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,
#4351
Joan Moschovakis
#67065
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Joan Rand Moschovakis is a logician and mathematician focusing on intuitionistic logic and mathematics. She is professor emerita at Occidental College and a guest at UCLA. Moschovakis earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 under the direction of Stephen Kleene, with a dissertation titled Disjunction, Existence and *-Eliminability in Formalized Intuitionistic Analysis.
Go to Profile#4352
Thomas Streicher
#52090
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Thomas Streicher is an Austrian mathematician who is a Professor of Mathematics at Technische Universität Darmstadt. He received his PhD in 1988 from the University of Passau with advisor Manfred Broy.
Go to Profile#4353
Alfred Frölicher
#89098
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Alfred Frölicher was a Swiss mathematician . He was a full professor at the Université de Fribourg , and then at the Université de Genève . He introduced the Frölicher spectral sequence and the Frölicher–Nijenhuis bracket and Frölicher spaces and Frölicher groups.
Go to Profile#4354
Kathleen Kavanagh
#73983
Overall Influence
Kathleen Rose Kavanagh is an American applied mathematician whose research involves simulation-based engineering, particular for problems involving air quality, water quality, and sustainable irrigation. She is a professor of mathematics at Clarkson University, and a director of the New York State Education IMPETUS for Career Success providing science enrichment for middle and high school students in three counties of New York State.. Kavanagh is also the associate director for the Institute for STEM Education at Clarkson University.
Go to Profile#4355
Katy Milkman
#10464
Overall Influence
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
Go to Profile#4356
Albrecht Pfister
#69287
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Albrecht Pfister is a German mathematician specializing in algebra and in particular quadratic forms. Pfister received his doctoral degree in 1961 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The title of his doctoral thesis was Über das Koeffizientenproblem der beschränkten Funktionen von zwei Veränderlichen . His thesis advisors were Martin Kneser and Karl Stein. In 1966 he received his habilitation at the Georg August University of Göttingen. From 1970 until his retirement he was professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.
Go to Profile#4357
Judith Covington
#75286
Overall Influence
Judith Lynnette Covington is an American mathematician and mathematics educator who works as a professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University Shreveport . Education and career Covington earned her Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with a dissertation in topological group theory jointly supervised by Victor P. Schneider and Bradd Clark, and in the same year joined the LSUS faculty. In the mid-1990s, she became one of the first cohort of fellows of Project NExT, a professional development program of the Mathematical Association of America, and she has continued t...
Go to Profile#4358
Joyce McLaughlin
#82138
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Joyce Rogers McLaughlin was an American mathematician, the Ford Foundation Professor of Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests were primarily in applied mathematics, and in particular in inverse problems.
Go to Profile#4359
Ilkka Niiniluoto
#13214
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Ilkka Maunu Olavi Niiniluoto is a Finnish philosopher and mathematician, serving as a professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki since 1981. He is currently on leave from his position, having been appointed as rector of the University of Helsinki on 1 August 2003, for a five-year period. On 25 April 2008 he was chosen to succeed Kari Raivio as chancellor of the University of Helsinki, beginning 1 June 2008.
Go to Profile#4360
Paul F. Velleman
#55286
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Paul F. Velleman is an American academic who is a professor of statistics at Cornell University. Education Velleman earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and social science from Dartmouth College, followed by Master of Arts and PhD from Princeton University. Velleman's thesis was written on the topic of non-linear data smoothing.
Go to Profile#4361
Alberto Cattaneo
#83393
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Alberto Sergio Cattaneo is an Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist, specializing in geometry related to quantum field theory and string theory. Biography After attending Liceo scientifico A. Volta in Milan, Cattaneo studied physics at University of Milan, graduating in 1991. In 1995 he obtained a PhD in theoretical physics at the same university; his thesis, entitled Teorie topologiche di tipo BF ed invarianti dei nodi , was supervised by Maurizio Martellini.
Go to Profile#4362
K. S. S. Nambooripad
#72475
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
K. S. S. Nambooripad was an Indian mathematician who has made fundamental contributions to the structure theory of regular semigroups. Nambooripad was also instrumental in popularising the TeX software in India and also in introducing and championing the cause of the free software movement in India.
Go to Profile#4363
Viatcheslav M. Kharlamov
#71079
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Viatcheslav Mikhailovich Kharlamov is a Russian-French mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and differential topology. Kharlamov studied from 1967 to 1972 at the Leningrad State University, where he received his Russian candidate degree in 1975 under Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin, with the thesis Inequalities and congruences for Euler characteristics of certain real algebraic varieties. From 1968, he taught at the Specialized Physics-Mathematics Boarding School No. 45 associated with Leningrad University and from 1976, he was a professor at Syktyvkar State University. From 1979 to 1991 he was a professor at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute.
Go to Profile#4364
Masanori Ohya
#59355
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
is a Japanese mathematician. After he received a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics and Information Science and Dr.Sc., he continuously worked on operator algebra, quantum entropy, quantum information theory and bio-information. He achieved results in the fields of quantum information and mathematical physics. In particular, he proposed his version of quantum mutual entropy. Note this quantity is not the same as Holevo's chi quantity or coherent information, though each of them plays important role in quantum information theory. The information theoretic meaning of Ohya's quantum mutual information...
Go to Profile#4365
Guy Henniart
#63671
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Guy Henniart is a French mathematician at Paris-Sud 11 University. He is known for his contributions to the Langlands program, in particular his proof of the local Langlands conjecture for GL over a p-adic local field—independently from Michael Harris and Richard Taylor—in 2000.
Go to Profile#4366
Ana Carpio
#75322
Overall Influence
Ana María Carpio Rodríguez is a Spanish applied mathematician whose research has included inverse problems, the propagation of dislocations in crystals, fluid dynamics, reaction–diffusion systems, and cancer metastasis. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Go to Profile#4367
Milton Sobel
#51532
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Milton Sobel was professor emeritus of statistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He made notable contributions in the areas of decision theory, sequential analysis, selection and ranking, reliability analysis, combinatorial problems, and Dirichlet processes. Of particular note are his contributions in selection and ranking, sequential analysis and reliability.
Go to Profile#4368
Carolyn Yackel
#75122
Overall Influence
Carolyn Yackel is an American mathematician who has been Professor of Mathematics at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia since 2001. From 1998 to 2001 she was Max Zorn Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Indiana University.
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Helen MacGillivray
#65003
Overall Influence
Helen Louise MacGillivray is an Australian statistician and statistics educator. She is the former president of the International Statistical Institute, the International Association for Statistical Education, and the Statistical Society of Australia, and chair of the United Nations Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training.
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Wolfgang Soergel
#70156
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Wolfgang Soergel is a German mathematician, specializing in geometry and representation theory. Biography He spent his youth in Heidelberg, where he passed the Abitur examination in 1980 at the . He studied mathematics and physics in Geneva and Bonn and received his Promotion in 1988 from the University of Hamburg. His PhD dissertation Universelle versus relative Einhüllende: Eine geometrische Untersuchung von Quotienten von universellen Einhüllenden halbeinfacher Lie-Algebren was supervised by Jens Carsten Jantzen. After postdoctoral positions at U. C. Berkeley, Harvard University, and MIT, Soergel completed his Habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1991.
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William McCrea
#34131
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Sir William Hunter McCrea FRS FRSE FRAS was an English astronomer and mathematician. Biography He was born in Dublin in Ireland on 13 December 1904. His family moved to Kent in 1906 and then to Derbyshire where he attended Chesterfield Grammar School. His father was a school master at Netherthorpe Grammar School in Staveley. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1923 where he studied Mathematics, later gaining a PhD in 1929 under Ralph H. Fowler.
Go to Profile#4372
Hans-Rudolf Künsch
#77632
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Hans Rudolf Künsch is a Swiss mathematician and statistician based in Zürich, where he has been a professor with the Seminar für Statistik since 1983 at the ETH Zurich. Education and career Künsch studied mathematics at ETH Zürich Künsch worked as a research student at the University of Tokyo with a scholarship grant from the Japanese government. After completing his PhD at ETH Zürich, with a dissertation project under Hans Föllmer and Frank Hampel on Reellwertige Zufallsfelder auf einem Gitter: Interpolationsprobleme, Variationsprinzip und statistische Analyse, he returned to research work in Japan, at the University of Tokyo and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics.
Go to Profile#4373
Doreen Thomas
#75000
Overall Influence
Doreen Anne Thomas, is a mathematician and electrical and mechanical engineer. She is an emeritus professor of Mechanical Engineering at Melbourne University and director of the start-up company MineOptima.
Go to Profile#4374
Sigur Dbarur Helgason
#89388
Overall Influence
#4375
Dan Burghelea
#76412
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Dan Burghelea is a Romanian-American mathematician, academic, and researcher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Ohio State University. Burghelea has contributed to a number of mathematical domains such as geometric and algebraic topology , global and geometric analysis , and applied topology .
Go to Profile#4376
Désiré-luc Massart
#89431
Overall Influence
#4377
Alex James
#62859
Overall Influence
Alex James is a British and New Zealand applied mathematician and mathematical biologist whose research involves the mathematical modeling of wildlife behaviour, gender disparities in academia, and the epidemiology of COVID-19. She is a professor in the school of mathematics and statistics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and a researcher with the Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence for Complex Systems, where she is Deputy Director for Industry and Stakeholder Engagement.
Go to Profile#4378
Marc Quinn
#5995
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Marc Quinn is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, and painting. Quinn explores "what it is to be human in the world today" through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment, and the media. His work has used materials that vary widely, from blood, bread and flowers, to marble and stainless steel. Quinn has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sir John Soane's Museum, the Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Fondation Beyeler, Fondazione Prada, and South London Gallery. The artist was a notable member of the Young British A...
Go to Profile#4379
Marie Françoise Ouedraogo
#31222
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Marie Françoise Ouedraogo is a Burkinabé mathematician. She has previously served in government as permanent secretary of the national policy of good governance. Biography Born in December 1967, Ouedraogo was raised in Ouagadougou. She was drawn to the study of mathematics at a young age as she received good grades without putting forth much effort. She was educated at the University of Ouagadougou, where she wrote her first thesis on Lie superalgebras in 1999. Akry Koulibaly served as her doctoral adviser. From 2005 to 2008 Ouedraogo served as the permanent secretary of the national policy of good governance.
Go to Profile#4380
Wilfrid Kendall
#53992
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Wilfrid S. Kendall is professor of statistics at the University of Warwick. He earned a DPhil in probability theory from the University of Oxford in 1979, authored or edited 5 books, published around 100 scientific articles in theoretical and applied probability and has been the president of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability . He is founding co-director of the UK Academy for PhD Training in Statistics , which each year provides training for around 90 first-year Statistics PhD students from the UK and Republic of Ireland.
Go to Profile#4381
André Warusfel
#69204
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
André Warusfel was a French mathematician and an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure. He taught for many years in preparatory classes, mainly in high schools Henri IV and Louis-le-Grand. Inspector General of mathematics from 1994 to 2001, he is Inspector General Emeritus of Mathematics Education.
Go to Profile#4382
Peng Yee Lee
#58585
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Peng Yee Lee is a Singaporean mathematician and mathematics educator. Lee is an associate professor of mathematics at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. He is a former president of the Southeast Asian Mathematical Society, a former vice president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction, and a former president of the Association of Mathematics Educators of Singapore.
Go to Profile#4383
Coralie Colmez
#24909
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (37 years)
Coralie Colmez is a French author and tutor in mathematics and mathematics education. Early life and career Coralie Colmez is the daughter of mathematicians Pierre Colmez and Leila Schneps. Colmez was raised in Paris, France.
Go to Profile#4384
Boris Mityagin
#85220
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Boris Samuel Mityagin is a Russian-American mathematician. Mityagin received in 1961 his candidate degree under Georgiy Shilov at the Moscow State University and in 1963 his Russian doctorate . He was a researcher at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1979 he became a professor at Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#4385
Lynda Wiest
#75279
Overall Influence
Lynda R. Wiest is an American mathematics education researcher and professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Research Wiest investigates mathematics education, educational equity, and teacher education.
Go to Profile#4386
Gene Wolfe
#1506
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Gene Rodman Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He was noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He was a prolific short story writer and novelist, and won many literary awards. Wolfe has been called "the Melville of science fiction", and was honored as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Go to Profile#4387
David Madigan
#44232
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
David Bennett Madigan is an Irish–American statistician and academic. He is currently Provost and Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Northeastern University. Previously he was Professor of Statistics at Columbia University. From 2013 to 2018 he was also the Executive Vice-President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and from 2008 to 2013 he served as Chair of the Department of Statistics, both at Columbia University. He was Dean of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Rutgers University , Director of the Institute of Biostatistics at Rutgers Univer...
Go to Profile#4388
Ralucca Gera
#75512
Overall Influence
Ralucca Michelle Gera is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory, including graph coloring, dominating sets, and spectral graph theory. Her interests also include personalized learning in mathematics education. She is a professor of mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Go to Profile#4389
Elisabeth Frink
#14560
Overall Influence
1930 - 1993 (63 years)
Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink was an English sculptor and printmaker. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as "the nature of Man; the 'horseness' of horses; and the divine in human form".
Go to Profile#4390
Michael Dorff
#78445
Overall Influence
Michael John Dorff is a mathematician at Brigham Young University known for his work in undergraduate research, promoting careers in math, popularizing mathematics, and harmonic mappings. Life and career Michael Dorff received his BA in Mathematics Education from Brigham Young University in 1986. He then taught High School math at Palos Verdes High, California, and Nurnberg High, Germany from 1986–1990. He received his MS from University of New Hampshire in 1992 followed by a Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Kentucky in 1997. He taught at University of Missouri-Rolla as an assistant pro...
Go to Profile#4391
Jesús Ildefonso Díaz
#81742
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jesús Ildefonso Díaz is a Spanish mathematician who works in partial differential equations. He is a professor at Complutense University of Madrid and a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#4392
Bruce G. Lindsay
#81062
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Bruce George Lindsay was an American statistician best known for his contributions to mixture modeling and likelihood theory. Biography Lindsay was born in 1947 in The Dalles, Oregon. He has earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Oregon in 1969 and a Ph.D. in biomathematics from the University of Washington in 1978. Between his undergraduate and graduate studies he has served in the U.S. Coast Guard for four years during the Vietnam War. He joined the Pennsylvania State University faculty in 1979, heading the Department of Statistics in 1998–2000 and 2006–2012 and rising to the rank of Eberly Chair in Statistics in 2012.
Go to Profile#4393
Ernie Tuck
#70181
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Professor Ernest Oliver Tuck was an Australian applied mathematician, notable for his sustained work in ship hydrodynamics, and for Tuck's incompressibility function. Early life and education Tuck was born on 1 June 1939 in Adelaide, South Australia. He studied Applied Mathematics for his undergraduate degree at the University of Adelaide, where his principal mentor was Professor R. B. Potts. In 1960, he studied with Fritz Ursell at Cambridge University for his PhD. His PhD thesis was on the application of slender-body theory to ships. In it, he made a revolutionary approach of using matched ...
Go to Profile#4394
Henry Helson
#85739
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Henry Berge Helson was an American mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley who worked on analysis. Education and career Helson received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1947. With the support of a Harvard travelling fellowship, he spent the academic year 1947–1948 in Europe; he visited London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna, but spent most of his time in Warsaw and then from spring 1948 in Wroclaw, where he worked with Marczewski. Helson received his Ph.D. in 1950 from Harvard with supervisor Lynn Loomis and then spent the academic year 1950–1951 primarily in Uppsala working with Beurling but with frequent trips elsewhere in Europe.
Go to Profile#4395
Mary Silber
#57975
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Mary Catherine Silber is a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago who works on dynamical systems, in bifurcation theory and pattern formation. Education and career Silber completed her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, under the supervision of Edgar Knobloch. Her dissertation was Symmetry and Spatial Pattern Selection.
Go to Profile#4396
Xiaojun Chen
#75097
Overall Influence
Xiaojun Chen is a Chinese applied mathematician, Chair Professor of Applied Mathematics at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization, complementarity theory, and stochastic equilibrium problems.
Go to Profile#4397
Chiara Sabatti
#57745
Overall Influence
Chiara Sabatti is an Italian and American statistician and statistical geneticist, and a professor of biomedical data science and of statistics at Stanford University. Her research involves the analysis of high-throughput genomics data.
Go to Profile#4398
Alison Harcourt
#39401
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Alison Grant Harcourt is an Australian mathematician and statistician most well-known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm along with Ailsa Land whilst carrying out research at the London School of Economics. She was also part of the team which developed a poverty line as part of the Henderson Inquiry into poverty in Australia and helped to introduce the double randomisation method of ordering candidates used in Australian elections.
Go to Profile#4399
Alona Ben-Tal
#74820
Overall Influence
Alona Ben-Tal is an Israeli and New Zealand applied mathematician who works as an associate professor and deputy head of school in the School of Natural and Computational Sciences at Massey University. Her research concerns dynamical systems and the mathematical modeling of human and bird breathing and of electrical power systems.
Go to Profile#4400
Carrie Diaz Eaton
#65791
Overall Influence
Carrie Diaz Eaton is an associate professor of digital and computational studies at Bates College, a co-founder of QUBES , and project director for Math Mamas. Diaz Eaton is a 1st generation Latina of Peruvian descent and is also known for her work in social justice in STEM higher education.
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