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,
#4151
Susan Morey
#72737
Overall Influence
Susan Morey is an American mathematician and a professor and chair of the Mathematics department at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Education and career Morey received a B.S. in mathematics with Honors from the University of Missouri in 1990 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University in 1995. Her dissertation The Equations of Rees Algebras of ideals of Low Codimension was supervised by Wolmer Vasconcelos. After receiving her Ph.D., Morey held a postdoctoral position at the University of Texas at Austin. She became an assistant professor at Texas State in 1997. Morey wa...
Go to Profile#4152
Ling Long
#72145
Overall Influence
Ling Long is a Chinese mathematician whose research concerns modular forms, elliptic surfaces, and dessins d'enfants, as well as number theory in general. She is a professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University.
Go to Profile#4153
Rebecca Hoyle
#61586
Overall Influence
Rebecca Bryony Hoyle is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Southampton, and associate dean for research at Southampton. She was the London Mathematical Society Mary Cartwright Lecturer for 2017.
Go to Profile#4154
Mireille Capitaine
#72704
Overall Influence
Mireille Capitaine is a French mathematician whose research focuses on random matrices and free probability theory. In 2012 she was a recipient of the G. de B. Robinson Award for a paper she coauthored that introduced free Bessel laws, a two-parameter family of generalizations of the free Poisson distribution. She received her PhD in 1996 from Paul Sabatier University, where she was advised by Michel Ledoux. She is currently a researcher for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , associated with the Toulouse Institute of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#4155
Patrice Ossona de Mendez
#63281
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Patrice Ossona de Mendez is a French mathematician specializing in topological graph theory who works as a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris. He is editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Combinatorics, a position he has held since 2009.
Go to Profile#4156
Nancy Pedersen
#66437
Overall Influence
Nancy L. Pedersen is an American genetic epidemiologist. She is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and the leader of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. She is known for her research on human twins, much of which is based on the Swedish Twin Registry. This has included research on the genetic basis of Alzheimer's disease and self-confidence.
Go to Profile#4157
Christiane Tammer
#72413
Overall Influence
Christiane Tammer is a German mathematician known for her work on mathematical optimization. She is a professor in the Institute of Mathematics of Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, and editor-in-chief of Optimization: A Journal of Mathematical Programming and Operations Research.
Go to Profile#4158
Robert S. Doran
#75717
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Stuart Doran is an American mathematician. He held the John William and Helen Stubbs Potter Professorship in mathematics at Texas Christian University from 1995 until his retirement in 2016. Doran served as chair of the TCU mathematics department for 21 years. He has also held visiting appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Study. He was elected to the board of trustees of the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study, serving as president of the organization for 10 years. He has been an ed...
Go to Profile#4159
Nancy Neudauer
#61775
Overall Influence
Nancy Ann Neudauer is an American mathematician specializing in matroid theory and known for her work in mathematical outreach in Africa and South America. She is a professor of mathematics at Pacific University, a co-director of the Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, and a former governor of the Pacific Northwest Section of the Mathematical Association of America.
Go to Profile#4160
John Erik Fornæss
#82076
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Erik Fornæss is a Norwegian-American mathematician. Fornæss received his master's degree in 1970 from the University of Oslo with thesis Uniform approximation on manifolds and his PhD in 1974 from the University of Washington under Edgar Lee Stout with thesis Embedding Strictly Pseudoconvex Domains in Convex Domains. At Princeton University he became in 1974 an instructor, in 1976 an assistant professor, in 1978 an associate professor, and in 1981 a full professor. Since 1991 he has been a professor at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#4161
Martha K. Smith
#72332
Overall Influence
Martha K. Smith is an American mathematician, mathematics educator, professor emerita in the department of mathematics, and associated professor emerita in the department of statistics and data science at the University of Texas at Austin. She made contributions to non-commutative algebra and as well as to mathematics education.
Go to Profile#4162
Nick Wormald
#78606
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Nicholas Charles Wormald is an Australian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Monash University. He specializes in probabilistic combinatorics, graph theory, graph algorithms, Steiner trees, web graphss, mine optimization, and other areas in combinatorics.
Go to Profile#4163
Steven Wofsy
#58266
Overall Influence
Steven C. Wofsy is an American atmosphere and hydrospheric scientist currently Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science at Harvard University and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Awarded the Roger Revelle Medal in 2012.
Go to Profile#4164
Mireille Martin-Deschamps
#69594
Overall Influence
Mireille Martin-Deschamps is a French mathematician who studies the algebraic geometry of space curves. She was president of the Société mathématique de France. Education and career Martin-Deschamps studied at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles from 1965 to 1969, and completed a doctorate in 1976 at Paris-Sud University, supervised by Pierre Samuel. She was a researcher for the French National Centre for Scientific Research from 1969 until 2003, when she became a professor at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University. She retired in 2010, and the university held a colloquium i...
Go to Profile#4165
Norman Laurence Gilbreath
#73836
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Norman Laurence Gilbreath is an American magician and author known for originating the Gilbreath shuffle. He is also known for Gilbreath's conjecture concerning prime numbers. Life and career Gilbreath got a BS in mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles . Following graduate work in applied mathematics, which saw him work under C. C. Chang, he spent his entire career at the Rand Corporation as an expert on compilers and optimization tasks. His book Magic for an Audience was published in 1989 as a series of three articles in Genii Magazine. He lives in Los Angeles and performed re...
Go to Profile#4166
Annalisa Crannell
#72641
Overall Influence
Annalisa Crannell is an American mathematician, and an expert in the mathematics of water waves, chaos theory, and geometric perspective. She is a professor of mathematics at Franklin & Marshall College.
Go to Profile#4167
Charles E. Mcculloch
#86574
Overall Influence
#4168
Victoria Howle
#71704
Overall Influence
Victoria E. Howle is an American applied mathematician specializing in numerical linear algebra and known as one of the developers of the Trilinos open-source software library for scientific computing. She is a full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University.
Go to Profile#4169
William J. LeVeque
#64979
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
William Judson LeVeque was an American mathematician and administrator who worked primarily in number theory. He was executive director of the American Mathematical Society during the 1970s and 1980s when that organization was growing rapidly and greatly increasing its use of computers in academic publishing.
Go to Profile#4170
Coralia Cartis
#66003
Overall Influence
Coralia Cartis is a Romanian mathematician at the University of Oxford whose research interests include compressed sensing, numerical analysis, and regularisation methods in mathematical optimization. At Oxford, she is a Professor in Numerical Optimization in the Mathematical Institute, and a tutorial fellow of Balliol College.
Go to Profile#4171
Peter H. Haynes
#69322
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Peter Howard Haynes is a British applied mathematician in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge and served as Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from 2005 to 2015.
Go to Profile#4172
Anders Lindquist
#65149
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Anders Gunnar Lindquist is a Swedish applied mathematician and control theorist. He has made contributions to the theory of partial realization, stochastic modeling, estimation and control, and moment problems in systems and control. In particular, he is known for the discovery of the fast filtering algorithms for Kalman filtering in the early 1970s, and his seminal work on the separation principle of stochastic optimal control and, in collaborations with Giorgio Picci, the Geometric Theory for Stochastic Realization. Together with late Christopher I. Byrnes and Tryphon T. Georgiou , he is one of the founder of the so-called Byrnes-Georgiou-Lindquist school.
Go to Profile#4173
Alison Ramage
#68157
Overall Influence
Alison Ramage is a British applied mathematician and numerical analyst specialising in preconditioning methods for numerical linear algebra, and their applications to the numerical solution of partial differential equations. She is a reader in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Strathclyde.
Go to Profile#4174
Michael Saks
#41270
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael Ezra Saks is an American mathematician. He is currently the Department Chair of the Mathematics Department at Rutgers University and from 2006 until 2010 was director of the Mathematics Graduate Program at Rutgers University. Saks received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 after completing his dissertation titled Duality Properties of Finite Set Systems under his advisor Daniel J. Kleitman.
Go to Profile#4175
Hans Rohrbach
#53013
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Hans Rohrbach was a German mathematician. He worked both as an algebraist and a number theorist and later worked as cryptanalyst at Pers Z S, the German Foreign Office cipher bureau, during World War II. He was latterly known as the person who broke the American diplomatic O-2 cypher, a variant of the M-138-A strip cipher during 1943. Rohrbach wrote a report on the breaking of the strip cypher when he was captured by TICOM, the allied effort to roundup and seize captured German intelligence people and material.
Go to Profile#4176
Michele Benzi
#71934
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michele Benzi is an Italian mathematician who works as a full professor in the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He is known for his contributions to numerical linear algebra and its applications, especially to the solution of sparse linear systems and the study of preconditioners.
Go to Profile#4177
Shoichiro Sakai
#78261
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
is a Japanese mathematician. Life Sakai studied mathematics at the Tohoku University . He there received the B. A. degree in 1953 and a doctorate at the same University in 1961. From 1960 to 1964, he was a faculty member of Waseda University. He then went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a professor in 1966 and remained until 1979. He then returned to Japan and went to the Nihon University. In 1992, he received the Japanese Mathematical Society Autumn Prize. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#4178
Geoffrey Horrocks
#71420
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Geoffrey Horrocks was a British mathematician working on vector bundles, who introduced the Horrocks construction used in the ADHM construction, and the Horrocks–Mumford bundle and monads. He was a professor at Newcastle University until his retirement in 1998.
Go to Profile#4179
Elizabeth S. Allman
#64407
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Elizabeth Spencer Allman is an American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks; her research interests range from abstract algebra and algebraic statistics to biomathematics and phylogeny.
Go to Profile#4180
Adriana Pesci
#65780
Overall Influence
Adriana Irma Pesci is an Argentine applied mathematician and mathematical physicist at the University of Cambridge, specialising in fluid dynamics. Her research topics have included lattice models of polymer solutions, Hele-Shaw flow, flagellar motion of organisms in fluids, soap films on Möbius strips, and the Leidenfrost effect.
Go to Profile#4181
Crista Arangala
#28905
Overall Influence
Crista Arangala is an American mathematician and textbook author, specializing in numerical analysis. She is a professor of mathematics and chair of the department of mathematics and statistics at Elon University, and a Fulbright Scholar.
Go to Profile#4182
Ian G. Enting
#61989
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ian Enting is a mathematical physicist and the AMSI/MASCOS Professorial Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems based at The University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#4183
Patricia Campbell
#72372
Overall Influence
Patricia F. Campbell is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. She is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work has concerned the improvement of mathematics education in minority and lower-income secondary schools, and the effectiveness of mathematics coaching in mathematics education.
Go to Profile#4184
Anatolii Goldberg
#66697
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Anatolii Asirovich Goldberg was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician working in complex analysis. His main area of research was the theory of entire and meromorphic functions. Life and work Goldberg received his PhD in 1955 from Lviv University under the direction of Lev Volkovyski. He worked as a docent in Uzhgorod University , then in Lviv University , where he became a full professor in 1965, and in Bar Ilan University . Goldberg, jointly with Iossif Ostrovskii and Boris Levin, was awarded the State Prize of Ukraine in 1992.
Go to Profile#4185
Victor Borisov
#82913
Overall Influence
1937 - 2013 (76 years)
Victor Vasil'evich Borisov was a Russian physicist and mathematician who contributed to the theory of wave motion, in particular to time domain electromagnetics and localized waves. Under his guidance, Vladimir Smirnov's approach to solving the initial-boundary value problem to the hyperbolic partial differential equations was developed into the spacetime triangle diagram technique.
Go to Profile#4186
Arnon Avron
#35326
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Arnon Avron is an Israeli mathematician and Professor at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on applications of mathematical logic to computer science and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#4187
Diane Henderson
#53595
Overall Influence
Diane Marie Henderson is an American applied mathematician, specializing in fluid dynamics and mathematical oceanography. Unusually for a mathematics professor, some of her research involves physical experiments with wave tanks, high speed cameras, and oil droplets.
Go to Profile#4188
Karin Baur
#73731
Overall Influence
Karin Baur is a Swiss mathematician who is working in the mathematical fields algebra, representation theory, cluster algebras, cluster categories, combinatorics, Lie algebras. Currently she is a professor at University of Leeds and she also a full professor at University of Graz. From 2007–2012 she has been an assistant professor at ETH Zurich. Moreover, she is one of the protagonists of the project Women of Mathematics throughout Europe.
Go to Profile#4189
Barbara Wohlmuth
#40459
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Barbara I. Wohlmuth is a German mathematician specializing in the numerical solution of partial differential equations. She holds the chair of numerical mathematics at the Technical University of Munich .
Go to Profile#4190
L. Christine Kinsey
#64057
Overall Influence
Laura Christine Kinsey is an American mathematician specializing in topology. She is a professor of mathematics at Canisius College. Education Kinsey graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1975 with honors in mathematics. She returned to the University of Maryland, College Park for graduate study, completing a Ph.D. there in 1984. Her dissertation, Pseudoisotopies and Submersions of a Compact Manifold to the Circle, was jointly supervised by Henry C. King and Walter Neumann.
Go to Profile#4191
Richard Laver
#79778
Overall Influence
1942 - 2012 (70 years)
Richard Joseph Laver was an American mathematician, working in set theory. Biography Laver received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, under the supervision of Ralph McKenzie, with a thesis on Order Types and Well-Quasi-Orderings. The largest part of his career he spent as Professor and later Emeritus Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Go to Profile#4192
Warren Bennis
#2120
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Warren Gamaliel Bennis was an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies. Bennis was University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#4193
Agnieszka Malinowska
#72697
Overall Influence
Agnieszka Barbara Malinowska is a Polish mathematician known for her research and books on fractional calculus and the fractional calculus of variations. She is an associate professor of mathematics, in the faculty of computer science of Bialystok University of Technology.
Go to Profile#4194
Arthur Engel
#48239
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Arthur Engel was a German mathematics teacher, educationalist and prolific author. His work has been translated into several languages. He had played a role in national and international mathematical competitions since 1970. Engel was one of the first to recognize the impact of electronic calculators and computers on mathematics teaching. He viewed that the focus should shift from learning how to apply algorithms, which could now be done by the machine, to learning how to build and test algorithms. He was also early to see the value of using computers to draw students into an interest and und...
Go to Profile#4195
Penny J. Davies
#73476
Overall Influence
Penelope Jane Davies is a Scottish mathematician who in 2009 became the second female president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, after Elizabeth McHarg. Her research involves numerical simulation of the partial differential equations describing wave scattering and elastic stability and biomechanical modelling. She is a senior lecturer in mathematics and statistics at the University of Strathclyde.
Go to Profile#4196
Emmanuel Haven
#20896
Overall Influence
Emmanuel Haven is an academic, author and researcher. He previously held a personal Chair at the University of Leicester and is currently full professor and the Dr. Alex Faseruk Chair in Financial Management at the Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University.
Go to Profile#4197
D. Raghavarao
#77167
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
Damaraju Raghavarao was an Indian-born statistician, formerly the Laura H. Carnell professor of statistics and chair of the department of statistics at Temple University in Philadelphia. Raghavarao is an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, American Statistical Association, and an elected member of The International Statistical Institute. He has been specialized in combinatorics and applications of experimental designs.
Go to Profile#4198
Nina Virchenko
#60380
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Nina Opanasivna Virchenko is a Ukrainian mathematician, academic, author, and member of the Ukrainian resistance movement. While a student in Kyiv in 1948, she was arrested on charges of Ukrainian nationalism, and was a political prisoner in a gulag in Eastern Siberia for six years.
Go to Profile#4199
John Quackenbush
#39846
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
John Quackenbush is an American computational biologist and genome scientist. He is a professor of biostatistics and computational biology and a professor of cancer biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute , as well as the director of its Center for Cancer Computational Biology . Quackenbush also holds an appointment as a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#4200
Leonid Vaserstein
#42149
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Leonid Nisonovich Vaserstein is a Russian-American mathematician, currently Professor of Mathematics at Penn State University. His research is focused on algebra and dynamical systems. He is well known for providing a simple proof of the Quillen–Suslin theorem, a result in commutative algebra, first conjectured by Jean-Pierre Serre in 1955, and then proved by Daniel Quillen and Andrei Suslin in 1976.
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