Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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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,

#4251

Krzysztof R. Apt

#27066

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Krzysztof R. Apt is a Polish computer scientist. He defended his PhD in mathematical logic in Warsaw, Poland in 1974. His research interests include program correctness and semantics, use of logic as a programming language, distributed computing, and game theory. Besides his own research, he has been heavily involved in service to the computing community, notably by promoting the use of logic in computer science and by advocating open access to scientific literature.

#4252

David John Finney

#87719

Overall Influence

#4253

Vern Paulsen

#78249

Overall Influence

Vern Ival Paulsen is an American mathematician, focusing in operator theory, operator algebras, frame theory, C*-algebras, and quantum information theory. Education and career Paulsen studied mathematics at Western Michigan University, obtaining a BA in 1973. He then moved to University of Michigan and obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics under Carl Pearcy in 1977. He spent the following two years at University of Kansas as an instructor. Since 1979, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at University of Houston. He was since 1996 the John and Rebecca Moores Professor at ...

#4254

William Haboush

#80065

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

William Joseph Haboush is an American mathematician at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who is best known for his 1975 proof of one of David Mumford's conjectures, known as Haboush's theorem.

#4255

Dorothy McFadden Hoover

#53829

Overall Influence

1918 - 2000 (82 years)

Dorothy Estheryne McFadden Hoover was an American physicist and mathematician. Hoover was a pioneer in the early days of NASA. Originally one of the first black women hired at Langley as a human computer, Hoover would eventually become a published physicist and mathematician. Hoover is one of the first black women to be listed as a co-author on NASA research publications. Her research supported the development of America's first jet fighter, the Sabre. Hoover's accomplishments were featured in Margot Lee Shetterly's bestselling book, Hidden Figures.

#4256

Olof Thorin

#72368

Overall Influence

1912 - 2004 (92 years)

G. Olof Thorin was a Swedish mathematician working on analysis and probability, who introduced the Riesz–Thorin theorem.

#4257

Harm Bart

#54846

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Harm Bart is a Dutch mathematician, economist, and Professor of Mathematics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, particularly known for his work on "factorization problems for matrix and operator functions."

#4258

Lynn Schreyer

#73066

Overall Influence

Lynn G. Schreyer is an American applied mathematician whose research concerns the mathematical modeling of porous media. She is associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Washington State University, and full professor of the department of mathematics and statistics at Washington State University in March 2021 . Dr. Schreyer was the former chair of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Activity Group on Geosciences.

#4259

Daniel Bennequin

#65099

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Daniel Bennequin is a French mathematician, known for the Thurston–Bennequin number introduced in his doctoral dissertation. Education and career Bennequin completed his secondary education at Lycée Condorcet and then graduated from the École normale supérieure. He received his habilitation in 1982 from the University of Paris VII under Alain Chenciner with thesis Entrelacements et équations de Pfaff. He was a professor at the University of Strasbourg before becoming a professor at the University of Paris VII .

#4260

Geoff Smith

#80416

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Geoffrey Charles Smith, MBE is a British mathematician. He is Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Bath and current professor in residence at Wells Cathedral School. He was educated at Trinity School in Croydon, and attended Keble College, Oxford, the University of Warwick, and the University of Manchester, where he gained a Ph.D. in group theory in 1983.

#4261

George Maltese

#80812

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

George John Maltese was an American mathematician whose primary field of research was functional analysis. Life and career Maltese was born in Middletown to a family of Italian ancestry. Between 1949 and 1953 he studied at the Wesleyan University. There he obtained his first degree, a in mathematics. From 1953 to 1954 he continued his studies as a Fulbright Fellow at the Goethe-University Frankfurt . From 1956 to 1960 he studied at Yale University . There he earned his PhD with the dissertation Generalized Convolution Algebras and Spectral Representations supervised by Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea.

#4262

Emily E. Witt

#73801

Overall Influence

Emily Elspeth Witt is an American mathematician, an associate professor and Keeler Intra-University Professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas. Her research involves commutative algebra, representation theory, and singularity theory.

#4263

Petr Mandl

#81604

Overall Influence

1933 - 2012 (79 years)

Professor Petr Mandl DSc was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to the fields of stochastic processes and actuarial science. He published several books and more than hundred articles.

#4264

Gérard Vergnaud

#49689

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Gérard Vergnaud was a French mathematician, philosopher, educator, and psychologist. He earned his doctorate from the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva under the supervision of Jean Piaget. Vergnaud was a professor emeritus of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, where he was a researcher in mathematics. Among his most significant work has been the development of the Theory of Conceptual Fields, which describes how children develop an understanding of mathematics.

#4265

Jerome Goldstein

#81697

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jerome Arthur Goldstein is an American mathematician whose main interests are partial differential equations, operator theory, stochastic analysis, fluid dynamics, quantum theory, and mathematical finance.

#4266

Prakash Belkale

#82066

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Prakash Belkale is an Indian-American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and representation theory. Education and career Belkale received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Chicago with thesis advisor Madhav Nori.

#4267

Vera Fischer

#70561

Overall Influence

Vera V. Fischer is an Austrian mathematician specializing in set theory, mathematical logic, and infinitary combinatorics. She is a privatdozent in the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic at the University of Vienna.

#4268

Jim Hefferon

#61485

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jim Hefferon is a Professor of Mathematics at Saint Michael's College. He is known for his award-winning textbook on linear algebra that is available for free download, with LaTeX source, and for his activity in the TeX community.

#4269

John C. Wood

#81268

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Professor John C. Wood is a British mathematician working at the University of Leeds. He is one of the leading experts on harmonic maps and harmonic morphisms in the field of differential geometry.

#4270

Philippe Di Francesco

#78569

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Philippe Di Francesco is a French-American mathematician, focusing in mathematical physics, physical combinatorics and integrable systems. He is senior researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Saclay in France, and is currently the Morris and Gertrude Fine Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois. He is also author of the book 'Conformal Field Theory'. He received his PhD in 1989, under Jean-Claude Le Guillou and Jean-Bernard Zuber, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University.

#4271

Christine Heitsch

#57391

Overall Influence

Christine Elizabeth Heitsch is a mathematician whose research involves the biomolecular structure of RNA. She is a professor of mathematics in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics, and the founding director of the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology at Georgia Tech.

#4272

Curtis Greene

#79452

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Curtis Greene is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic combinatorics. He is the J. McLain King Professor of Mathematics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Greene did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. in 1969 from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert P. Dilworth. He held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Haverford.

#4273

Maggie Cheng

#70770

Overall Influence

Maggie Xiaoyan Cheng is an applied mathematician and computer scientist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Scientific Computation. Her research interests include cyber security and Machine Learning.

#4274

María J. Carro

#82705

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

María Jesús Carro Rossell is a Spanish mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis, including Fourier analysis, functional analysis, harmonic analysis, operator theory and the analysis of Lorentz spaces. She is a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, in the Department of Mathematical Analysis and Applied Mathematics.

#4275

Steven Gaal

#73048

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Steven Alexander Gaal was a Hungarian-American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota—Minneapolis. Education Gaal received his Ph.D. under Frigyes Riesz and Lipót Fejér in 1947, although at the time, graduate study in Hungary did not exist in the formal way it is thought of today. There were no formalities of preliminary exams or qualifying exams, no thesis advisor or tuition. After World War I, Hungary was dismembered and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ended. Two thirds of Hungary's territory was given to other states, some existing, others created and since vanished.

#4276

Gabriel Peyré

#45679

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Gabriel Peyré is a French mathematician. Most of his work lies in the field of transportation theory. He is a CNRS senior researcher and a Professor in the mathematics and applications department of the École normale supérieure in Paris. He was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2021.

#4277

Patrizia Gianni

#61237

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Patrizia M. Gianni is an Italian mathematician specializing in computer algebra. She is known for her early research on Gröbner bases including her discovery of the FGLM algorithm for changing monomial orderings in Gröbner bases, and for her development of the components of the Axiom computer algebra system concerning polynomials and rational functions.

#4278

Martyn Cundy

#55807

Overall Influence

1913 - 2005 (92 years)

Henry Martyn Cundy was a mathematics teacher and professor in Britain and Malawi as well as a singer, musician and poet. He was one of the founders of the School Mathematics Project to reform O level and A level teaching. Through this he had a big effect on maths teaching in Britain and especially in Africa.

#4279

Louise Nixon Sutton

#69625

Overall Influence

1925 - 2006 (81 years)

Louise Nixon Sutton was a mathematician. She was the first African-American woman to be awarded a PhD in mathematics education by New York University, and the first chair of the Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics at Elizabeth City State University.

#4280

Leopold Schmetterer

Leopold Schmetterer

#79395

Overall Influence

1919 - 2004 (85 years)

Leopold Karl Schmetterer was an Austrian mathematician working on analysis, probability, and statistics. Decorations and awards 1973: Fellow of the American Statistical Association1975: Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class1976: Science Award of the City of Vienna1981: Austrian State Prize for Science Policy 1984: Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences1969: Gibble award

#4281

Mihyun Kang

#74185

Overall Influence

Mihyun Kang is a South Korean mathematician specializing in combinatorics, including graph enumeration and the topological properties of random graphs. She is a professor in the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at the Graz University of Technology.

#4282

Richard Arenstorf

Richard Arenstorf

#80700

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Richard F. Arenstorf was an American mathematician. He discovered a stable orbit between the Earth and the Moon, called an Arenstorf Orbit. It was the basis of the orbit used by the Apollo Program for going to the Moon.

#4283

Tuval Foguel

#78565

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Tuval Shmuel Foguel is Professor of Mathematics at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. Tuval Foguel was born in 1959 in Berkeley, California to Hava and Shaul Foguel and he is a descendant of Saul Wahl. Through his mother Hava , Professor Foguel is related to Nahum Sokolow. Professor Foguel received his B.S. in mathematics from York College, City University of New York in 1988 and his PhD in Mathematics under Michio Suzuki from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1992 with a focus on finite groups. He has introduced the term conjugate-permutable subgroup. In the past, Pr...

#4284

Bonita V. Saunders

#73477

Overall Influence

Bonita Valerie Saunders is an American mathematician specializing in mathematical visualization. She works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Division of the Information Technology Laboratory, where she contributes to the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions as the Visualization Editor and the principal designer of visualizations and graphs.

#4285

Brenda MacGibbon

#71255

Overall Influence

Kathryn Brenda MacGibbon-Taylor was a Canadian mathematician, statistician, and decision scientist. She was a professor of mathematics at the Université du Québec à Montréal and was affiliated with the Group for Research in Decision Analysis.

#4286

James Murdoch Austin

#43964

Overall Influence

1915 - 2000 (85 years)

James Murdoch Austin was a New Zealand-American meteorologist. He was notable for his pioneering modeling of the meteorology of air pollution, especially that of smokestack particulates. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of the pioneer of chaos theory and early practitioner of numerical weather prediction, Edward Norton Lorenz.

#4287

Anna Panorska

#72462

Overall Influence

Anna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. Research Panorska's research interests include studying extreme eventss in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.

#4288

Maria Cristina Villalobos

#63625

Overall Influence

Maria Cristina Villalobos is an American applied mathematician at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she is Myles and Sylvia Aaronson Endowed Professor of mathematics, associate dean of sciences, and director of the Center of Excellence in STEM Education. Her research interests include mathematical optimization, control theory, and their application to retinitis pigmentosa treatment and to antenna design.

#4289

Rose Peltesohn

#74210

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Rose Pauline Peltesohn was an Israeli mathematician of German origin. Life Rose Peltesohn was the daughter of the physician Ludwig Peltesohn and of Cilly Caro. After graduation in March 1931 she studied mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin and got her Ph.D. in Mathematics at 1936 with Issai Schur as supervisor . Her dissertation was valued opus valde laudabile. Being Jewish she emigrated through Italy to Palestine, arriving 1938. Between the years 1939–1942 she worked in a bank and later as a lawyer's secretary and translator in Tel Aviv. She married her cousin Gerhard Pelte...

#4290

Sommer Gentry

#52354

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sommer Elizabeth Gentry is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy and as a research associate in surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her research concerns operations research and its applications to the optimization of organ transplants, and has led to the discovery of geographic inequities in organ allocation. She is also interested in dancing, teaches swing dancing at the Naval Academy, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the mathematics and robotics of dance.

#4291

Peter Montgomery

Peter Montgomery

#32892

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Peter Lawrence Montgomery was an American mathematician who worked at the System Development Corporation and Microsoft Research. He is best known for his contributions to computational number theory and mathematical aspects of cryptography, including the Montgomery multiplication method for arithmetic in finite fields, the use of Montgomery curves in applications of elliptic curves to integer factorization and other problems, and the Montgomery ladder, which is used to protect against side-channel attacks in elliptic curve cryptography.

#4292

Chris Rogers

#69375

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Leonard Christopher Gordon Rogers is a mathematician working in probability theory and quantitative finance. He is Emeritus Professor of Statistical Science in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

#4293

Glen Van Brummelen

Glen Van Brummelen

#55377

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Glen Robert Van Brummelen is a Canadian historian of mathematics specializing in historical applications of mathematics to astronomy. He is president of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics, and was a co-editor of Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures .

#4294

Diana Thomas

#60030

Overall Influence

Diana Maria Thomas is an American applied mathematician known for her research on nutrition and body weight. She is a professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy . Education and career Thomas is originally from Glendive, Montana, where her father was a physician; she is a graduate of Dawson County High School in Glendive, and majored in mathematics at the University of Montana, graduating in 1991. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1996 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her dissertation, Dynamics of Lattice Systems, was supervised by Shui-Nee Chow.

#4295

Ledyard Tucker

#48349

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

Ledyard R. Tucker was an American mathematician who specialized in statistics and psychometrics. His Ph.D. advisor at the University of Chicago was Louis Leon Thurstone. He was a lecturer in psychology at Princeton University from 1948 to 1960, while simultaneously working at ETS. In 1960, he moved to working full-time in academia when he joined the University of Illinois. The rest of his career was spent as professor of quantitative psychology and educational psychology at UIUC until he retired in 1979. Tucker is best known for his Tucker decomposition and Tucker–Koopman–Linn model. He is cr...

#4296

Adélia Sequeira

#73189

Overall Influence

Adélia da Costa Sequeira is a Portuguese applied mathematician specializing in the mathematical modeling of blood flow and the circulatory system. She is a professor of mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico, part of the University of Lisbon, where she is coordinator for the Scientific Area on Numerical Analysis and Applied Analysis and director of the Research Center for Computational and Stochastic Mathematics.

#4297

Anastasia Stavrova

#74469

Overall Influence

Anastasia Konstantinovna Stavrova is a Russian mathematician specializing in algebraic groups, non-associative algebra, and algebraic K-theory. She is a researcher in the Chebyshev Laboratory at Saint Petersburg State University.

#4298

Hiroaki Terao

#82467

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Hiroaki Terao is a Japanese mathematician, known as, with Peter Orlik and Louis Solomon, a pioneer of the theory of arrangements of hyperplanes. He was awarded a Mathematical Society of Japan Algebra Prize in 2010.

#4299

Rami Grossberg

#26692

Overall Influence

Rami Grossberg is a full professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and works in model theory. Work Grossberg's work in the past few years has revolved around the classification theory of non-elementary classes. In particular, he has provided, in joint work with Monica VanDieren, a proof of an upward "Morley's Categoricity Theorem" for Abstract Elementary Classes with the amalgamation property, that are tame. In another work with VanDieren, they also initiated the study of tame Abstract Elementary Classes. Tameness is both a crucial technical property in categoricity transfer pro...

#4300

Jackie Stedall

#40654

Overall Influence

1950 - 2014 (64 years)

Jacqueline Anne "Jackie" Stedall was a British mathematics historian. She wrote nine books, and appeared on radio on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme. Early life Stedall was born in Romford, Essex, and attended Queen Mary's High School in Walsall. Her academic achievements included a BA in mathematics from Girton College, Cambridge, an MSc in statistics from the University of Kent, a PGCE from Bristol Polytechnic , and a PhD in the history of mathematics from the Open University. Her PhD focused upon John Wallis' 1685 work Treatise of Algebra.

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