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,
#4301
Ronald Getoor
#67992
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Ronald Kay Getoor was an American mathematician. Getoor received from the University of Michigan bachelor's degree in 1950, master's degree in 1951, and Ph.D. in 1954 under Arthur Herbert Copeland with thesis Connections between operators in Hilbert space and random functions of second order. As a postdoc he was an instructor at Princeton University. He became in 1956 an assistant professor and then full professor at the University of Washington. During the academic year 1964–1965 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. From 1966 until his retirement in 2000 he was a professor at...
Go to Profile#4302
Sina Greenwood
#65974
Overall Influence
Sina Ruth Greenwood is a New Zealand mathematician whose interests include continuum theory, discrete dynamical systems, inverse limits, set-valued analysis, and Volterra spaces. She is an associate professor of mathematics and Associate Dean Pacific in the faculty of science at the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#4303
Carolina Araujo
#70472
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Carolina Bhering de Araujo is a Brazilian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry, including birational geometry, Fano varieties, and foliations. Education and career Araujo was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She did her undergraduate studies in Brazil, completing a degree in mathematics in 1998 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She earned her PhD in 2004 at Princeton University, where her dissertation, supervised by János Kollár, was titled The Variety of Tangents to Rational Curves.
Go to Profile#4304
Goong Chen
#32572
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Goong Chen is an applied mathematician known for his use of computer forensics and computer simulation to recreate what may have occurred in aviation accidents. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#4305
Roselyn E. Williams
#73834
Overall Influence
Roselyn Elaine Williams is an American mathematician who is an Associate Professor and former chair of the mathematics department at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Her decades long involvement in the National Association of Mathematicians includes a 14 year term as secretary-treasurer.
Go to Profile#4306
Malay Ghosh
#67570
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Malay Ghosh is an Indian statistician and currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida. He obtained a B.S. in 1962 from the University of Calcutta, and subsequently a M.A. in 1964 from the University of Calcutta. Then he moved to the United States to pursue higher academic studies and obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1969 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under the supervision of Pranab K. Sen.
Go to Profile#4307
Konstantina Trivisa
#73290
Overall Influence
Konstantina Trivisa is a Greek-American applied mathematician whose research involves nonlinear partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the mathematical modeling of flocking. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she directs the Institute for Physical Science & Technology.
Go to Profile#4308
Tomek Bartoszyński
#86439
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Tomek Bartoszyński is a Polish-American mathematician who works in set theory. He is the son of statistician Robert Bartoszyński. Biography Bartoszyński studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw from 1976 to 1981, and worked there from 1981 to 1987. In 1984 he defended his Ph.D. thesis Combinatorial aspects of measure and category; his advisor was Wojciech Guzicki. In 2004 he received his habilitation from the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#4309
Sally Cockburn
#78010
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Sally Patricia Cockburn is a mathematician whose research ranges from algebraic topology and set theory to geometric graph theory and combinatorial optimization. A Canadian immigrant to the US, she is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Hamilton College, and former chair of the mathematics department at Hamilton.
Go to Profile#4310
Alessandra Lunardi
#73093
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Alessandra Lunardi is an Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis. She is a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the University of Parma. She is particularly interested in Kolmogorov equations and free boundary problems.
Go to Profile#4311
George Bard Ermentrout
#88415
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
G. Bard Ermentrout is an American mathematician and distinguished professor at University of Pittsburgh and a member of the Odor2Action research network. He uses nonlinear dynamics for the mathematical modeling of problems in neuroscience. He explores patterns of activation in neural systems as they relate to biological problems such as olfaction.
Go to Profile#4312
Phyllis Chinn
#68772
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Phyllis Zweig Chinn is an American mathematician who holds a professorship in mathematics, women's studies, and teaching preparation at Humboldt State University in California. Her publications concern graph theory, mathematics education, and the history of women in mathematics.
Go to Profile#4313
Elizabeth Mansfield
#74967
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Louise Mansfield is an Australian mathematician whose research includes the study of moving frames and conservation laws for discretisations of physical systems. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and was a Vice-President thereof from January 2015 until December 2018. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at the University of Kent. She was one of the co-editors of the LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics, a journal published by the London Mathematical Society from 1998 to 2015. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of t...
Go to Profile#4314
Hollylynne Lee
#73002
Overall Influence
Hollylynne Stohl Lee is an American mathematics educator and statistics educator who describes herself as an "educational designer" focusing on technology-based learning. She is a professor of mathematics education in the College of Education at North Carolina State University, where she directs the Hub for Innovation and Research in Statistics Education in the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.
Go to Profile#4315
Véronique Gayrard
#73567
Overall Influence
Véronique Gayrard is a French mathematician specializing in probability and statistical physics, with research topics including Hopfield networks, the long-term behavior of the random energy model and similar glassy systems, and metastability in reversible diffusion. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the Marseille Institute of Mathematics operated jointly by CNRS and Aix-Marseille University. At I2M, she is affiliated with the research group on the mathematics of randomness , which she headed from 2015 to 2021.
Go to Profile#4316
Zofia Szmydt
#77458
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Zofia Szmydt was a Polish mathematician working in the areas of differential equations, potential theory and the theory of distributions. She was a winner of the Stefan Banach Prize for mathematics in 1956.
Go to Profile#4317
Neda Bokan
#74354
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Neda Bokan is a Serbian mathematician specializing in differential geometry. Education and career Bokan joined the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts as an assistant in 1969, began working at the University of Belgrade in 1971, and completed a Ph.D. there in 1979, with a dissertation on transformation groups of almost-contact manifolds supervised by Mileva Prvanović.
Go to Profile#4318
Hans-Joachim Nastold
#88694
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Hans-Joachim Nastold was a German mathematician, who made notable contributions to algebra and number theory. Born in Stuttgart, Nastold earned his Abitur in Göppingen. He attended the University of Heidelberg, earning his doctorate in 1957, under supervision of Friedrich Karl Schmidt.
Go to Profile#4319
Anne Chao
#72814
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Lien-Ju Anne Chao is a Taiwanese environmental statistician. She works in the Institute of Statistics at National Tsing Hua University, where she is Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor and a former Taiwan National Chair Professor. Chao has described herself as "60% statistician, 30% mathematician and 10% ecologist". She is known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating the size and diversity of populations.
Go to Profile#4320
L. Adrienne Cupples
#81769
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
L. Adrienne Cupples was a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health. Early life and education Cupples was born to Rev. Shirley Sherrill and his wife, Mary Lea Sherrill. She studied history and American studies at Raymond College, part of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California before earning a masters and doctorate in statistics from Boston University.
Go to Profile#4321
Petra Bonfert-Taylor
#57531
Overall Influence
Petra Bonfert-Taylor is a German-born mathematician known for research in complex analysis and her work in web development for the International Mathematical Union Committee for Women in Mathematics. She is professor of engineering and Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Go to Profile#4322
Julia Pevtsova
#75035
Overall Influence
Julia Pevtsova is a Russian-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Her research concerns representation theory and in particular modular representation theory.
Go to Profile#4323
Richard Johnsonbaugh
#60768
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Richard F. Johnsonbaugh is an American mathematician and computer scientist. His interests include discrete mathematics and the history of mathematics. He is the author of several textbooks. Johnsonbaugh earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University, and then moved to the University of Oregon for graduate study. He completed his Ph.D. at Oregon in 1969. His dissertation, I. Classical Fundamental Groups and Covering Space Theory in the Setting of Cartan and Chevalley; II. Spaces and Algebras of Vector-Valued Differentiable Functions, was supervised by Bertram Yood. He also ha...
Go to Profile#4324
Pamela G. Coxson
#74716
Overall Influence
Pamela Gail Coxson is an American applied mathematician specialized in disease modelling. She is a specialist in the division of general and internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations.
Go to Profile#4325
Lisa Mantini
#65267
Overall Influence
Lisa Mantini is an American mathematician. Education Mantini earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Master of Arts and PhD from Harvard University. All these degrees were in mathematics.
Go to Profile#4326
Günter Heimbeck
#50534
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Günter Heimbeck is a German–Namibian retired professor of mathematics. His particular research interest is geometry; the Heimbeck Planes are named for him. Heimbeck probably is the first and only Namibian scholar to have a scientific sub-discipline carry his name.
Go to Profile#4327
Abdon Atangana
#88752
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (40 years)
#4328
Pauline Mellon
#64065
Overall Influence
Pauline E. Mellon is an Irish mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at University College Dublin. Her research specialties include functional analysis, the theory of Banach spaces, and the symmetries of manifolds. From 2019 to 2020 she was president of the Irish Mathematical Society and has been a member of the Royal Irish Academy's Physical, Chemical and Mathematical Sciences committee.
Go to Profile#4329
Frederick J. Almgren Jr.
#65010
Overall Influence
1933 - 1997 (64 years)
Frederick Justin Almgren Jr. was an American mathematician working in geometric measure theory. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Almgren received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974. Between 1963 and 1992 he was a frequent visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Go to Profile#4330
Wenxian Shen
#74562
Overall Influence
Wenxian Shen is a Chinese-American mathematician known for her work in topological dynamics, almost-periodicity, waves and other spatial patterns in dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at Auburn University.
Go to Profile#4331
Joris van der Hoeven
#35756
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Joris van der Hoeven is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, specializing in algebraic analysis and computer algebra. He is the primary developer of GNU TeXmacs. Education and career Joris van der Hoeven received in 1997 his doctorate from Paris Diderot University with thesis Asymptotique automatique. He is a Directeur de recherche at the CNRS and head of the team Max Modélisation algébrique at the Laboratoire d'informatique of the École Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#4332
Nicholas Bingham
#57211
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Nicholas Hugh Bingham is a British mathematician working in the field of probability theory, stochastic analysis and analysis more generally. Education and career Bingham is currently a Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College London, and is a Visiting Professor at both the London School of Economics and the University of Liverpool.
Go to Profile#4333
Chrysoula Tsogka
#74593
Overall Influence
Chrysoula Tsogka is a Greek applied mathematician whose research involves remote sensing, wave propagation, and imaging through complex media. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Merced.
Go to Profile#4334
Joceline Lega
#72364
Overall Influence
Joceline Claude Lega is a French physicist and applied mathematician, interested in nonlinear dynamics. She is a professor in the departments of mathematics, applied mathematics, and epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona, and editor-in-chief of Physica D.
Go to Profile#4335
David Abrahams
#61034
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Ian David Abrahams is an English mathematician and held the Beyer Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, 2008–2016. From 2014 to 2016 he was Director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh and in October 2016 he succeeded John Toland as Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and N M Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematics, in Cambridge. He was President 2007–2009, of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. In 2017 he was awarded the IMA/LMS David Crighton Medal for services to mathematics.
Go to Profile#4336
John Horvath
#80693
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
John Michael Horvath was a Hungarian-American mathematician noted for his contributions to analysis especially in functional analysis and distribution theory. Education and career Horvath received his doctorate in 1947 from the University of Budapest as a student of Lipót Fejér and Frigyes Riesz. Four other talented mathematicians also graduated in the class of 1947: János Aczél, Ákos Császár, László Fuchs and István Gál. Together with Horvath, they were referred to as the Big Five. After obtaining his doctorate, he went to the French National Centre for Scientific Research to do research, t...
Go to Profile#4337
Olof Hanner
#86398
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Olof Hanner was a Swedish mathematician. Education and career Hanner earned his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1952. He was a professor at the University of Gothenburg from 1963 to 1989. Contributions In a 1956 paper, Hanner introduced the Hanner polytopes and the Hanner spaces having these polytopes as their metric balls. Hanner was interested in a Helly property of these shapes, later used to characterize them by : unlike other convex polytopes, it is not possible to find three translated copies of a Hanner polytope that intersect pairwise but do not have a point of common intersection....
Go to Profile#4338
Mina Ossiander
#74470
Overall Influence
Mina Egbert Ossiander is an American mathematician specializing in probability theory and central limit theorems. She is a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University, where she also holds an adjunct appointment in statistics.
Go to Profile#4339
Margaret Wiecek
#57513
Overall Influence
Margaret M. Wiecek is a Polish-American operations researcher and professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson University, known for her research in multi-objective optimization, Pareto efficiency, robust design, and three-dimensional packing problems in mechanical engineering.
Go to Profile#4341
Nkechi Agwu
#34003
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Nkechi Madonna Adeleine Agwu is a mathematics teacher. Agwu is a naturalized American citizen, tenured faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, and was a director of the college's Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.
Go to Profile#4342
Flemming Topsøe
#46984
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Flemming Topsøe is a Danish mathematician, and is emeritus in the mathematics department of the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of several mathematical science works, among them works about analysis, probability theory and information theory. He is the older brother of the engineer Henrik Topsøe , son of the engineer Haldor Topsøe and great-grandson of the crystallographer and chemist Haldor Topsøe .
Go to Profile#4343
Lek-Heng Lim
#77710
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Lek-Heng Lim is a Singaporean mathematician. Lim earned a bachelor's degree at the National University of Singapore, studied for his master's at Cornell University and the University of Cambridge, and completed a doctorate at Stanford University. Lim started his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Charles Morrey Assistant Professor. He later joined the University of Chicago faculty. While affiliated with Chicago, Lim won the James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing and in 2017, followed by the 2020 Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra.
Go to Profile#4344
Bernard Benjamin
#57507
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Bernard Benjamin was a noted British health statistician, actuary and demographer. He was author or co-author of at least six books and over 100 papers in learned journals. He was born in London and studied physics part-time at Sir John Cass College while working as an actuary for the London County Council pension fund, later moving to the public health section. Following wartime service as a statistician in the RAF he returned to the same civilian job and studied part-time for a PhD on the analysis of tuberculosis mortality. He was appointed Chief Statistician at the General Register Office ...
Go to Profile#4345
Ichirō Satake
#74622
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
was a Japanese mathematician working on algebraic groups who introduced the Satake isomorphism and Satake diagrams. He was considered an iconic figure in the theory of linear algebraic groups and symmetric spaces.
Go to Profile#4346
Lorna Stewart
#74904
Overall Influence
Lorna Kay Stewart is a retired Canadian computer scientist and discrete mathematician whose research concerns algorithms in graph theory and special classes of graphs, including cographs, permutation graphs, interval graphs, comparability graphs and their complements, well-covered graphs, and asteroidal triple-free graphs. She earned her Ph.D. in 1985 at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Derek Corneil, and is a professor emerita at the University of Alberta.
Go to Profile#4347
Virginia Torczon
#73823
Overall Influence
Virginia Joanne Torczon is an American applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research on nonlinear optimization methods including pattern search. She is dean of graduate studies and research, and chancellor professor of computer science, at the College of William & Mary.
Go to Profile#4348
Nail H. Ibragimov
#46289
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Nail Hairullovich Ibragimov was a Russian mathematician and mathematical physicist. At his death he was a professor emeritus at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. Ibragimov's research area was differential calculus, group analysis and mathematical physics. He was the author of many books on mathematics and mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#4349
Feng Ding
#89038
Overall Influence
#4350
Albert Muchnik
#55710
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Albert Abramovich Muchnik was a Russian mathematician who worked in the field of foundations and mathematical logic. He received his Ph.D. from Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1959 under the advisorship of Pyotr Novikov. From there, he wrote his dissertation titled Solution to the Post Reducibility Problem. Muchnik's most significant contribution was on the subject of relative computability. He and Richard Friedberg independently introduced the priority method which gave an affirmative answer to Post's problem regarding the existence of recursively enumerable Turing degrees between 0 and 0' .
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