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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#4701
David Edmunds
#94721
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
David Eric Edmunds FLSW is a British mathematician working in analysis. He obtained his PhD in 1955 at the University of Cardiff under the supervision of Rosa M. Morris. In 1996, he was awarded the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#4702
Pilar Ribeiro
#84094
Overall Influence
1911 - 2011 (100 years)
Pilar Ribeiro was a mathematician who was a founder of the Portuguese Mathematical Society and also of the Gazeta de Matemática . Early life Maria do Pilar Baptista Ribeiro was born in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, on 5 October 1911, the daughter of Joaquim Rodrigues Carreira and Luísa Loureiro Peres. She graduated in Mathematics from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon in 1933, at a time when it was still unusual for women to study such a subject. A year later, she married mathematician Hugo Baptista Ribeiro , who she had met during the course. The couple shared an oppos...
Go to Profile#4703
Andrée Ehresmann
#71952
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Andrée Ehresmann is a French mathematician specialising in category theory. Education and career Ehresmann was a researcher at CNRS from 1957 to 1963. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 1962 at University of Paris under the supervision of Gustave Choquet. Her thesis was entitled Différentiabilité dans les espaces localement convexes. Distructures [Differentiability in locally convex spaces. Distructures].
Go to Profile#4704
Ranee Brylinski
#77835
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Ranee Kathryn Brylinski is an American mathematician known for her research in representation theory and quantum logic gates. Formerly a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, she left academia in 2003 to found the mathematical consulting company Brylinski Research with her husband, Jean-Luc Brylinski.
Go to Profile#4705
Lucy Campbell
#81994
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Lucy Jean Campbell is an applied mathematician and numerical analyst from Barbados, Jamaica, Ghana, and Canada, specializing in the applications of fluid dynamics to modeling the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. Beyond fluid dynamics, she has also investigated methods for tracing the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. She is an associate professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University.
Go to Profile#4706
Herta Freitag
#68907
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Herta Freitag was an Austrian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Hollins College, known for her work on the Fibonacci numbers. Life She was born as Herta Taussig in Vienna, earning a master's degree from the University of Vienna in 1934. She took a teaching position at the university. However, her father had publicly opposed the Nazis. Herta and her parents decided to move to a summer cottage in the mountains outside Vienna, to give themselves some time to make plans for the future. Herta's brother, Walter Taussig, a musician, was touring the United States and decided to remain in the U.S.
Go to Profile#4707
Yves Benoist
#79277
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Yves Benoist is a French mathematician, known for his work on group dynamics on homogeneous spaces. He is currently a Senior Researcher of CNRS at the University of Paris-Sud. In 1990 Benoist proved a longstanding open conjecture with Patrick Foulon and François Labourie about Anosov flows on compact, negatively curved manifolds. In the 2000s he wrote a series of papers on the divisible convex sets in projective space and periodic tilings by such sets.
Go to Profile#4708
Waleed Al-Salam
#69286
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
Waleed Al-Salam was a mathematician who introduced Al-Salam–Chihara polynomials, Al-Salam–Carlitz polynomials, q-Konhauser polynomials, and Al-Salam–Ismail polynomials. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta.
Go to Profile#4709
James Stuart Forrester
#95944
Overall Influence
#4710
Isabella Bashmakova
#72349
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Isabella Grigoryevna Bashmakova was a Russian historian of mathematics. In 2001, she was a recipient of the Alexander Koyré́ Medal of the International Academy of the History of Science. Education and career Bashmakova was born on January 3, 1921, in Rostov-on-Don, to a family of Armenian descent. Her father, Grigory Georgiyevich Bashmakov, was a lawyer. Her family moved to Moscow in 1932. She began studies in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1938, but was evacuated from Moscow during World War II, during which she served as a nurse in Samarkand. She completed a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#4711
Guozhen Lu
#41876
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Guozhen Lu is a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is known for his contributions to harmonic analysis, geometric analysis, and partial differential equations. Education and career Lu graduated from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China in 1983 and earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1991. He was a Bateman Research Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology from 1991 to 1993, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Wright State University from 1993 to 1997, and an associate professor of the same department from 1997 to 2000 before he moved to Wayne State University.
Go to Profile#4712
Kenneth L. Lange
#95995
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
#4713
David E. Barrett
#70152
Overall Influence
David Eugene Barrett is a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan. Barrett received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1982 under the supervision of Raghavan Narasimhan. In 2012, Barrett became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#4714
Lillian K. Bradley
#79346
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Lillian Katie Bradley was an American mathematician and mathematics educator who in 1960 became the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in any subject at the University of Texas at Austin. She accomplished this ten years after African-Americans were first admitted to the school, and despite the dominance of the mathematics department at Austin by R. L. Moore, known for his segregationist views and for his snubs of African-American students.
Go to Profile#4715
Jerome Robbins
#1437
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Jerome Robbins was an American dancer, choreographer, film director, theatre director and producer who worked in classical ballet, on stage, film, and television. Among his numerous stage productions were On the Town, Peter Pan, High Button Shoes, The King and I, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof. Robbins was a five-time Tony Award-winner and a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. He received two Academy Awards, including the 1961 Academy Award for Best Director with Robert Wise for West Side Story and a special Academy Honorary Award for ...
Go to Profile#4716
Mikhail Agranovich
#94534
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Mikhail Semyonovich Agranovich was a Russian mathematician working on partial differential equations who introduced the Agranovich–Dynin formula. External links
Go to Profile#4717
Ram Dass
#725
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Ram Dass , also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and writer. His best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, which has been described by multiple reviewers as "seminal", helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill , How Can I Help? , and Polishing the Mirror .
Go to Profile#4718
Tamal Dey
#60154
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Tamal Krishna Dey is an Indian mathematician and computer scientist specializing in computational geometry and computational topology. He is a professor at Purdue University. Education and career Dey graduated from Jadavpur University in 1985, with a bachelor's degree in electronics. He earned a master's degree from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in 1987, and completed his Ph.D. at Purdue University in 1991. His dissertation, Decompositions of Polyhedra in Three Dimensions, was supervised by Chandrajit Bajaj.
Go to Profile#4719
Deborah Hughes Hallett
#78665
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Deborah J. Hughes Hallett is a mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona. Her expertise is in the undergraduate teaching of mathematics. She has also taught as Professor of the Practice in the Teaching of Mathematics at Harvard University, and continues to hold an affiliation with Harvard as Adjunct Professor of Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Go to Profile#4720
Steven Neil Evans
#85685
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Steven Neil Evans is an Australian-American statistician and mathematician, specializing in stochastic processes. Education and career Evans was born, Orange, New South Wales. In 1982 he obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Sydney and in 1987 his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge under Martin T. Barlow with thesis Local Properties of Markov Families and Stochastic Processes Indexed by a Totally Disconnected Field. From 1987 to 1991 he was an assistant professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1987–1989 he was a Whyburn Research Instructor in mathematics at the University of Virginia.
Go to Profile#4721
Pierre Soulages
#3808
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, President François Hollande of France described him as "the world's greatest living artist." His works are held by leading museums of the world, and there is a museum dedicated to his art in his hometown of Rodez.
Go to Profile#4722
Efstratia Kalfagianni
#90299
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Efstratia Kalfagianni is a Greek American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology. Early life Kalfagianni was born in 1965 in Greece. She lived on a small Greek island most of her early life. She started getting into math as a sophomore in high school because of classes in euclidean geometry and elementary number theory. Her teachers encouraged her to pursue math in college as well.
Go to Profile#4723
Darryl Holm
#93355
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Darryl Holm is an American applied mathematician, and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. He studied Physics at the University of Minnesota , and Physics and Mathematics at the University of Michigan . He joined the Theoretical Design Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1972 where he worked on the physics of strong shock waves and high-temperature hydrodynamic phenomena. At LANL Darryl also wrote his PhD dissertation entitled "Symmetry breaking in fluid dynamics: Lie group reducible motions for real fluids", receiving his PhD in 1976, supervised by Roy Axford.
Go to Profile#4724
Leah Berman
#81506
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Leah Wrenn Berman Williams is a mathematician at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, specializing in discrete geometry. At the University of Alaska, she is a professor of mathematics, the head of the department of mathematics and statistics, and was the interim dean of the College of Natural Science and Mathematics. She was also a member of the borough assembly of Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska from 2018-2021.
Go to Profile#4725
David DeMets
#94556
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
David L. DeMets is an American biostatistician. DeMets earned a doctorate in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota in 1970, and completed his postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health in 1972, then joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 1972. He was later named Max Halperin Professor of Biostatistics, and awarded emeritus status upon retirement in 2017.
Go to Profile#4726
Arunas Rudvalis
#96149
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Arunas Rudvalis is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is best known for the Rudvalis group. Rudvalis went to the Harvey Mudd College and received his Ph.D. degree in Dartmouth College under direction of Ernst Snapper.
Go to Profile#4727
Hernando Burgos-Soto
#95317
Overall Influence
Hernando Burgos Soto is a Canadian writer and mathematician, professor of mathematics at George Brown College. He is the author of several math papers in which he introduced some mathematics concepts and extended to tangles some celebrated results of knot theory about the Khovanov homology and the Jones polynomial. During his career as a mathematician, his interests have included Mathematical Statistics, Knot Theory, Algebraic Topology and more recently Mathematical Finance. He is comfortable writing in English and Spanish. When writing in Spanish, he works in the area of prose fiction writing short stories.
Go to Profile#4728
Britta Nestler
#38485
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Britta Nestler is a German materials scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Her research involves the development of software to simulate the formation of microstructures in advanced materials for which experimental studies would be too expensive or difficult.
Go to Profile#4729
Wolfgang Krieger
#31527
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Wolfgang Krieger is a German mathematician, specializing in analysis. Krieger studied mathematics and physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1959, where he obtained his doctorate in 1968 under Elmar Thoma with the thesis Über Maßklassen. Krieger studied at Harvard University from 1962 to 1965, earning a master's degree in 1964. From 1966 to 1968 he was a research assistant in Munich; and from 1968 assistant professor, from 1970 associate professor and from 1972 full professor at Ohio State University. For the academic year 1973–1974 he was a visiting professor at the University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#4730
William B. Bonnor
#48147
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
William Bowen Bonnor was a mathematician and gravitation physicist best known for his research into astrophysics, cosmology and general relativity. For most of his academic career he was a professor of mathematics at the University of London.
Go to Profile#4731
Ulrich Pinkall
#86715
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Ulrich Pinkall is a German mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and computer graphics. Pinkall studied mathematics at the University of Freiburg with a Diplom in 1979 and a doctorate in 1982 with thesis Dupin'sche Hyperflächen under the supervision of Martin Barner. Pinkall was then a research assistant in Freiburg until 1984 and from 1984 to 1986 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 1985 he completed his habilitation in Bonn with thesis Totale Absolutkrümmung immersierter Flächen . Since 1986 he is professor at TU Berlin.
Go to Profile#4732
Elizabeth McHarg
#79558
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Elizabeth Adam McHarg was a Scottish mathematician who in 1965 became the first female president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. Education McHarg studied at the Glasgow High School for Girls and then the University of Glasgow, earning a master's degree with first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy in 1943. The university awarded her the Thomas Logan Medal and a George A Clark scholarship, funding her as a researcher at Girton College, Cambridge. At Girton, she studied nonlinear partial differential equationss with Mary Cartwright, and completed her Ph.D. in 1948.
Go to Profile#4733
Michael Sternberg
#66022
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Michael Joseph Ezra Sternberg is a professor at Imperial College London, where he is director of the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and Bioinformatics and Head of the Structural bioinformatics Group.
Go to Profile#4734
William Edge
#66826
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
William Leonard Edge FRSE was a British mathematician most known for his work in finite geometry. Students knew him as WLE. Life Born in Stockport to schoolteacher parents , Edge attended Stockport Grammar School before winning a place at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1923 with an entrance scholarship, later graduating MA DSc. In 1928 Trinity College made him a Research Fellow and he was also an Allen Scholar.
Go to Profile#4735
Helmuth Gericke
#75752
Overall Influence
1909 - 2007 (98 years)
Paul Fritz Helmuth Gericke was a German mathematician and a historian of mathematics. Life Gericke was born in Aachen on 7 May 1909. From 1926 to 1931 he studied physics and mathematics at the universities of Greifswald, Marburg and Göttingen. In 1931, he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the Volta effect. In 1934, he was an assistant to Wilhelm Süss in Freiburg. With Süss, he attained his habilitation in pure mathematics in 1941. After 1945, he helped Süss to further develop the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach. His interest in the history of mathematics was aroused by the work of Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann, whom he had met in Oberwolfach in 1945 and 1946.
Go to Profile#4736
Olga Gil Medrano
#79949
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Olga Gil Medrano is a Spanish mathematician who was president of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society from 2006 to 2009. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Valencia, where she is also Vice-Rector for International Relations and Cooperation. Her mathematical research concerns differential geometry and geometric analysis; since 2000, she has also been interested in the dissemination of mathematics to the general public.
Go to Profile#4737
Mihnea Popa
#78672
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Mihnea Popa is a Romanian-American mathematician at Harvard University, specializing in algebraic geometry. He is known for his work on complex birational geometry, Hodge theory, abelian varieties, and vector bundles.
Go to Profile#4738
Vlastimil Klíma
#61868
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
RNDr. Vlastimil Klíma is a leading cryptographer, computer security expert, and white hat hacker. As an academic, he taught Applied Cryptography at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. He is the author of several works in the field of cryptographic hash functions and digital signatures. Klíma received his doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in 1984.
Go to Profile#4739
Halsey Royden
#66319
Overall Influence
1928 - 1993 (65 years)
Halsey Lawrence Royden, Jr. was an American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis on Riemann surfaces, several complex variables, and complex differential geometry. Royden is the author of a popular textbook on real analysis.
Go to Profile#4740
Gabriele Kaiser
#83876
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Gabriele Kaiser is a German mathematics educator. She is a professor of mathematics education at the University of Hamburg. Kaiser completed a doctorate in 1986 and a habilitation in 1997 at the University of Kassel. Her doctoral dissertation, Anwendungen im Mathematikunterricht - Konzeptionen und Untersuchungen zur unterrichtlichen Realisierung, was supervised by Werner Blum. She became a professor at Hamburg in 1998, and served as vice dean of education from 2010 to 2016. Since 2005 she has been editor-in-chief of the journal ZDM Mathematics Education, and she is the editor or co-editor of 2...
Go to Profile#4741
Akio Hattori
#95437
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
was a Japanese mathematician working in algebraic topology who proved the Hattori–Stong theorem. Hattori was the president of the Mathematical Society of Japan in 1989–1991. Hattori received a Doctorate in Science from the University of Tokyo in 1959 with Shokichi Iyanaga as his advisor. He then joined the faculty of the University of Tokyo. Between 1966 and 1968 Hattori worked as a visiting scholar at both Johns Hopkins University and Yale University.
Go to Profile#4742
Qiang Du
#96768
Overall Influence
#4743
Zhi-Ming Ma
#85470
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Zhi-Ming Ma. is a Chinese mathematics professor of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Ma is a former Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee for International Mathematical Union., a two times president of Chinese Mathematical Society, an elected member of World Academy of Sciences and the Chairman of Graduate Degree Committee of Academy of Math and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#4744
Nicholas Fisher
#69674
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Nicholas Irving Fisher is an Australian statistician and entrepreneur. He was a statistical researcher at the CSIRO for over 30 years and has founded the analytics company ValueMetrics Australia. He has contributed to the development and applications of directional statistics in geosciences, and statistical methods for quality improvement, specifically performance measurement for enterprises.
Go to Profile#4745
Rachel Kuske
#92925
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Rachel Ann Kuske is an American-Canadian applied mathematician and Professor and Chair of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Professional career Kuske received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1992. Her dissertation, Asymptotic Analysis of Random Wave Equations, was supervised by Bernard J. Matkowsky. From 1997 to 2002, she was Assistant Professor and then associate professor at the University of Minnesota. She is an expert on stochastic and nonlinear dynamics, mathematical modeling, asymptotic methods, and industrial mathematics. She served on t...
Go to Profile#4746
Giovanni Battista Rizza
#82051
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Giovanni Battista Rizza , officially known as Giambattista Rizza, was an Italian mathematician, working in the fields of complex analysis of several variables and in differential geometry: he is known for his contribution to hypercomplex analysis, notably for extending Cauchy's integral theorem and Cauchy's integral formula to complex functions of a hypercomplex variable, the theory of pluriharmonic functions and for the introduction of the now called Rizza manifolds.
Go to Profile#4747
Pierre Hansen
#96821
Overall Influence
#4748
Michael Mackey
#73647
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Michael C. Mackey is a Canadian-American biomathematician and Professor in the Department of Physiology of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who holds the Joseph Morley Drake Emeritus Chair.
Go to Profile#4749
Zhouping Xin
#88284
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Zhouping Xin is a Chinese mathematician and the William M.W. Mong Professor of Mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He specializes in partial differential equations. Xin received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1988, under the supervision of Joel Smoller. Before joining the faculty of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he was a professor at the Courant Institute at New York University. He was a Sloan Research Fellow from 1991 to 1993 and an invited speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians. He has also been affiliated ...
Go to Profile#4750
Anna Stafford
#84200
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Anna Adelaide Stafford Henriques was an American mathematician known for her pioneering role as a female researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study. Education Anna Adelaide Stafford was born on August 20, 1905, in Chicago, the first of five children in her family. Her father was a factory manager, and both her parents were children of immigrants. The family moved from Chicago to Wisconsin and Minnesota; her parents died in 1919 and the children moved again to a relative's home in Missouri.
Go to Profile