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,
#4651
Emil J. Straube
#83899
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Emil Josef Straube is a Swiss and American mathematician. Education and career He received from ETH Zurich in 1977 his diploma in mathematics and in 1983 his doctorate in mathematics. For the academic year 1983–1984 Straube was a visiting research scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a visiting assistant professor from 1984 to 1986 at Indiana University Bloomington and from 1986 to 1987 at the University of Pittsburgh. From 1996 to the present, he is a full professor at Texas A&M University, where he was an assistant professor from 1987 to 1991 and an associate pr...
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Davar Khoshnevisan
#90900
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Davar Khoshnevisan is an American mathematician. Biography Khoshnevisan completed bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematical sciences at Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Warry Millar. Khoshnevisan began his teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After one year, he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty. In 1993, Khoshnevisan moved to the University of Utah. Khoshnevisan was elected a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2015, and awarded an equivalent honor by the American Ma...
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Barry I. Graubard
#94780
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
#4654
Kohji Matsumoto
#92411
Overall Influence
is a Japanese mathematician . He is professor of mathematics at Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan. Education and career Matsumoto graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1981. He got a doctoral degree from Rikkyo University in 1986, advised by Akio Fujii. His thesis was titled Discrepancy estimates for the value-distribution of the Riemann zeta-function. He became a lecturer at Iwate University in 1987 and an associate professor there in 1990. He joined Nagoya University in 1995, becoming a full professor there in 2001.
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Rosa M. Morris
#71929
Overall Influence
1914 - 2011 (97 years)
Rosa Margaret Morris was a Welsh applied mathematician, working in potential theory and aerodynamics. When she was 23, her research and examination results made national news. In her later career, she taught at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire , where she co-authored a successful textbook on Mathematical Methods of Physics and became one of the first female Heads of School of Mathematics in the United Kingdom.
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Edith Hirsch Luchins
#67676
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Edith Hirsch Luchins was a Polish-American mathematician. Her work focused on applying mathematical principles to problems in the philosophy of science and psychology, most notably in the field of Gestalt psychology. The Luchins and Luchins' Water Jar Experiment is named after her and psychologist Abraham S. Luchins.
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Marko Tadić
#92730
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Marko Tadić is a Croatian mathematician. Tadić does research in the field of noncommutative harmonic analysis, especially the representation theory of classical groups and classification of unitary representations and its interaction with the modern theory of automorphic forms through Langlands program.
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Ian Milsom
#94883
Overall Influence
#4659
Charles W. Dunnett
#94884
Overall Influence
#4660
Henry J. Mcquay
#94911
Overall Influence
#4661
Rosana Rodríguez-López
#82106
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Rosana Rodríguez-López is a Spanish mathematician known for her well-cited research publications applying fixed-point theorems to differential equations. She is a professor in the Department of Statistics, Mathematical Analysis and Optimisation at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2005 with the doctoral thesis "Periodic solutions for nonlinear differential equations" under the supervision of Juan José Nieto Roig.
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Xavier Ros-Oton
#83275
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (37 years)
Xavier Ros Oton is a Spanish mathematician who works on partial differential equations . He is an ICREA Research Professor and a Full Professor at the University of Barcelona. Research His research is mainly focused on topics related to the regularity of solutions to nonlinear elliptic and parabolic PDE. Some of his main contributions have been in the context of free boundary problems, integro-differential equations, and the Calculus of Variations.
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Sergei N. Artemov
#43041
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Sergei Nikolaevich Artemov is a Russian-American researcher in logic and its applications. He currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he is the founder and head of its research laboratory for logic and computation. His research interests include proof theory and logic in computer science, optimal control and hybrid systems, automated deduction and verification, epistemology, and epistemic game theory. He is best known for his invention of logics of proofs and justifications.
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Janos Galambos
#80669
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Janos Galambos was a Hungarian mathematician affiliated with Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Education and career Galambos earned his Ph.D. in 1963 from Eötvös Loránd University, under the supervision of Alfréd Rényi. He remained at the Eötvös Loránd University as an assistant professor from 1964 to 1965. He was lecturer at the University of Ghana from 1965 to 1969 and at University of Ibadan from 1969 to 1970. In 1970, Galambos joined the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia and remained there until his retirement in 2012.
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Paul Meier
#63720
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Paul Meier was a statistician who promoted the use of randomized trials in medicine. Meier is known for introducing, with Edward L. Kaplan, the Kaplan–Meier estimator, a method for measuring how many patients survive a medical treatment from one duration to another, taking into account that the sampled population changes over time.
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Giovanni Forni
#94988
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
#4667
Ivan Stojmenović
#76530
Overall Influence
1957 - 2014 (57 years)
Ivan Stojmenović was a Serbian-Canadian mathematician and computer scientist well known for his contributions to communications networks and algorithms. He has published over 300 articles in his field and edited four handbooks in the area of wireless sensor networks.
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Lloyd Demetrius
#35973
Overall Influence
Lloyd A. Demetrius is an American mathematician and theoretical biologist at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary biology, Harvard University. He is best known for the discovery of the concept evolutionary entropy, a statistical parameter that characterizes Darwinian fitness in models of evolutionary processes at various levels of biological organization – molecular, organismic and social. Evolutionary entropy, a generalization of the Gibbs-Boltzmann entropy in statistical thermodynamics, is the cornerstone of directionality theory, an analytical study of evolution by variation and selection.
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Florent Bureau
#44155
Overall Influence
1906 - 1999 (93 years)
Florent-Joseph Bureau was a Belgian mathematician. He was a professor at the University of Liège. He worked on algebraic and differential geometry and the theory of analytical functions. In 1952, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Exact Sciences.
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A. V. Balakrishnan
#57575
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Alampallam Venkatachalaiyer Balakrishnan was an American applied mathematician and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education and career Balakrishnan grew up in Chennai, India, and entered the University of Madras in the early 1940s. While there he earned a scholarship from the Indian government to study in the United States and learn to produce documentaries. Upon arriving at the University of Southern California, known for its film school, he initially wanted to become a sound engineer on Hollywood films. At the time, he was unable to get a position because he was not a member of any of the guilds, which controlled who was able to get a jobs.
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Ronald Gould
#94805
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Ronald James Gould is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He is a Goodrich C. White professor emeritus in the Emory University Department of Mathematics. Education and career After attending SUNY Fredonia for his undergraduate degree, Gould received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Western Michigan University. His thesis was titled Traceability in Graphs, and was completed under the supervision of Gary Chartrand. He spent a short period as a lecturer at San Jose State University in 1978 and 1979, then moved to Emory University in 1979. He was named to the Goodrich C.
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Joseph Diestel
#94394
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Joseph Diestel was an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Kent State University. In addition to his contribution to functional analysis, particularly Banach space theory and the theory of vector measures, Diestel was known for a number of highly influential textbooks: in 1975 he published "Lecture Notes Geometry of Banach Spaces—Selected Topics"; in 1977, he published "Vector Measures" with J. Jerry Uhl; in 1984, published "Sequences and series in Banach spaces" and in 1995 he published "Absolutely summing operators" with H. Jarchow and A. Tonge; as well as a number of othe...
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Georgia Perakis
#59737
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Georgia Perakis is a Greek-American operations researcher and the William F. Pounds Professor of Operations Research and Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management, Associate Dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and Codirector of the MIT Operations Research Center Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research is primarily in the areas of dynamic pricing, revenue management and inventory control. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Manag...
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Ahmed Abbes
#60998
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Ahmed Abbes is a Tunisian-French mathematician and a at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques . He is known for his work in arithmetic geometry. Early life and education Abbes was born on 24 May 1970 in Sfax, Tunisia. Abbes received a bronze medal in 1988 and a silver medal in 1989 at the International Mathematical Olympiad while representing Tunisia. Abbes has both French and Tunisian citizenship.
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Yang-Hui He
#81150
Overall Influence
Yang-Hui He is a mathematical physicist, who is a Fellow at the London Institute, which is based at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, as well as lecturer and former Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He holds honorary positions as visiting professor of mathematics at City, University of London, Chang-Jiang Chair professor at Nankai University, and President of STEMM Global scientific society.
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Ian Wanless
#86786
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Ian Murray Wanless is a professor in the School of Mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research area is combinatorics, principally Latin squares, graph theory and matrix permanents.
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Charles Rezk
#93422
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Charles Waldo Rezk is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, category theory, and spectral algebraic geometry. Education and career Rezk matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and graduated there in 1991 with B.A. and M.A. in mathematics. In 1996 he received his PhD from MIT with thesis Spaces of Algebra Structures and Cohomology of Operads and advisor Michael J. Hopkins. At Northwestern University Rezk was a faculty member from 1996 to 2001. At the University of Illinois he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2006 and an associate professor from 20...
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Desmond Higham
#70844
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Desmond John Higham is an applied mathematician and Professor of Numerical Analysis the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He is a graduate of the Victoria University of Manchester gaining his BSc in 1985, MSc in and 1986 and PhD 1988. He was a postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto before taking up a Lectureship at the University of Dundee in 1990 and moving to a Readership at the University of Strathclyde in 1996. He was made Professor in 1999 and awarded the "1966 Chair of Numerical Analysis" in 2011. He moved to the University of Edinburgh in ...
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Colin W. Clark
#83738
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Colin Whitcomb Clark is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at The University of British Columbia. Clark specializes in behavioral ecology and the economics of natural resources, specifically, in the management of commercial fisheries. Clark was named a Fellow of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade in 2016 for his contributions to bioeconomics. Clark's impact upon fisheries economics through his scholarly work is encapsulated in Mathematical Bioeconomics: The Mathematics of Conservation, which is considered to be a classic contribution in environmental economic theory.
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Gene Abrams
#87390
Overall Influence
Gene Abrams is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at University of Colorado Colorado Springs. He works in the area of Algebra, and he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Oregon in 1981. Abrams' research interests are in noncommutative rings and their categories of modules, and he is known for his contributions to Morita equivalence, particularly Morita equivalence for nonunital rings.
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Jonathan Tawn
#78676
Overall Influence
Jonathan Tawn is Professor of Statistics at Lancaster University. He is one of the leading researchers in Extreme value theory, looking into both methods and applications in areas such as oceanography, hydrology, and climatology.
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Basilio de Bragança Pereira
#58167
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Basílio de Bragança Pereira is a Brazilian statistician. de Bragança Pereira studied at Escola Nacional de Ciências Estatísticas since 1958 until his Bachelor of Science in statistics , and obtained his PhD and D.I.C. from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine supervised by Sir David Cox. He also obtained a Master of Science in operational research and a docent free in applied statistics from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
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Walter Theodore Federer
#95288
Overall Influence
#4684
Emmanuel Trélat
#82307
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Emmanuel Trélat is a French mathematician. Education and career Emmanuel Trélat was admitted at École normale supérieure de Cachan in 1995 and obtained the agrégation in 1998. In 2000, he obtained a doctorate under the direction of Bernard Bonnard at the University of Burgundy at Dijon with thesis titled Étude asymptotique et transcendance de la fonction valeur en contrôle optimal; catégorie log-exp en géométrie sous-Riemannienne dans le cas Martinet . In 2001 he was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Paris-Sud, where he obtained in 2005 his habilitation Contrôle en dimension finie et infinie .
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Attila Aşkar
#13137
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Attila Aşkar is a Turkish civil engineer, scientist and former president of the Koç University in Rumelifeneri, Istanbul, Turkey during 2001 and 2009. Life Attila Aşkar was born on September 4, 1943 in Bolvadin, Afyonkarahisar Province-Turkey. He is the son of Kemal and Nüzhet Aşkar, and was married to Elsie Vance, the daughter of former Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance on August 30, 1998.
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Edray Herber Goins
#88597
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Edray Herber Goins is an American mathematician. He specializes in number theory and algebraic geometry. His interests include Selmer groups for elliptic curves using class groups of number fields, Belyi mapss and Dessin d'enfants.
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Pauline Barrieu
#75213
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Pauline Barrieu is a French financial statistician, probability theorist, and expert on financial risk assessment, risk transfer, and uncertainty quantification. She is a professor of statistics in the London School of Economics.
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Coke Reed
#50325
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Coke Stevenson Reed is an American mathematician and inventor from Austin, Texas. He is the inventor of the proprietary Data Vortex network. Implementations of this network into Supercomputers use a novel topology and switch logic based on his and Krystyna Kuperberg's solution to a problem posed by Stan Ulam in the Scottish Book.
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Ellen Baake
#77948
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Ellen Baake is a German mathematical biologist who works as a professor of biomathematics and theoretical bioinformatics at Bielefeld University. Her research uses probability theory and differential equations to study biological evolution; she has also studied mathematical immunobiology and the mathematical modeling of photosynthesis.
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Regina S. Burachik
#82547
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Regina Sandra Burachik is an Argentine mathematician who works on optimization and analysis . Currently, she is a professor at the University of South Australia. She earned her Ph.D. from the IMPA in 1995 under the supervision of Alfredo Noel Iusem . In her thesis, she "introduced and analyzed solution methods for variational inequalities, the latter being a generalization of the convex constrained optimization problem."
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Mariya Shcherbina
#60128
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Mariya Vladimirovna Shcherbina is a Ukrainian mathematician and mathematical physicist who studies the theory of random matrices. She is a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the 2009 winner of the Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky Prize.
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Richard W. Cottle
#78037
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Richard W. Cottle is an American mathematician. He was a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, starting as an Acting Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering in 1966 and retiring in 2005. He is notable for his work on mathematical programming/optimization, “Nonlinear programs”, the proposal of the linear complementarity problem, and the general field of operations research.
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Long Yiming
#85477
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Long Yiming is a Chinese researcher, mathematician, and professor at Nankai University. He is a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on symplectic geometry, nonlinear functional analysis, celestial mechanics, the variation method, and the Hamiltonian system.
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Elizabeth Cuthill
#77897
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Elizabeth Hahnemann Cuthill was an American applied mathematician and numerical analyst known for her work on sparse matrix algorithms, on block iterative methods for the numerical approximation of differential equations, and on the development of computer simulations of nuclear reactors. She was a researcher for the United States Navy at the David Taylor Model Basin. The Cuthill–McKee algorithm and reverse Cuthill–McKee algorithm are heuristics for permuting matrices into forms with small bandwidth and for associated problems in graph bandwidth, named for the work of Cuthill with James McKee...
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John Barkley Rosser
#95495
Overall Influence
#4696
Guy Hirsch
#88723
Overall Influence
1915 - 1993 (78 years)
Guy Hirsch was a Belgian mathematician and philosopher of mathematics, who worked on algebraic topology and epistemology of mathematics. He became a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in 1973.
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Andrew Putman
#95549
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Andrew Putman is an American mathematician at the University of Notre Dame. His research fields include geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. Putman earned his bachelor's degree from Rice University. In 2007, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Benson Farb. He was a C. L. E. Moore Instructor at MIT from 2007-2010, and then served on the faculty at Rice from 2010-2016. He then moved to Notre Dame, where he is currently the Notre Dame Professor of Topology.
Go to Profile#4698
Pietro Corvaja
#92702
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Pietro Corvaja is an Italian mathematician working in Diophantine geometry. He is a professor of geometry at the University of Udine. Early life and education Corvaja was born in Padua, Italy on 19 July 1967. He graduated with a scientific high school diploma from a liceo scientifico in 1985, before enrolling in the University of Pisa as a student of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He graduated from the Scuola Normale with an undergraduate thesis on the theory of transcendental numbers under the direction of Roberto Dvornicich in 1989.
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Peter. E. Kloeden
#95656
Overall Influence
#4700
Rudolf Halin
#85511
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Rudolf Halin was a German graph theorist, known for defining the ends of infinite graphs, for Halin's grid theorem, for extending Menger's theorem to infinite graphs, and for his early research on treewidth and tree decomposition. He is also the namesake of Halin graphs, a class of planar graphs constructed from trees by adding a cycle through the leaves of the given tree; earlier researchers had studied the subclass of cubic Halin graphs but Halin was the first to study this class of graphs in full generality.
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