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,
#4401
Frederick Valentine Atkinson
#67010
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Frederick Valentine "Derick" Atkinson was a British mathematician, formerly of the University of Toronto, Canada, where he spent most of his career. Atkinson's theorem and Atkinson–Wilcox theorem are named after him. His PhD advisor at Oxford was Edward Charles Titchmarsh.
Go to Profile#4402
Wiesława Nizioł
#63865
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Wiesława Krystyna Nizioł is a Polish mathematician, director of research at CNRS, based at Institut mathématique de Jussieu. Her research concerns arithmetic geometry, and in particular p-adic Hodge theory, Galois representations, and p-adic cohomology.
Go to Profile#4403
Ruthmae Sears
#75581
Overall Influence
Ruthmae Sears is a Bahamian-American mathematics educator, focusing on systemic inequities that impede student understanding of mathematics. She is an associate professor for secondary mathematics education in the University of South Florida College of Education.
Go to Profile#4404
Elżbieta Pleszczyńska
#54541
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Elżbieta Pleszczyńska is a Polish full professor of statistics, activist of disability rights movement. Biography She gained an M.Sc. in mathematics at University of Warsaw, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in 1956. She held position at Institute of Mathematics PAS until 1972. She received her Ph.D. in 1965 in the area of discriminant analysis . Her habilitation thesis, titled "Trend Estimation Problems in Time Series Analysis", was accepted in 1973.
Go to Profile#4405
Andrei Monin
#31536
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Andrei Sergeyevich Monin was a Soviet and Russian geophysicist, mathematician, and oceanographer. Monin was known for his contributions to statistical theory of turbulence and atmospheric physics. He served as the Director of the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He was instrumental in developing the Shirshov Institute into one of the largest scientific centers for ocean and earth science studies.
Go to Profile#4406
Guergana Petrova
#75796
Overall Influence
Guergana Petrova is an applied mathematician known for her research on numerical methods for solving differential equations. She is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University. Education and career Petrova earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Sofia University. She moved to the US for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina.
Go to Profile#4407
Vivek Borkar
#48347
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Vivek Shripad Borkar is an Indian electrical engineer, mathematician and an Institute chair professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He is known for introducing analytical paradigm in stochastic optimal control processes and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He also holds elected fellowships of The World Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Indian National Academy of Engineering and the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#4408
Per Christian Hansen
#89788
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#4409
Cami Sawyer
#72868
Overall Influence
Cameron Cunningham Sawyer is an American mathematician who has worked in New Zealand at Massey University and the Ministry of Education. Trained in algebraic topology, her work in New Zealand has focused on mathematics education, educational technology, distance learning, and the needs of Māori students in mathematics.
Go to Profile#4410
Ben Andrews
#80491
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Ben Andrews is an Australian mathematician at the Australian National University. He is known for contributions to geometric analysis, with a majority of his work being in the field of extrinsic geometric flows. He received his Ph.D. from Australian National University in 1993, under the supervision of Gerhard Huisken. As of 2020, he has had nine Ph.D. students.
Go to Profile#4411
Cristina Toninelli
#75492
Overall Influence
Cristina Toninelli is an Italian mathematician who works in France as a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , at the Centre de recherche en mathématiques de la décision of Paris Dauphine University. Her research concerns the probability theory and statistical mechanics of phase transitions in interacting particle systems, including bootstrap percolation, glass transitions, and jamming. She has also studied cellular automata and group testing.
Go to Profile#4412
Dolores Richard Spikes
#48132
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Dolores Margaret Richard Spikes was an American mathematician and university administrator. Born in Baton Rouge, Dolores Richard attended public and parochial schools in that city and, still in her home city, went on to Southern University from which she earned her B.S. degree in mathematics in 1957. Also at Southern she met her future husband, Hermon Spikes.
Go to Profile#4413
Victor Bangert
#87782
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Victor Bangert is Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematisches Institut in Freiburg, Germany. His main interests are differential geometry and dynamical systems theory. He specialises in the theory of closed geodesics, wherein one of his significant results, combined with another one due to John Franks, implies that every Riemannian 2-sphere possesses infinitely many closed geodesics. He also made important contributions to Aubry–Mather theory.
Go to Profile#4414
Howell Peregrine
#58115
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Howell Peregrine was a British applied mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics, especially of free surface flows such as water waves, and coastal engineering. Education and career Howell Peregrine joined the Mathematics Department of University of Bristol in 1964 following his undergraduate and postgraduate training at Oxford and Cambridge. He spent his entire career at Bristol. One of his most remarkable contributions was the theoretical prediction of a new nonlinear entity, now called the Peregrine soliton, that may explain the formation of hydrodynamics rogue waves and...
Go to Profile#4415
Jenny McNulty
#75773
Overall Influence
Jennifer McNulty is an American mathematician and academic administrator, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her research is in combinatorics, specializing in matroid theory and graph theory.
Go to Profile#4416
George Gheverghese Joseph
#52956
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
George Gheverghese Joseph, also known as G. G. Joseph is an Indian-born African mathematician who is a specialist in the history of mathematics. His works are mainly focused on the achievements of Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics and the transmission of mathematics from India to Europe.
Go to Profile#4417
Franck Barthe
#77834
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Franck Barthe is a French mathematician. He was awarded the European Congress of Mathematics prize in 2004. He is working as a professor of mathematics at Paul Sabatier University. Work Franck Barthe is known for his reverse form of the Brascamp-Lieb inequality. With Keith M. Ball, Shiri Artstein, and Assaf Naor, he solved Shannon's problem of the monotonic entropy increase of sums of random variables.
Go to Profile#4418
Jacques Hurtubise
#85133
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Jacques Claude Hurtubise FRSC is a Canadian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department at McGill University. His research interests include moduli spaces, integrable systems, and Riemann surfaces. Among other contributions, he is known for proving the Atiyah–Jones conjecture.
Go to Profile#4419
Cindy Greenwood
#80359
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Priscilla E. Greenwood is a Canadian mathematician who is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. She is known for her research in probability theory. Education and career Greenwood graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in 1959. She began her graduate studies in operations research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became exposed to probability theory through a course on stochastic processes offered in 1960 by Henry McKean. Soon afterwards, she switched to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her Ph.D. in 1963 under the supervision of Joshua Chover.
Go to Profile#4420
Kenneth L. Cooke
#24636
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Kenneth L. Cooke was an American mathematical biologist known for his contributions to the study of epidemics. He was the W. M. Keck Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Go to Profile#4421
Pao-sheng Hsu
#75304
Overall Influence
Pao-sheng Hsu is a mathematics educator, Career Hsu completed her PhD under George Bachman at Polytechnic University in 1975; her dissertation was titled An Application of Compactification: Some Theorems on Maximal Ideals.
Go to Profile#4422
Kenneth Massey
#77969
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Kenneth Massey is an American sports statistician known for his development of a methodology for ranking and rating sports teams in a variety of sports. His ratings have been a part of the Bowl Championship Series since the 1999 season. He is an assistant professor of mathematics at Carson–Newman University in Tennessee.
Go to Profile#4423
Asha Rao
#74824
Overall Influence
Asha Rao is a mathematician and expert in cyber security. She is the Associate Dean, or Head of Department, of Mathematical Sciences and Professor at RMIT University. Education and career Rao completed her PhD in Algebra at the University of Pune. She started working at RMIT University as a lecturer in 1992, and became a Professor in 2016.
Go to Profile#4424
Mariette Yvinec
#61101
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Mariette Yvinec is a French researcher in computational geometry at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Sophia Antipolis. She is one of the developers of CGAL, a software library of computational geometry algorithms.
Go to Profile#4425
Kaye A. de Ruiz
#75862
Overall Influence
Kaye A. de Ruiz is a mathematician and educator who has spent the majority of her career teaching calculus and statistics at the United States Air Force Academy. Education De Ruiz received her Bachelor of Science degree from Southern Oregon College and a Master of Science degree from Oregon State University. While working at the Air Force Academy faculty as an instructor, she completed a Ph.D. in applied statistics at the University of California, Riverside in 1990; her dissertation, A Mathematical Model for a Paired Comparison Experiment on a Continuum of Response, was jointly supervised by Robert J.
Go to Profile#4426
Christina Birkenhake
#84772
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Christina Birkenhake is a German mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. She is a lecturer at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, in the research group on algebra and geometry. Education and career After studying mathematics at the University of Münster beginning in 1982, Birkenhake earned her doctorate in 1989 from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. Her dissertation was Heisenberg-Gruppen ampler Geradenbündel auf abelschen Varietäten [Heisenberg groups of ample line bundles on abelian varieties], and her doctoral advisor was Herbert Lange.
Go to Profile#4427
Jeanne Peiffer
#49426
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Jeanne Peiffer is a Luxembourg historian of mathematics. Contributions She deals with scientific journals in the 17th and 18th centuries, also from a scientific sociological point of view and with the aspect of the history of the specialization of mathematics journals, with perspective in the Renaissance in connection with geometry and optics, and the letter as a communication tool of mathematics in the 18th century.
Go to Profile#4428
Christina Tønnesen-Friedman
#75877
Overall Influence
Christina Wiis Tønnesen-Friedman is a Danish-American mathematician specializing in Riemannian geometry, especially of Kähler manifolds and Sasakian manifolds. She is Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
Go to Profile#4429
Jerome K. Percus
#83461
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Jerome Kenneth Percus was a physicist and mathematician known for important contributions to statistical physics, chemical physics, and applied mathematics. In 1958, he published with George J. Yevick a groundbreaking study on the statistical mechanics of classical liquids. They formulated an integral equation that is the foundation for several approximation methods for computing the pair correlation function, and thereby allow the derivation of thermodynamic properties from first principles.
Go to Profile#4430
Chris Stevens
#57079
Overall Influence
Terrie Christine Stevens, also known as T. Christine Stevens, is an American mathematician whose research concerns topological groups, the history of mathematics, and mathematics education. She is also known as the co-founder of Project NExT, a mentorship program for recent doctorates in mathematics, which she directed from 1994 until 2009.
Go to Profile#4431
David Allen Hoffman
#79830
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
David Allen Hoffman is an American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. In 1985, together with William Meeks, he proved that Costa's surface was embedded. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2018, for "contributions to differential geometry, particularly minimal surface theory, and for pioneering the use of computer graphics as an aid to research." He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize in 1990 for his expository article "The Computer-Aided Discovery of New Embedded Minimal Surfaces". He obtained his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#4432
Robert Minlos
#77117
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Robert Adol'fovich Minlos was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who has made important contributions to probability theory and mathematical physics. His theorem on the extension of cylindrical measures to Radon measures on the continuous dual of a nuclear space is of fundamental importance in the theory of generalized random processes.
Go to Profile#4433
Sylvie Boldo
#73769
Overall Influence
Sylvie Boldo is a French mathematician and computer scientist. Her research combines automated theorem proving and computer arithmetic, focusing on the formal verification of floating-point arithmetic operations and of algorithms based on them. She is a director of research for the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation , affiliated with the Formal Methods Laboratory at Paris-Saclay University and the INRIA Saclay-Île-de-France Research Centre, where she co-leads the Toccata project for formally verified programs, certified tools and numerical computations. She is als...
Go to Profile#4434
Laura Miller
#38940
Overall Influence
Laura A. Miller is an American mathematical biologist, known for her research in biomechanical applications of fluid dynamics including insect flight, jellyfish propulsion, and blood flow in embryonic hearts. She works at the University of Arizona as a professor of mathematics.
Go to Profile#4435
Terry M. Therneau
#90090
Overall Influence
#4436
Vera W. de Spinadel
#75016
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Vera Martha Winitzky de Spinadel was an Argentine mathematician. She was the first woman to gain a PhD in mathematics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1958. Between 2010 and 2017, she was full Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires. In 1995, she was named Director of the Centre of Mathematics and Design. In April 2005 she inaugurated the Laboratory of Mathematics & Design, University Campus in Buenos Aires. From 1998 to her death she was the President of the International Mathematics and Design Associati...
Go to Profile#4437
Dorothée Normand-Cyrot
#75800
Overall Influence
Dorothée Normand-Cyrot is a French applied mathematician and control theorist, known for her work on discrete-time nonlinear control systems. Education and career As a teenager entering the French university system in 1971, Normand-Cyrot found the grandes écoles closed off to her because she was female; instead she went to a lesser university to study mathematics. Her mentors included algebraist Andrée Ehresmann and, a few years later, control theorist Michel Fliess.
Go to Profile#4438
Stanisław Szarek
#84178
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Stanisław J. Szarek is a Polish professor of mathematics at both Case Western Reserve University in the USA and Pierre and Marie Curie University in France . His research concerns convex geometry and functional analysis.
Go to Profile#4439
David L. Banks
#57130
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
David L. Banks is an American statistician. He is a former editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association; a founding editor of the journal Statistics, Politics and Policy; and a co-editor of the monograph Statistical Methods for Human Rights. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Royal Statistical Society. He has been a member of the board of directors of the American Statistical Association, and he is a past-President of the Classification Society. He has taught at the University of Cambridge and at Carnegie Mellon University; he was also Chief Statistician of the U.S.
Go to Profile#4440
Paul A. Schweitzer
#49515
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Paul Alexander Schweitzer SJ is an American mathematician specializing in differential topology, geometric topology, and algebraic topology. Schweitzer has done research on foliations, knot theory, and 3-manifolds. In 1974 he found a counterexample to the Seifert conjecture that every non-vanishing vector field on the 3-sphere has a closed integral curve. In 1995 he demonstrated that Sergei Novikov's compact leaf theorem cannot be generalized to manifolds with dimension greater than 3. Specifically, Schweitzer proved that a smooth, compact, connected manifold with Euler characteristic zero an...
Go to Profile#4441
Amit Garg
#75236
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Dr Amit Garg is an Indian mathematician and mental calculator. He currently works as founder and Chief Scientist at ORMAE, a firm registered in USA, UAE & India which engages in building innovative products, consulting and training in Operations Research and Data Science.
Go to Profile#4442
Mitchell H. Gail
#88472
Overall Influence
Mitchell H. Gail is an American physician-scientist and biostatistician. He is a distinguished investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Life Gail completed a M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968 and a Ph.D. in statistics from George Washington University in 1977. He joined the National Cancer Institute in 1969, and served as chief of the biostatistics branch from 1994 to 2008. Gail is a Fellow and former President of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#4443
David B. Massey
#80658
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
David Bradley Massey is an American mathematician. He completed both his undergraduate studies and his doctoral research work at Duke University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1986 for his results in the area of complex analytic singularities under the direction of William L. Pardon.
Go to Profile#4444
Hal Schenck
#71267
Overall Influence
Henry Koewing "Hal" Schenck is an American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. He holds the Rosemary Kopel Brown Eminent Scholars Chair in mathematics at Auburn University.
Go to Profile#4445
Martin Grohe
#54133
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Martin Grohe is a German mathematician and computer scientist known for his research on parameterized complexity, mathematical logic, finite model theory, the logic of graphs, database theory, and descriptive complexity theory. He is a University Professor of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, where he holds the Chair for Logic and Theory of Discrete Systems.
Go to Profile#4446
YoungJu Choie
#69656
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
YoungJu Choie is a South Korean mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the Pohang University of Science and Technology . Her research interests include number theory and modular forms.
Go to Profile#4447
Elizabeth A. Stuart
#60274
Overall Influence
Elizabeth A. Stuart is a professor of mental health, biostatistics, and health policy and management in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research involves causal inference and missing data in the statistics of mental health. She was a co-author on a study showing that post-suicide-attempt counseling can significantly reduce the risk of future suicide.
Go to Profile#4448
Yuefan Deng
#55604
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Yuefan Deng is a professor at Stony Brook University and is also an affiliated faculty of the Institute of Advanced Computational Sciences at the same university. In addition, he is the Mt. Tai Scholar at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, China and this title ended in December, 2017. Yuefan Deng specializes in design and applications of supercomputers. He published widely in physics, applied mathematics, life science and biomedical engineering, in addition to the Biography of C. N. Yang, the Nobel laureate. He has been granted 13 patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office and Chi...
Go to Profile#4449
Alexander Astin
#20195
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Alexander W. Astin was the Allan M. Cartter Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was founding director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. He has served as Director of Research for both the American Council on Education and the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. He was also the founding director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, an ongoing national study of some fifteen million students, 300,000 faculty and staff, and 1,800 higher education institutions.
Go to Profile#4450
Mythily Ramaswamy
#70978
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Mythily Ramaswamy is an Indian mathematician and professor in the Department of Mathematics at the TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore. Her research involves functional analysis and controllability of partial differential equations.
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