tool to create artworks. Therefore, his artworks can be totally described by mathematical concepts. Mathematical concepts he uses in his work include trigonometric functions, exponential function, Fibonacci sequence, sawtooth wave, etc.
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#4091

Laurent Saloff-Coste

#79655
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Laurent Saloff-Coste is a French mathematician whose research is in Analysis, Probability theory, and Geometric group theory. Saloff-Coste received his "doctorat de 3eme cycle" in 1983 at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris VI. He completed his "Doctorat d'Etat" in 1989 under Nicholas Varopoulos. In the 1990s, he worked as "Directeur de Recherche" at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. Since 1998, he is a professor of Mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was chair from 2009 to 2015.
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#4092

Fumiko Futamura

#69207
Overall Influence
Fumiko Futamura is a Japanese-American mathematician known for her work on the mathematics of perspective and perspective drawing. She is a professor of mathematics at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and Lord Chair in Mathematics and Computer Science at Southwestern.
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#4093

Claire Mathieu

Claire Mathieu
#27155
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Claire Mathieu is a French computer scientist and mathematician, known for her research on approximation algorithms, online algorithms, and auction theory. She works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
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#4094

Max Kelly

#69820
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Gregory Maxwell "Max" Kelly was an Australian mathematician who worked on category theory. Biography Kelly was born in Bondi, New South Wales, Australia, on 5 June 1930. He obtained his PhD at Cambridge University in homological algebra in 1957, publishing his first paper in that area in 1959, Single-space axioms for homology theory. He taught in the Pure Mathematics department at the University of Sydney from 1957 to 1966, rising from lecturer to reader. During 1963–1965 he was a visiting fellow at Tulane University and the University of Illinois, where with Samuel Eilenberg he formalized...
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#4095

Günther Frei

#69211
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Günther Hans Frei is a Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Frei studied mathematics, physics and languages at the University of Zurich. There he received his doctoral degree in 1968 with advisor Bartel Leendert van der Waerden and dissertation on geometry . He became an instructor in 1968 at the University of Notre Dame and in 1970 at Quebec's Université Laval, where he became in 1971 a professor. He remained there until he retired as professor emeritus and returned to Switzerland to live in Hombrechtikon.
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#4096

Fokko du Cloux

#65746
Overall Influence
1954 - 2006 (52 years)
Fokko du Cloux was a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist. He worked on the Atlas of Lie groups and representations until his death. Career in mathematics Du Cloux was based at the Institut Girard Desargues, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Villeurbanne, in France. One of the founding members of the project, he was responsible for building the Atlas software which was instrumental in the mapping of the structure of the E8 Lie group. Fokko du Cloux was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2005, but he continued to actively participate in the project until his death from ALS....
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#4097

Magnhild Lien

#50002
Overall Influence
Magnhild Lien is a Norwegian mathematician specializing in knot theory. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at California State University, Northridge, and the former executive director of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
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#4098

Daniel Kráľ

#72371
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Daniel Kráľ is a Czech mathematician and computer scientist who works as a professor of mathematics and computer science at the Masaryk University. His research primarily concerns graph theory and graph algorithms.
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#4099

Teresa W. Haynes

#70580
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Teresa W. Haynes is an American professor of mathematics and statistics at East Tennessee State University known for her research in graph theory and particularly on dominating sets. Education and career Haynes earned three degrees from Eastern Kentucky University: a B.S. in mathematics and education in 1975, M.A. in mathematics and education in 1978, and M.S. in mathematical sciences in 1984. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science in 1988 from the University of Central Florida. Her dissertation was -Insensitive Domination and was supervised by Robert C. Brigham.
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#4100

Renzo L. Ricca

#65507
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Renzo Luigi Ricca is an Italian-born applied mathematician , professor of mathematical physics at the University of Milano-Bicocca. His principal research interests are in classical field theory, dynamical systems and structural complexity. He is known for his contributions to the field of geometric and topological fluid dynamics and, in particular, for his work on geometric and topological aspects of kinetic and magnetic helicity, and physical knot theory in general.
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