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,
#451
Ralph Abraham
#3180
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ralph Herman Abraham is an American mathematician. He has been a member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1968. Life and work Abraham earned his BSE , MS and PhD from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Santa Cruz, he held positions at the University of California, Berkeley , Columbia University and Princeton University . He has also held visiting positions in Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, and Florence.
Go to Profile#452
Huai-Dong Cao
#9619
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Huai-Dong Cao is a Chinese–American mathematician. He is the A. Everett Pitcher Professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University. He is known for his research contributions to the Ricci flow, a topic in the field of geometric analysis.
Go to Profile#453
J. Peter May
#9703
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jon Peter May is an American mathematician working in the fields of algebraic topology, category theory, homotopy theory, and the foundational aspects of spectra. He is known, in particular, for the May spectral sequence and for coining the term operad. The word "operad" was created by May as a portmanteau of "operations" and "monad" .
Go to Profile#454
Steven G. Krantz
#9277
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Steven George Krantz is an American scholar, mathematician, and writer. He has authored more than 350 research papers and published more than 150 books. Additionally, Krantz has edited journals such as the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and The Journal of Geometric Analysis.
Go to Profile#455
Cahit Arf
#2732
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Cahit Arf was a Turkish mathematician. He is known for the Arf invariant of a quadratic form in characteristic 2 in topology, the Hasse–Arf theorem in ramification theory, Arf semigroups and Arf rings.
Go to Profile#456
Sergei Adian
#8710
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Sergei Ivanovich Adian, also Adyan , was a Soviet and Armenian mathematician. He was a professor at the Moscow State University and was known for his work in group theory, especially on the Burnside problem.
Go to Profile#457
Michael Rapoport
#9163
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael Rapoport is an Austrian mathematician. Career Rapoport received his PhD from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1976, under the supervision of Pierre Deligne. He held a chair for arithmetic algebraic geometry at the University of Bonn, as well as a visiting appointment at the University of Maryland. In 1992, he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, in 1999 he won the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize, and he is the recipient of the 2011 Heinz Hopf Prize. In 1994, he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Zürich.
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Hermann Bondi
#1851
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Sir Hermann Bondi was an Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist. He is best known for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. He contributed to the theory of general relativity, and was the first to analyze the inertial and gravitational interaction of negative mass and the first to explicate correctly the nature of gravitational waves. In his 1990 autobiography, Bondi regarded the 1962 work on gravitational waves as his "best scientific work".
Go to Profile#459
Mary Ellen Rudin
#9374
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Mary Ellen Rudin was an American mathematician known for her work in set-theoretic topology. In 2013, Elsevier established the Mary Ellen Rudin Young Researcher Award, which is awarded annually to a young researcher, mainly in fields adjacent to general topology.
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Akshay Venkatesh
#7027
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
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John Allen Paulos
#4465
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Allen Paulos is an American professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has gained fame as a writer and speaker on mathematics and the importance of mathematical literacy. Paulos writes about many subjects, especially of the dangers of mathematical innumeracy; that is, the layperson's misconceptions about numbers, probability, and logic.
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Luigi Ambrosio
#11537
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Luigi Ambrosio is a professor at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. His main fields of research are the calculus of variations and geometric measure theory. Biography Ambrosio entered the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1981. He obtained his degree under the guidance of Ennio de Giorgi in 1985 at University of Pisa, and the Diploma at Scuola Normale. He obtained his PhD in 1988.
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Murray Gerstenhaber
#6895
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Murray Gerstenhaber is an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, best known for his contributions to theoretical physics with his discovery of Gerstenhaber algebra. He is also a lawyer and a lecturer in law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
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Veeravalli S. Varadarajan
#10366
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Veeravalli Seshadri Varadarajan was an Indian mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who worked in many areas of mathematics, including probability, Lie groups and their representations, quantum mechanics, differential equations, and supersymmetry.
Go to Profile#465
Hiraku Nakajima
#8266
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hiraku Nakajima is a Japanese mathematician, and a professor of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He is International Mathematical Union president for the 2023–2026 term.
Go to Profile#466
Ravi Vakil
#10663
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Ravi D. Vakil is a Canadian-American mathematician working in algebraic geometry. Education and career Vakil attended high school at Martingrove Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, Ontario, where he won several mathematical contests and olympiads. After earning a BSc and MSc from the University of Toronto in 1992, he completed a PhD in mathematics at Harvard University in 1997 under Joe Harris. He has since been an instructor at both Princeton University and MIT. Since the fall of 2001, he has taught at Stanford University, becoming a full professor in 2007.
Go to Profile#467
Ivan Fesenko
#11383
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ivan Fesenko is a mathematician working in number theory and its interaction with other areas of modern mathematics. Education Fesenko was educated at St. Petersburg State University where he was awarded a PhD in 1987.
Go to Profile#468
André Joyal
#8314
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
André Joyal is a professor of mathematics at the Université du Québec à Montréal who works on category theory. He was a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2013, where he was invited to join the Special Year on Univalent Foundations of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#469
Stephen Schanuel
#11186
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Stephen H. Schanuel was an American mathematician working in the fields of abstract algebra and category theory, number theory, and measure theory. Life While he was a graduate student at University of Chicago, he discovered Schanuel's lemma, an essential lemma in homological algebra. Schanuel received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1963, under the supervision of Serge Lang.
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Murray Rosenblatt
#11058
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Murray Rosenblatt was a statistician specializing in time series analysis who was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1965, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He wrote about 140 research articles, 4 books, and co-edited 6 books.
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Hendrik Lenstra
#5233
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hendrik Willem Lenstra Jr. is a Dutch mathematician. Biography Lenstra received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1977 and became a professor there in 1978. In 1987, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; starting in 1998, he divided his time between Berkeley and the University of Leiden, until 2003, when he retired from Berkeley to take a full-time position at Leiden.
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Graham Higman
#8742
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Graham Higman FRS was a prominent English mathematician known for his contributions to group theory. Biography Higman was born in Louth, Lincolnshire, and attended Sutton High School, Plymouth, winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1939 he co-founded The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society, and earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1941. His thesis, The units of group-rings, was written under the direction of J. H. C. Whitehead. From 1960 to 1984 he was the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford.
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Friedhelm Waldhausen
#11551
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Friedhelm Waldhausen is a German mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology. He made fundamental contributions in the fields of 3-manifolds and K-theory. Career Waldhausen studied mathematics at the universities of Göttingen, Munich and Bonn. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Bonn; his advisor was Friedrich Hirzebruch and his thesis was entitled "Eine Klasse von 3-dimensionalen Mannigfaltigkeiten" .
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Vladimir Vapnik
#966
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is a computer scientist, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine method and support-vector clustering algorithms.
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Albert Nijenhuis
#11669
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Albert Nijenhuis was a Dutch-American mathematician who specialized in differential geometry and the theory of deformations in algebra and geometry, and later worked in combinatorics. His high school studies at the gymnasium in Arnhem were interrupted by the evacuation of Arnhem by the Nazis after the failure of Operation Market Garden by the Allies. He continued his high school mathematical studies by himself on his grandparents’ farm, and then took state exams in 1945.
Go to Profile#476
Nimrod Megiddo
#4518
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Nimrod Megiddo is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a research scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center and Stanford University. His interests include combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and analysis, game theory, and machine learning. He was one of the first people to propose a solution to the bounding sphere and smallest-circle problem.
Go to Profile#477
Winfried Scharlau
#10699
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Winfried Scharlau was a German mathematician. Biography Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie was supervised by Friedrich Hirzebruch. Scharlau was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1969–1970 and in spring 1972. From 1970 he was a professor at the University of Münster, where he has now retired.
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Per Martin-Löf
#2937
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Per Erik Rutger Martin-Löf is a Swedish logician, philosopher, and mathematical statistician. He is internationally renowned for his work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic, and computer science. Since the late 1970s, Martin-Löf's publications have been mainly in logic. In philosophical logic, Martin-Löf has wrestled with the philosophy of logical consequence and judgment, partly inspired by the work of Brentano, Frege, and Husserl. In mathematical logic, Martin-Löf has been active in developing intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathema...
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Ian G. Macdonald
#10443
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Ian Grant Macdonald was a British mathematician known for his contributions to symmetric functions, special functions, Lie algebra theory and other aspects of algebra, algebraic combinatorics, and combinatorics.
Go to Profile#480
James Serrin
#8851
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
James Burton Serrin was an American mathematician, and a professor at University of Minnesota. Life He received his doctorate from Indiana University in 1951 under the supervision of David Gilbarg. From 1954 till 1995 he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota.
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Gérard Laumon
#9901
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gérard Laumon is a French mathematician, best known for his results in number theory, for which he was awarded the Clay Research Award. Life and work Laumon studied at the École Normale Supérieure and Paris-Sud 11 University, Orsay. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 1987, and the E. Dechelle prize of the French Academy of the Sciences in 1992.
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Lisa Piccirillo
#11297
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lisa Marie Piccirillo is an American mathematician who works on geometry and low-dimensional topology. In 2020, Piccirillo published a mathematical proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics determining that the Conway knot is not a slice knot, answering an unsolved problem in knot theory first proposed over fifty years prior by English mathematician John Horton Conway. In July 2020, she became an assistant professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Carlos Simpson
#11801
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Carlos Tschudi Simpson is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Simpson received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Harvard University, where he was supervised by Wilfried Schmid; his thesis was titled Systems of Hodge Bundles and Uniformization. He became a professor at the University of Toulouse III and then at the University of Nice. He is research director of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
Go to Profile#484
Wilfried Schmid
#11746
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Wilfried Schmid is a German-American mathematician who works in Hodge theory, representation theory, and automorphic forms. After graduating as valedictorian of Princeton University's class of 1964, Schmid earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1967 under the direction of Phillip Griffiths, and then taught at Berkeley and Columbia University, becoming a full professor at Columbia at age 27. In 1978, he moved to Harvard University, where he served as the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 2019.
Go to Profile#485
Wolfgang M. Schmidt
#11887
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Wolfgang M. Schmidt is an Austrian mathematician working in the area of number theory. He studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, where he received his PhD, which was supervised by Edmund Hlawka, in 1955. Wolfgang Schmidt is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#486
Allen Hatcher
#13213
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Allen Edward Hatcher is an American topologist. Biography Hatcher was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. After obtaining his B.S from Oberlin College in 1966, he went for his graduate studies to Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1971. His thesis, A K2 Obstruction for Pseudo-Isotopies, was written under the supervision of Hans Samelson. Afterwards, Hatcher went to Princeton University, where he was an NSF postdoc for a year, then a lecturer for another year, and then Assistant Professor from 1973 to 1979. He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1975–76 and 1979–80.
Go to Profile#487
Arthur T. Benjamin
#8132
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Arthur T. Benjamin is an American mathematician who specializes in combinatorics. Since 1989 he has been a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, where he is the Smallwood Family Professor of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#488
Jacob Fox
#12780
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Jacob Fox is an American mathematician. He is a professor at Stanford University. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics.
Go to Profile#489
Walter Noll
#5262
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Walter Noll was a mathematician, and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. He is best known for developing mathematical tools of classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and continuum mechanics.
Go to Profile#490
Carl Pomerance
#8283
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Carl Bernard Pomerance is an American number theorist. He attended college at Brown University and later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number has at least seven distinct prime factors. He joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies for a number of years, and then became a distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#491
Andrei Okounkov
#7347
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
#492
Robert Steinberg
#10776
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Robert Steinberg was a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. He introduced the Steinberg representation, the Lang–Steinberg theorem, the Steinberg group in algebraic K-theory, Steinberg's formula in representation theory, and the Steinberg groups in Lie theory that yield finite simple groups over finite fields.
Go to Profile#493
Bill Gosper
#4384
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ralph William Gosper Jr. , known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and he holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. The Gosper curve and the Gosper's algorithm are named after him.
Go to Profile#494
Hale Trotter
#8628
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Hale Freeman Trotter was a Canadian-American mathematician, known for the Lie–Trotter product formula, the Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm, and the Lang–Trotter conjecture. He was born in Kingston, Ontario. He died in Princeton, New Jersey on January 17, 2022.
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Michel Hénon
#6578
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Michel Hénon was a French mathematician and astronomer. He worked for a long time at the Nice Observatory. In astronomy, Hénon is well known for his contributions to stellar dynamics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he made important contributions on the dynamical evolution of star clusters, in particular globular clusters. He developed a numerical technique using Monte Carlo methods to follow the dynamical evolution of a spherical star cluster much faster than the so-called n-body methodss.
Go to Profile#496
John Coleman Moore
#10705
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
John Coleman Moore was an American mathematician. The Borel−Moore homology and Eilenberg–Moore spectral sequence are named after him. Early life and education Moore was born in 1923 in Staten Island, New York. He received his B.A. in 1948 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in 1952 from Brown University under the supervision of George W. Whitehead.
Go to Profile#497
Victor Klee
#7961
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Victor LaRue Klee, Jr. was a mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. He spent almost his entire career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Go to Profile#498
Abraham H. Taub
#7726
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Abraham Haskel Taub was a distinguished American mathematician and physicist who made important contributions to the early development of general relativity, as well as differential geometry and differential equations.
Go to Profile#499
J. W. S. Cassels
#10325
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
John William Scott "Ian" Cassels, FRS was a British mathematician. Biography Cassels was educated at Neville's Cross Council School in Durham and George Heriot's School in Edinburgh. He went on to study at the University of Edinburgh and graduated with an undergraduate Master of Arts degree in 1943.
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Samuel Karlin
#5695
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century. Education and career Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life. Later in life he told his three children, who all became scientists, that walking down the street without a yarmulke on his head for the first time was a milestone in his life.
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