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,
#4551
Karl Kunisch
#90588
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Karl Kunisch is an Austrian mathematician. Life and work Kunisch studied mathematics at the Graz University of Technology and at the Northwestern University, Evanston, USA. After his doctorate in 1978 at the Graz University of Technology on the topic of neutral functional-differential equations and semigroup theory, he obtained his habilitation in 1980 at the same university. In the following years, he repeatedly held visiting professor positions at the Lefschetz Center for Dynamical Systems of Brown University, USA.
Go to Profile#4552
Michèle Raynaud
#79664
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Michèle Raynaud is a French mathematician, who works on algebraic geometry and who worked with Alexandre Grothendieck in Paris in the 1960s at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques . Biography Raynaud was a member of the séminaire de géométrie algébrique du Bois Marie 1 and 2 and obtained her doctorate in 1972, supervised by Grothendieck at Paris Diderot University. Her thesis was entitled Théorèmes de Lefschetz en cohomologie cohérente et en cohomologie étale. Grothendieck wrote about her doctoral thesis in Récoltes et Semailles describing it as original, entirely independent, an...
Go to Profile#4553
Claudia Neuhauser
#31661
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Claudia Maria Neuhauser is a mathematician whose research focuses on mathematical biology and spatial ecology. She also investigates computational biology and bioinformatics. Neuhauser is currently Interim Vice Chancellor/Vice President for Research at the University of Houston, where she has been employed since 2018.
Go to Profile#4554
Alain Dufresne
#92435
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
#4555
Jeffrey T. Leek
#46771
Overall Influence
Jeffrey Tullis Leek is an American biostatistician and data scientist working as a Vice President, Chief Data Officer, and Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He is an author of the Simply Statistics blog, and runs several online courses through Coursera, as part of their Data Science Specialization. His most popular course is The Data Scientist's Toolbox, which he instructed along with Roger Peng and Brian Caffo. Leek is best known for his contributions to genomic data analysis and critical view of research and the accuracy of popular statistical methods.
Go to Profile#4556
Jaume Llibre
#92452
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
#4557
Dörte Haftendorn
#81372
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Dörte Haftendorn is a German mathematician, mathematics educator, and textbook author who works as a professor at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Education and career Haftendorn earned her PhD in 1975 from the Clausthal University of Technology. Her dissertation, Additiv kommutative und idempotente Halbringe mit Faktorbedingung [Additive, commutative, and idempotent semirings with the factor condition], concerned the theory of semirings and was supervised by Hanns J. Weinert.
Go to Profile#4558
Denise Lievesley
#47604
Overall Influence
Denise Anne Lievesley is a British social statistician. She has formerly been Chief Executive of the English Information Centre for Health and Social Care, Director of Statistics at UNESCO, in which capacity she founded the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Director of what is now the UK Data Archive .
Go to Profile#4559
Hans Munthe-Kaas
#86709
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Hans Zanna Munthe-Kaas is a Norwegian mathematician at the University of Bergen, and UiT The Arctic University of Norway working in the area of computational mathematics in the borderland between pure and applied mathematics and computer science.
Go to Profile#4560
Yu Takeuchi
#68105
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Yu Takeuchi was a Colombian nationalized Japanese physicist and mathematician, teacher and promoter of mathematics in Colombia. Biography Takeuchi studied theoretical physics at the Imperial University of Tokyo and was a professor at the Ibaraki University. He arrived in Colombia through a cultural exchange program sponsored by the National University of Colombia and the Japanese government in 1959, and he would go on to teach at the university until 1989. Along with five other Japanese professors, Takeuchi arrived in Colombia, entering through Buenaventura, without knowing how to speak Spanish.
Go to Profile#4561
Vanaja Iyengar
#62384
Overall Influence
1901 - 2001 (100 years)
Vanaja Iyengar was an Indian mathematician, educationist and the founder vice-chancellor of Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam, Tirupati, in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. She was one of the founders of the Andhra Mahila Sabha School of Informatics. The Government of India awarded her the fourth highest civilian honour of Padma Shri in 1987.
Go to Profile#4562
Alina Carmen Cojocaru
#79542
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Alina Carmen Cojocaru is a Romanian mathematician who works in number theory and is known for her research on elliptic curves, arithmetic geometry, and sieve theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a researcher in the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy.
Go to Profile#4563
Josephine Chanler
#80186
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Josephine Hughes Chanler was an American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. Early life and education She was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the only child of Louisa Castle and James Chanler. Her parents separated soon after her birth, and she grew up with her mother, who lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky and worked as a schoolteacher. As a girl she became ill with polio, and had to undergo treatment for it at intervals later in her life. When she was a high school student, she and her mother moved to Jacksonville, Florida, but they moved back to Bowling Green so that Chanler could attend the Western Kentucky State Normal School and Teacher's College.
Go to Profile#4564
Astrid an Huef
#78031
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Astrid an Huef is a German-born New Zealand mathematician who holds a professorship at Victoria University of Wellington. Until 2017, she held the Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Otago. Her research interests include functional analysis, operator algebras, and dynamical systems. She was the president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society for the 2016–2017 term.
Go to Profile#4565
Sankar Kumar Pal
#36268
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Sankar Kumar Pal is a computer scientist and president of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is a computer scientist with an international reputation on pattern recognition, image processing, fuzzy neural network, soft computing, granular mining, and machine intelligence. He founded the Machine Intelligence Unit in 1993, and the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility in 2004, both at the ISI. He is the founder president of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Kolkata Chapter.
Go to Profile#4566
Joe P. Buhler
#71647
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Joe Peter Buhler is an American mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic number theory, algebra and cryptography. Education and career Buhler received his undergraduate degree from Reed College in 1972, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977 with thesis Icosahedral Galois Representations and thesis advisor John Tate. Buhler was a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon from 1980 until his retirement in 2005. From 2004 to 2017, he was director of the IDA Center for Communications Research in La Jolla, California.
Go to Profile#4567
Ekaterina Kostina
#76631
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Ekaterina Arkad'evna Kostina is a Belarusian-German mathematician specializing in numerical methods for nonlinear programming, robust optimization, and optimal control theory, and in the applications of these methods to the sciences. She is professor of numerical mathematics in the faculty of mathematics and computer science and institute for applied mathematics at Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile#4568
Stevan Pilipović
#86073
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Stevan Pilipović is a Professor of Mathematics, since 1987, at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics of Novi Sad University. Biography Since 2009, he is an academician of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His research interests include functional analysis, generalized functions and hyperfunctions, pseudo-differential operators, time–frequency analysis, linear and nonlinear equations with singularities. Probability theory and stochastic processes. Moreover, he is also interested in applications of mathematics in mechanics with applications in medicine. Currently he is a preside...
Go to Profile#4569
C. C. Li
#27934
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
In this Chinese name, the family name is Li . Ching Chun Li was a Chinese-American population geneticist and human geneticist. He was known for his research and the book An Introduction to Population Genetics.
Go to Profile#4570
Joseph A. Thas
#91456
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Joseph Adolphe François Thas is a Belgian mathematician, who works on combinatorics, incidence geometry and finite geometries. Thas received in 1969 his PhD from Ghent University under Julien Bilo with thesis der 3x3-matrices met elementen in een algebraïsch afgesloten veld K. Thas showed how to extend projective geometry and cross-ratios with the concept of a projective line over a ring.
Go to Profile#4571
Robert Kass
#64683
Overall Influence
Robert E. Kass is the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Statistics and Data Science, the Machine Learning Department, and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#4572
Vincent Calvez
#62535
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Vincent Calvez is a French mathematician. He is currently a directeur de recherche at the Institute Camille Jordan at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1. He is known for his work in mathematical modeling in biology, especially in the movement of bacteria.
Go to Profile#4573
Betül Tanbay
#24680
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Betül Tanbay is a Turkish mathematician, scientist and professor of mathematics at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey and the first woman president of the Turkish Mathematical Society between 2010 and 2016.
Go to Profile#4574
Sarah Zerbes
#72750
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Sarah Livia Zerbes is a German algebraic number theorist at ETH Zurich. Her research interests include L-functions, modular forms, p-adic Hodge theory, and Iwasawa theory, and her work has led to new insights towards the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, which predicts the number of rational points on an elliptic curve by the behavior of an associated L-function.
Go to Profile#4575
Madan Lal Puri
#60978
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Madan Lal Puri is a statistician from India who built his career in the United States. He was born on 20 February 1929 in Sialkot, and is known for his work in mathematics which has had profound effects on the way statistics is understood and applied. He has won many honours and awards, including the title of College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Research Scholar and the Bicentennial Medal, both from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Go to Profile#4576
Guacolda Antoine Lazzerini
#69370
Overall Influence
1908 - 2015 (107 years)
Guacolda Antoine Lazzerini was a Chilean mathematician and teacher of mathematics. Education and career Antoine's father died when Antoine was a teenager, and she began helping to support the family by teaching mathematics. She entered the teaching school of the University of Chile in 1924, and finished her studies there in 1928, earning the title of professor of mathematics and physics with a thesis on differential equations and their application in pedagogy and engineering. She became a high school mathematics teacher at the Liceo José Victorino Lastarria , and continued to teach there for ...
Go to Profile#4577
Mauro Francaviglia
#69601
Overall Influence
1953 - 2013 (60 years)
Mauro Francaviglia was an Italian mathematician. He was a professor at University of Torino and he worked mainly on geometric methods applied to mechanics, mathematical physics and general relativity.
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Harald Garcke
#75546
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Harald Garcke is a German mathematician and professor at the University of Regensburg. Career and important results Garcke studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Bonn and finished his PhD 1993 as a student of Hans Wilhelm Alt . 1993/94 he was post-doc with Charles M. Elliott at the University of Sussex and from 1994 he was scientific assistant in Bonn where he finished his habilitation in 2000 . In the year 2001 he got offers for professur-positions at the Universities Regensburg and Duisburg. Since 2002 he is full professor at the University of Regensburg where he ...
Go to Profile#4579
You Jae Yi
#92980
Overall Influence
#4580
Chris Ferrie
#45857
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Chris Ferrie is a Canadian physicist, mathematician, researcher, and children's book author. Ferrie studied at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario Canada, where he earned a BSc in mathematical physics, a masters in applied mathematics, and a PhD in applied mathematics on Theory and Applications of Probability in Quantum Mechanics from the Institute for Quantum Computing and University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#4581
Kurt Schütte
#56785
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Kurt Schütte was a German mathematician who worked on proof theory and ordinal analysis. The Feferman–Schütte ordinal, which he showed to be the precise ordinal bound for predicativity, is named after him. He was the doctoral advisor of 16 students, including Wolfgang Bibel, Wolfgang Maaß, Wolfram Pohlers, and Martin Wirsing.
Go to Profile#4582
Itai Benjamini
#78669
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Itai Benjamini is an Israeli mathematician who holds the Renee and Jay Weiss Chair in the Department of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Benjamini completed his Ph.D. in 1992 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Benjamin Weiss. His dissertation was entitled "Random Walkss on Graphs and Manifolds". In 2004 he won the Rollo Davidson Prize for young probability theorists "for his work across probability, including the analytic and geometric, particularly in the study of random processes associated with graphs". In the same year he also won the Morris L. Levinson Prize of the Weizmann Institute.
Go to Profile#4583
Angela Spalsbury
#89069
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Angela Sue Spalsbury is an American mathematician specializing in functional analysis. She is a former president of Pi Mu Epsilon, the dean and chief administrator of the Geauga campus of Kent State University, and the co-author of a book on Haar measure, The Joys of Haar Measure, with Joe Diestel.
Go to Profile#4584
Ádám Korányi
#59910
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Ádám Korányi is a Hungarian and American mathematician. He is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman College, City University of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include complex analysis, harmonic analysis, and quasiconformal mappings.
Go to Profile#4585
John F. MacGregor
#59345
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
John Frederick MacGregor is a statistician whose work in the field of statistical process control has received significant recognition. His pioneering work was in the area of latent variable/multivariate analysis methods applied to industrial processes.
Go to Profile#4586
Michael Herman
#67159
Overall Influence
1942 - 2000 (58 years)
Michael Robert Herman was a French American mathematician. He was one of the leading experts on the theory of dynamical systems. Born in New York City, he was educated in France. He was a student at École polytechnique before being one of the first members of the Centre de Mathématiques created there by Laurent Schwartz. In 1976 he earned his PhD at the Paris-Sud 11 University, under supervision of Harold Rosenberg. He introduced Herman rings in 1979.
Go to Profile#4587
Bernadette Perrin-Riou
#30551
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Bernadette Perrin-Riou is a French number theorist. Early life Perrin-Riou was born on 1 August 1955 in Les Vans, Ardèche, France. Her parents had both had a scientific education; her mother and father were a physicist and chemist, respectively. She was brought up, along with her sisters, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Go to Profile#4588
Antonia J. Jones
#50278
Overall Influence
1943 - 2010 (67 years)
Antonia Jane Jones was a British mathematician and computer scientist. Her research considered number theory and computer science. Early life and education Jones was born in 1943 in Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital. She was the first member of her family to attend university. Jones contracted polio as a child and lost both of her legs at the age of ten. Jones attended the University of Reading, where she studied mathematics and physics and graduated both with first class honours. She was a doctoral student in number theory at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 1969.
Go to Profile#4589
Jun-Ichi Igusa
#82404
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Jun-ichi Igusa was a Japanese mathematician who for over three decades was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his contributions to algebraic geometry and number theory. The Igusa zeta-function, the Igusa quartic, Igusa subgroups, Igusa curves, and Igusa varieties are named after him.
Go to Profile#4590
Carol Wood
#59750
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Carol Saunders Wood is a retired American mathematician, the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, Emerita, at Wesleyan University. Her research concerns mathematical logic and model-theoretic algebra, and in particular the theory of differentially closed fields.
Go to Profile#4591
Forman S. Acton
#33323
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Forman Sinnickson Acton was an American computer scientist, engineer, educator and author. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Education Acton began his education in the Salem City School system. He left at the end of 9th grade to attend boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1939. He then attended Princeton University, obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1943, and his Master of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1944.
Go to Profile#4592
Gail Wolkowicz
#80185
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Gail Susan Kohl Wolkowicz is a Canadian researcher in differential equations, dynamical systems, and mathematical biology who works as a professor of mathematics and statistics at McMaster University. She is known, among other contributions, for her proof that the competitive exclusion principle holds for inter-species competition in the chemostat.
Go to Profile#4593
Kenneth Davidson
#70671
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Kenneth Ralph Davidson is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He did his undergraduate work at Waterloo and received his Ph.D. under the supervision of William Arveson at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. Davidson was Director of the Fields Institute from 2001 to 2004. His areas of research include operator theory and C*-algebras. Since 2007 he has been appointed University Professor at the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#4594
Leon Birnbaum
#37416
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Leon Birnbaum was a Romanian mathematician and philosopher. He was born in Chernovtsy on June 18, 1918 to a family with an intellectual tradition. He studied at the Orthodox High School, then at the Faculty of Mathematics. In 1941 the war reached Chernovtsy and he was deported to Magilev-Podolsk in Transnistria until 1944.
Go to Profile#4595
Casey Mann
#82406
Overall Influence
Casey Mann is an American mathematician, specializing in discrete and computational geometry, in particular tessellation and knot theory. He is Professor of Mathematics at University of Washington Bothell, and received the PhD at the University of Arkansas in 2001.
Go to Profile#4596
Mara Neusel
#78613
Overall Influence
1964 - 2014 (50 years)
Mara Dicle Neusel was a mathematician, author, teacher and an advocate for women in mathematics. The focus of her mathematical work was on invariant theory, which can be briefly described as the study of group actionss and their fixed pointss.
Go to Profile#4597
Adriana Garroni
#53179
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Adriana Garroni is an Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis, including the calculus of variations, geometric measure theory, potential theory, and applications to the mathematical modeling of materials including plasticity and fracture. She is a professor in mathematics at Sapienza University of Rome.
Go to Profile#4598
Shin-ya Koyama
#93530
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Shin-ya Koyama is a Japanese mathematician working in number theory. He is currently a professor at Toyo University. External links Website of Shin-ya Koyama
Go to Profile#4599
Judith R. Goodstein
#45602
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Judith Ronnie Goodstein is an American historian of science, historian of mathematics, archivist, and book author. She worked for many years at the California Institute of Technology , where she is University Archivist Emeritus.
Go to Profile#4600
Uriel Rothblum
#65252
Overall Influence
1947 - 2012 (65 years)
Uriel George "Uri" Rothblum was an Israeli mathematician and operations researcher. From 1984 until 2012 he held the Alexander Goldberg Chair in Management Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.
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