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.

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,

#4451

Irene Mulvey

#64728

Overall Influence

Irene Mulvey is an American mathematician. Mulvey completed her doctoral dissertation, titled Periodic, Recurrent and Non-Wandering Points for Continuous Maps of the Circle at Wesleyan University in 1982, where she was advised by Ethan Coven. She was appointed to a professorship at Fairfield University in 1985. In July 2020, Mulvey was elected president of the American Association of University Professors, succeeding Rudy Fichtenbaum. Later in an exclusive interview made by Vox, she claimed that state bills targeted at Diversity, equity and inclusion programs damage not only high education but...

#4452

Jacqueline Chen

#52106

Overall Influence

Jacqueline H. Chen is an American mechanical engineer. She works in the Combustion Research Facility of Sandia National Laboratories, where she is a Senior Scientist. Her research applies massively parallel computing to the simulation of turbulent combustion.

#4453

Brian Rotman

#15847

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Brian Rotman is a British-born professor who works in the United States. Trained as a mathematician and now an established philosopher, Rotman has blended semiotics, mathematics and the history of writing in his work and teaching throughout his career.

#4454

Jerzy Browkin

#89483

Overall Influence

1934 - 2015 (81 years)

Jerzy Browkin was a Polish mathematician, studying mainly algebraic number theory. He was a professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1994, together with Juliusz Brzeziński, he formulated the n-conjecture—a version of the abc conjecture involving n > 2 integers.

#4455

Jeff Edmonds

#73718

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Jeff Edmonds is a Canadian and American mathematician and computer scientist specializing in computational complexity theory. Academic career Edmonds received his Bachelors at Waterloo in 1987 and his Ph.D. in 1993 at University of Toronto. His thesis proved lower bounds on time-space tradeoffs. He did his post-doctorate work at the ICSI in Berkeley on secure data transmission over networks for multi-media applications. He joined Department of EECS at Lassonde School of Engineering York University in 1995.

#4456

Hinke Osinga

#79599

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Hinke Maria Osinga is a Dutch mathematician and an expert in dynamical systems. She works as a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. As well as for her research, she is known as a creator of mathematical art.

#4457

Jeremiah Farrell

#38191

Overall Influence

1937 - 2022 (85 years)

Jeremiah Farrell was an American professor emeritus of mathematics at Butler University in Indiana. He was well known for having constructed Will Shortz's favorite puzzle, the famous 1996 "Election Day" crossword in The New York Times. He also wrote puzzles for many other books and newspapers, such as Scott Kim's puzzle column for Discover magazine.

#4458

Friedrich Eisenbrand

Friedrich Eisenbrand

#77275

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Friedrich Eisenbrand is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor at EPFL Lausanne working in discrete mathematics, linear programming, combinatorial optimization and algorithmic geometry of numbers.

#4459

Thomas Zaslavsky

#89293

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Thomas Zaslavsky is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics. Zaslavsky's mother Claudia Zaslavsky was a high school mathematics teacher and an ethnomathematician in New York; his father Sam Zaslavsky was an electrical engineer. Thomas Zaslavsky graduated from the City College of New York. At M.I.T. he studied hyperplane arrangements with Curtis Greene and received a Ph.D. in 1974. In 1975 the American Mathematical Society published his doctoral thesis.

#4460

Albert E. Green

#43754

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Albert Edward Green was a British applied mathematician and research scientist in theoretical and applied mechanics. Biography Green studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he attended lectures by Sydney Goldstein, Arthur Eddington and G. I. Taylor. In 1932 he attained a first in the first part of the Tripos examinations in mathematics and in 1934 was Wrangler in the second part. After his first very promising publications he was named the 1936 Fellow of Jesus College, received the 1936 Smith Prize, and in 1937 received his PhD under Taylor. With Taylor he published in the 1930s and 1940s a series of works on stress distribution in anisotropic plates.

#4461

Chris Heyde

#80072

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

Christopher Charles Heyde AM was a prominent Australian statistician who did leading research in probability, stochastic processes and statistics. Heyde was a professor at Columbia University, the University of Melbourne, CSIRO, University of Manchester, University of Sheffield, Michigan State University, and The Australian National University, Canberra.

#4462

Edward George Effros

#81568

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Edward George Effros was an American mathematician, specializing in operator algebras and representation theory. His research included "C*-algebras theory and operator algebras, descriptive set theory, Banach space theory, and quantum information."

#4463

Ian Goulden

#71998

Overall Influence

Ian P. Goulden is a Canadian and British mathematician. He works as a professor at the University of Waterloo in the department of Combinatorics and Optimization. He obtained his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 1979 under the supervision of David M. Jackson. His PhD thesis was titled Combinatorial Decompositions in the Theory of Algebraic Enumeration. Goulden is well known for his contributions in enumerative combinatorics such as the Goulden-Jackson cluster method.

#4464

Michael A. Newton

#62918

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Michael Abbott Newton is a Canadian statistician. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2004. He has written many research papers about the statistical analysis of cancer biology, including linkage analysis and signal identification.

#4465

Colin P. Rourke

#66340

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Colin Rourke is a British mathematician who worked in PL topology, low-dimensional topology, differential topology, group theory, relativity and cosmology. He is an emeritus professor at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick and a founding editor of the journals Geometry & Topology and Algebraic & Geometric Topology, published by Mathematical Sciences Publishers, where he is the vice chair of its board of directors.

#4466

Robert Ellis

#72959

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Robert Mortimer Ellis was an American mathematician, specializing in topological dynamics. Ellis grew up in Philadelphia, served briefly in the U.S. Army, and then studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. in 1953. He was a postdoc at the University of Chicago from 1953 to 1955. He was at Pennsylvania State University from 1955 to 1957 an assistant professor and from 1957 to 1963 an associate professor and at Wesleyan University from 1963 to 1967 a full professor. At the University of Minnesota he was a full professor from 1967 to 1995, when he retired as professo...

#4467

Judita Cofman

#75886

Overall Influence

1936 - 2001 (65 years)

Judita Cofman was a Yugoslav-German mathematician, the first person to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Novi Sad. She was known for her work in finite geometry and for her books aimed at young mathematicians.

#4468

Michael Vogelius

#79194

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Michael Steenstrup Vogelius is an American mathematician. Education Vogelius completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland College Park in 1980. His doctoral advisor was Ivo Babuška. His dissertation thesis was titled A Dimensional Reduction Approach to the Solution of Partial Differential Equations.

#4469

Claus Michael Ringel

Claus Michael Ringel

#85079

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Claus Michael Ringel is a German mathematician, specializing in algebra. Education and career Ringel studied mathematics, physics and philosophy beginning in 1964 at the Goethe University Frankfurt with the Diplom degree in mathematics in 1968. He received in 1969 from the Goethe University Frankfurt his doctorate under the supervision of Friedrich-Wilhelm Bauer with thesis Diagonalisierungspaare in der Homologischen Algebra . He then became a research assistant at the University of Tübingen and in 1971/72 an assistant professor at Carleton University . In 1972 he habilitated in Tübingen an...

#4470

Niels Keiding

#77246

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Niels Keiding was a renowned and influential Danish Biostatistician. Biography Education Keiding studied at the University of Copenhagen, graduating with a cand.stat. degree under supervisor Anders Hald in 1968.

#4471

Vladimir Tretyakov

#21660

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Vladimir Evgenyevich Tretyakov was a Russian mathematician. He was the rector of the Ural State University from 1993 to 2006 and was its President until his death on 8 January 2021.

#4472

Michael Barr

#50115

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Michael Barr is an American mathematician who is the Peter Redpath Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at McGill University. Early life and education He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the 202nd class of Central High School in June 1954. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in February 1959 and received a PhD from the same school in June 1962.

#4473

David King

#25392

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Sir David Anthony King is a South African-born British chemist, academic, and head of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. King first taught at Imperial College, London, the University of East Anglia, and was then Brunner Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. He held the 1920 Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge from 1988 to 2006, and was Master of Downing College, Cambridge, from 1995 to 2000: he is now emeritus professor. While at Cambridge, he was successively a fellow of St John's College, Downing College, and Queens' College. Moving to the ...

#4474

Itala D'Ottaviano

#40823

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Itala Maria Loffredo D'Ottaviano is a Brazilian mathematical logician who was president of the Brazilian Logic Society. Topics in her work have included non-classical logic, paraconsistent logic, many-valued logic, and the history of logic.

#4475

David Orrell

#17280

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

David John Orrell is a Canadian writer and mathematician. He received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Oxford. His work in the prediction of complex systems such as the weather, genetics and the economy has been featured in New Scientist, the Financial Times, The Economist, Adbusters, BBC Radio, Russia-1, and CBC TV. He now conducts research and writes in the areas of systems biology and economics, and runs a mathematical consultancy Systems Forecasting. He is the son of theatre historian and English professor John Orrell.

#4476

S. L. Hakimi

#49890

Overall Influence

1932 - 2005 (73 years)

Seifollah Louis Hakimi was an Iranian-American mathematician born in Iran, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University, where he chaired the department of electrical engineering from 1973 to 1978. He was chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of California, Davis, from 1986 to 1996.

#4477

Alexander Arhangelskii

#89542

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Alexander Vladimirovich Arhangelskii is a Russian mathematician. His research, comprising over 200 published papers, covers various subfields of general topology. He has done particularly important work in metrizability theory and generalized metric spaces, cardinal functions, topological function spaces and other topological groups, and special classes of topological maps. After a long and distinguished career at Moscow State University, he moved to the United States in the 1990s. In 1993 he joined the faculty of Ohio University, from which he retired in 2011.

#4478

Marion Walter

#68203

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Marion Walter was an internationally-known mathematics educator and professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. There is a theorem named after her, called Marion Walter's Theorem or just Marion's Theorem as it is affectionately known.

#4479

Paul Baum

#72680

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Paul Frank Baum is an American mathematician, the Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. He is known for formulating the Baum–Connes conjecture with Alain Connes in the early 1980s.

#4480

Assyr Abdulle

#71932

Overall Influence

1971 - 2021 (50 years)

Assyr Abdulle was a Swiss mathematician. He specialized in numerical mathematics. Biography Abdulle earned a doctorate in mathematics under Gerhard Wanner and Ernst Hairer at the University of Geneva with the thesis Méthodes de Chebyshev basées sur des polynômes orthogonaux. He also earned a degree in violin and music from the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève in 1993. From 2001 to 2002, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and worked at the computational laboratory at ETH Zurich from 2002 to 2003. In 2003, he became an assistant professor at the University of Basel and an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2007.

#4481

Karel Hrbáček

#70484

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Karel Hrbáček is professor emeritus of mathematics at City College of New York. He specializes in mathematical logic, set theory, and non-standard analysis. Early life and education Karel studied at Charles University with Petr Vopěnka, looking at large cardinal numbers. He was awarded the degree RNDr. Before his appointment at CCNY he was an exchange fellow at University of California, Berkeley and a research associate at Rockefeller University. In 1980 he received an award from the Mathematical Association of America for his article on Non-standard Set Theory.

#4482

Jane Cronin Scanlon

#63906

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Jane Smiley Cronin Scanlon was an American mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Her research concerned partial differential equations and mathematical biology.

#4483

Boris M. Schein

Boris M. Schein

#89701

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Boris Moiseyevich Schein was a Russian-American mathematician, an expert in semigroups, and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Biography Schein was born in Moscow on 22 June 1938, and moved to Saratov during World War II. He became interested in mathematics as a teenager, and came under the influence of Viktor Wagner, a professor of mathematics at Saratov State University. Schein did his undergraduate studies in Mechanics-Mathematics at Saratov State, and chose to specialize in geometry, Wagner's subject. In 1958 he solved the problem of characterizing the semigroups that could be embedded into an inverse semigroup.

#4484

Runze Li

#87149

Overall Influence

Runze Li is an American statistical scientist, currently the Eberly Family Chair Professor in Statistics at Eberly College of Science, Pennsylvania State University. He became a Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2009, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2011 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017.

#4485

Björn Sandstede

#90023

Overall Influence

Björn Sandstede is a German applied mathematician. He is currently the Alumni-Alumnae University Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, where he serves as chair of the department. Sandstede earned his Dr. rer. nat. in 1993 from the University of Stuttgart, under the supervision of Bernold Fiedler.

#4486

Tom Whiteside

#54933

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Derek Thomas Whiteside FBA was a British historian of mathematics. Biography In 1954 Whiteside graduated from Bristol University with a B.A. having studied French, Latin, mathematics and philosophy. He had spent part of 1952 studying at the Sorbonne. In 1956 he began graduate study with Richard Braithwaite who referred him to Michael Hoskin . In 1959 he submitted the manuscript "Mathematical patterns of thought in the late seventeenth century" to Hoskin who submitted it to Archive for History of Exact Sciences for publication.

#4487

Julia Chuzhoy

#70533

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Julia Chuzhoy is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, known for her research on approximation algorithms and graph theory. Education and career Chuzhoy earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, 2000, and 2004 respectively. Her dissertation, on approximation algorithms, was supervised by Seffi Naor. She has been at the Toyota Technological Institute since 2007, and also holds a position in the Computer Science Department of the University of Chicago.

#4488

Christiane Tretter

#78920

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Christiane Tretter is a German mathematician and mathematical physicist who works as a professor in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Bern in Switzerland, and as managing director of the institute. Her research interests include differential operators and spectral theory.

#4489

Jouko Väänänen

#48886

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Jouko Antero Väänänen is a Finnish mathematical logician known for his contributions to set theory, model theory, logic and foundations of mathematics. He served as the vice-rector at the University of Helsinki, and a professor of mathematics at the University of Helsinki, as well as a professor of mathematical logic and foundations of mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Peter Aczel in 1977 with the PhD thesis entitled "Applications of set theory to generalized quantifiers". He was elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 2002.

#4490

Graham Allan

#82942

Overall Influence

1936 - 2007 (71 years)

Graham Robert Allan was an English mathematician, specializing in Banach algebras. He was Reader in functional analysis and Vice-Master of Churchill College at Cambridge University. Life Allan was born on 13 August 1936 in Southgate, Middlesex, England. After serving in the Royal Air Force from 1955 to 1957, he entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and continued at Cambridge for his graduate studies, receiving a PhD in 1964 under the supervision of Frank Smithies.

#4491

Phillip Thomas Hawkins

#71120

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Phillip Thomas Hawkins FRS is a molecular biologist, senior group leader at the Babraham Institute. Phill Hawkins has contributed much to the understanding of inositol lipids functions in eukaryotic cells. Together with his long-time collaborator Leonard R Stephens, he established that PtdInsP2 is the main substrate of receptor-controlled Type 1 phosphoinositide 3-kinases , thus identifying PtdInsP3 as the key output signal produced by this enzyme. They identified and isolated the GPCR-activated Type 1B PI3K and, in a sustained body of work, defined its structure, explained its complex pattern of regulation by GβΥ and Ras, and proved its role in inflammatory events in vivo.

#4492

Malcolm Ludvigsen

#89598

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Malcolm Ludvigsen is a British mathematician and plein air painter. He is a former research fellow and visiting lecturer in mathematics at the University of York and the author of a book on general relativity. Many of his paintings depict the beaches of the Yorkshire coast.

#4493

Edmund A. Gehan

#91200

Overall Influence

#4494

Maurice L'Abbé

#38731

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Maurice L'Abbé was a Canadian academic and mathematician. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, L'Abbé obtained his license in mathematics in 1945 from the Université de Montréal, and a doctorate in mathematics from the Princeton University in 1951. He joined the faculty of science in the Université de Montréal becoming an associate professor in 1950 and full professor in 1956. He was director of the Université de Montréal's Department of Mathematics from 1957 to 1968. He was dean of the Faculty of Science from 1964 to 1968 and Vice-Rector for Research from 1968 to 1978.

#4495

Ingo Althöfer

#64298

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Ingo Althöfer is a German mathematician at the University of Jena, where he holds the chair of operations research. Althöfer earned his PhD in 1986 at Bielefeld University. His dissertation, Asymptotic Properties of Certain Competition Systems in Artificial Intelligence and Ecology, was supervised by Rudolf Ahlswede.

#4496

Oscar Bruno

#74399

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Oscar P. Bruno is Professor of Applied & Computational Mathematics in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for research on numerical analysis.

#4497

Johann Jakob Burckhardt

#76916

Overall Influence

1903 - 2006 (103 years)

Johann Jakob Burckhardt was a Swiss mathematician and crystallographer. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1936 in Oslo. Biography Johann Jakob Burckhardt came from an old Basel family. His ancestors include a brother of Jacob Bernoulli and Johann Bernoulli. The son of a lawyer and legal advisor to the German consulate in Basel, J. J. Burckhardt attended in Basel the Gymnasium am Münsterplatz and the Oberrealschule. In 1922 he matriculated at the University of Basel.

#4498

Arnaud Doucet

#91274

Overall Influence

#4499

Dov Tamari

#61189

Overall Influence

1911 - 2006 (95 years)

Dov Tamari , born Bernhard Teitler, was a mathematician. Born in Fulda, Germany, he left for the British Mandate for Palestine in 1933. He was known for his work in logic and combinatorics, and the Tamari lattice is named after him.

#4500

Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen

Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen

#73588

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen is a Danish mathematician who works in the Department of Science, Systems and Models at Roskilde University, and in the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include the philosophy of mathematics, history of mathematics, and mathematics education.

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