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,
#4751
Justin Jacobs
#70705
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (40 years)
Justin Wayne Jacobs is an American statistician, currently serving as the Senior Basketball Researcher with the Orlando Magic. Jacobs is a former applied research mathematician at the National Security Agency, and an independent sports analytics researcher. Noted for his research into geolocation, geospatial statistics and spatio-temporal statistics, Jacobs was awarded a National Intelligence Medallion from the ODNI in January 2014 by the Director of National Intelligence as well as the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering in April 2014 by President Barack Obama.
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Cornelius Greither
#94156
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Cornelius Greither is a German mathematician specialising in Iwasawa theory and the structure of Galois modules. Education and career Greither completed his PhD in 1983 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München under the supervision of Bodo Pareigis: his thesis bears the title Zum Kürzungsproblem kommutativer Algebren. He habilitated in 1988 at same university, with thesis title Cyclic Galois extensions and normal bases.
Go to Profile#4753
Marie A. Vitulli
#81963
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Marie A. Vitulli is an American mathematician and professor emerita at the University of Oregon. Mathematics Vitulli's research is in commutative algebra and applications to algebraic geometry. More specific topics in her research include deformations of monomial curves, seminormal rings, the weak normality of commutative rings and algebraic varieties, weak subintegrality, and the theory of valuations for commutative rings. Along with her colleague David K. Harrison, she developed a unified valuation theory for rings with zero divisors that generalized both Krull and Archimedean valuations.
Go to Profile#4754
Sigmund Selberg
#85631
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Sigmund Selberg was a Norwegian mathematician. He was born in Langesund as the son of Ole Michael Ludvigsen Selberg and Anna Kristina Brigtsdatter Skeie. He was twin brother of Arne Selberg and brother of Henrik Selberg and Atle Selberg. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim from 1947 to 1977. His works mainly focused on the distribution of prime numbers.
Go to Profile#4755
Duncan Lawson
#60161
Overall Influence
Duncan Austin Lawson is a British mathematician known for work in mathematics education including university-wide mathematics and statistics support. Early life and education Lawson attended Bury Grammar School and later obtained a BA and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#4756
Jozef Teugels
#76301
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Jozef Lodewijk Maria Teugels, or Jozef L. Teugels, Jef Teugels is a Belgian mathematical statistician and actuary. His main contributions are in extreme value theory, stochastic processes, and reinsurance theory.
Go to Profile#4757
Reidun Twarock
#83657
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Reidun Twarock is a German-born mathematical biologist at the University of York. She is known for developing mathematical models of viruses based on higher-dimensional lattices. Education Twarock originally studied mathematical physics at the universities of Cologne and Bath. During her PhD at Technische Universität Clausthal she experimented with quantum mechanical models confined to the surface of a sphere.
Go to Profile#4758
Patrice D. Cani
#97125
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
#4759
Mabel Gweneth Humphreys
#53254
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
Mabel Gweneth Humphreys was a Canadian-American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. The M. Gweneth Humphreys Award of the Association for Women in Mathematics was established in her honor.
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Charles Leedham-Green
#75894
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Charles R. Leedham-Green is a retired professor of mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London, known for his work in group theory. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. His parents were John Charles Leedham-Green , a surgeon and general practitioner in Southwold, and Gertrude Mary Somerville Caldwell.
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David Evans
#52774
Overall Influence
David Evans is an Australian mathematician and engineer. Evans obtained the degree of Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Sydney in 1983; and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1989. He has four other degrees.
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Ilona Palásti
#81389
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Ilona Palásti was a Hungarian mathematician who worked at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. She is known for her research in discrete geometry, geometric probability, and the theory of random graphs. With Alfréd Rényi and others, she was considered to be one of the members of the Hungarian School of Probability.
Go to Profile#4763
Vera Serganova
#83945
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Vera Vladimirovna Serganova is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who researches superalgebras and their representations. Serganova graduated from Moscow State University. She defended her Ph.D. in 1988 at Saint Petersburg State University under the joint supervision of Dimitry Leites and Arkady Onishchik. She was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 and a plenary speaker at the ICM in 2014. In 2017, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#4764
Catherine Meusburger
#88838
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Catherine Meusburger is an Austrian mathematician and physicist. She works at the interface between mathematical physics, algebra and geometry. Since 2011 she has served as professor of mathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Go to Profile#4765
Ricardo Mañé
#93979
Overall Influence
1948 - 1995 (47 years)
Ricardo Mañé Ramirez was a Uruguayan mathematician, known for his contributions to dynamical systems and ergodic theory. He was a doctoral student of Jacob Palis at IMPA. He was an invited speaker at the International Congresses of Mathematicians of 1983 and 1994 and is a recipient of the 1994 TWAS Prize.
Go to Profile#4766
Martin Kulldorff
#11976
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Martin Kulldorff is a Swedish biostatistician. He has been a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School since 2003, though on leave as of 2023. He is a member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Go to Profile#4767
Jennifer Rexford
#19977
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Jennifer Rexford is an American computer scientist who is currently the Provost, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and formerly the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research focuses on analysis of computer networks, and in particular network routing, performance measurement, and network management.
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Martin Schumacher
#64331
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Martin Schumacher is a German statistician. He was the head of the Institute for Medical Biometry and Statistics of the Medical Center of the University of Freiburg from 1986 until 2017. Life and work Martin Schumacher graduated from the University of Dortmund with a diploma in mathematics and statistics in 1974. He stayed in Dortmund and earned his PhD in 1977. Between 1975 and 1979 and 1983 and 1986 he first worked as research assistant for Prof. Siegfried Schach and then as Professor for Statistics in Science. In between those periods of time in Dortmund, he spent the years 1979-1983 in H...
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Roger Jones
#94250
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Roger L. Jones is an American mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis and ergodic theory. Biography He obtained a B.S. in mathematics in 1971 from University at Albany, SUNY, and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1974 from Rutgers University, with thesis Inequalities for the Ergodic Maximal Function written under the direction of Richard Floyd Gundy. He has recently retired from a professorship in mathematics at DePaul University in Chicago. There he taught everything from remedial math to graduate-level courses. During his tenure at DePaul, Roger published numerous research papers in math, wa...
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Monika Ludwig
#81890
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Monika Ludwig is an Austrian mathematician, University Professor of Convex and Discrete Geometry at the Vienna University of Technology. Academic career Ludwig earned a Dipl.-Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology in 1990, and a doctorate in 1994 under the supervision of Peter M. Gruber. She remained at the same university as an assistant and associate professor from 1994 until 2007, when she moved to the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She returned to the Vienna University of Technology as a full professor in 2010.
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Michael T. Goodrich
#49487
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Michael T. Goodrich is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science and the former chair of the department of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
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Jerrold B. Tunnell
#57782
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Jerrold Bates Tunnell was a mathematician known for his work in number theory. He was an associate professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Early life and education Tunnell was born on September 16, 1950, in Dallas, Texas.
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Claude Sabbah
#65335
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Claude Sabbah is a French mathematician and researcher at École Polytechnique. Education Sabbah received his doctoral degree from Paris Diderot University in 1976 under the supervision of Lê Dũng Tráng.
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George Herbert Weiss
#68311
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
George H. Weiss was an American applied mathematician and physicist at the National Institutes of Health, known for his work on random walks. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of New York and Columbia University, graduating in 1951, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1958.
Go to Profile#4775
Alan Cobham
#47356
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Alan Belmont Cobham was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for inventing the notion of polynomial time and the complexity class P, for Cobham's thesis stating that the problems that have practically usable computer solutions are characterized by having polynomial time, and for Cobham's theorem on the sets of numbers that can be recognized by finite automata. He also did foundational work on automatic sequences, invented priority queues and studied them from the point of view of queueing theory, and wrote a program for playing contract bridge that was at the time one of t...
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Christine Bachoc
#81413
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Christine Bachoc is a French mathematician known for her work in coding theory, kissing numbers, lattice theory, and semidefinite programming. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bordeaux.
Go to Profile#4777
Béla Andrásfai
#71348
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Béla Andrásfai was a Hungarian mathematician. The Andrásfai graph was named after him. Andrásfai began his high school studies in 1942 at Verbőczy High School in Budapest, continued at Szombathely High School in 1946, and graduated from high school in 1951. In 1954 he graduated as a teacher of mathematics and physics from the Budapest College of Pedagogy, and in 1957 from Eötvös Loránd University. Between 1953 and 1955 he was a teaching assistant at the Department of Mathematics at the College of Pedagogy, then went on to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Budapest Technical University.
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Piers Anthony
#10168
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob is an American author in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is best known for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xanth.
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Kumiko Nishioka
#92069
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Kumiko Nishioka is a Japanese mathematician at Keio University. She specializes in transcendental numbers, and is known for her research related to the theory of Mahler functions and Painlevé transcendents. In 1996 she published the first comprehensive text on transcendence of Mahler functions, Mahler Functions and Transcendence, extending and generalizing Mahler's method. Her husband Keiji Nishioka is also a mathematician, and a coauthor.
Go to Profile#4780
Shervin Assari
#97588
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
#4781
Alexander Schmidt
#97597
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Alexander Schmidt is a German mathematician at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests include algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. Life Schmidt attended the Heinrich Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium in East Berlin, a special school for mathematics. In 1984 he received the bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Prague. He studied mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin and was awarded the diploma in 1991. In 1993, he obtained his PhD at the University of Heidelberg by Kay Wingberg . He then was a research assistant and later an assistant at the chair of Prof.
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William A. Veech
#92216
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
William A. Veech was the Edgar O. Lovett Professor of Mathematics at Rice University until his death. His research concerned dynamical systems; he is particularly known for his work on interval exchange transformations, and is the namesake of the Veech surface. He died unexpectedly on August 30, 2016 in Houston, Texas.
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Anthony Joseph Tromba
#93483
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Anthony Joseph Tromba is an American mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations, differential geometry, and the calculus of variations. Tromba received from Cornell University his bachelor's degree in 1965 and from Princeton University his M.S. in 1967 and his Ph.D. in 1968 under Stephen Smale with thesis Degree theory on Banach manifolds. Tromba was from 1968 to 1970 an assistant professor at Stanford University after which he joined the faculty of the University of California. From 1992-1995 he was Professor Ordinarius at the Ludwigs Maximilan University in Munich and is ...
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Anne Penfold Street
#83660
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Anne Penfold Street was one of Australia's leading mathematicians, specialising in combinatorics. She was the third woman to become a mathematics professor in Australia, following Hanna Neumann and Cheryl Praeger. She was the author of several textbooks, and her work on sum-free sets became a standard reference for its subject matter. She helped found several important organizations in combinatorics, developed a researcher network, and supported young students with interest in mathematics.
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Tore Schweder
#47850
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Tore Schweder is a Norwegian statistician and is a professor at the Department of Economics and at the Centre for Ecology and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo. Schweder has worked with scientists in a number of fields, including medicine, demography, sociology, economics, ecology, genetics and fisheries. Since 1990, most of his applied work has been concerned with assessment of marine resources , and with the problem of uncertainty in fisheries management. His methodological research interests also include basic connections between likelihood and confidence, cf. confidence dis...
Go to Profile#4786
Mary Bradburn
#84027
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Mary Bradburn was a British mathematics educator who became president of the Mathematical Association for the 1994–1995 term. Education and career Bradburn was born on 17 March 1918 in Normanby in North Yorkshire, the daughter of a marine engineer and a Scotswoman. She attended a school that didn't approve of girls studying mathematics, but allowed her to progress through the mathematics curriculum at her own rate, several years ahead of the other students.
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Paul E. Green
#18803
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Paul E. Green He was the founder of conjoint analysis and one of "major architects of modern marketing science and practice", having popularised the use of Bayesian statistics, multidimensional scaling, clustering, and qualitative data analysis within the marketing discipline. He wrote more than sixteen books and 200 articles on market research-related subjects. His seminal article, "Conjoint Analysis in Consumer Research: Issues and Outlook," has been cited more than 750 times in ISI and has some 4,000 citations on Google Scholar.
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Laura Martignon
#71249
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Laura Martignon is a Colombian and Italian professor and scientist. From 2003 until 2020 she served as a Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Education at the Ludwigsburg University of Education. Until 2017 she was an Adjunct Scientist of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where she previously worked as Senior Researcher. She also worked for ten years as a Mathematics Professor at the University of Brasilia and spent a period of one and a half years, as visiting scholar, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Nicolas Monod
#40978
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Nicolas Monod is a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and known for work on bounded cohomology, ergodic theory, geometry , locally compact groups and amenability. He was born in Montreux, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2001 with thesis "Continuous Bounded Cohomology of Locally Compact Groups" written under the direction of Marc Burger.
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Ana Bela Cruzeiro
#87774
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Ana Bela Cruzeiro is a Portuguese and Swiss mathematician whose research concerns stochastic analysis and the Malliavin calculus, as well as the differential equations used to model fluid dynamics and quantum mechanics. She is a professor of mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico, part of the University of Lisbon.
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Michael Redhead
#25589
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Michael Logan Gonne Redhead was a British academic and philosopher of physics. Biography Redhead was born on 30 December 1929 in London and educated there at Westminster School. Redhead was Centennial Professor in CPNSS at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Sara Billey
#91423
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Sara Cosette Billey is an American mathematician working in algebraic combinatorics. She is known for her contributions on Schubert polynomials, singular loci of Schubert varieties, Kostant polynomials, and Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomials often using computer verified proofs. She is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington.
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Simone Gutt
#90505
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Simone Gutt is a Belgian mathematician specializing in differential geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Education and career Gutt was born on 13 July 1956 in Uccle, near Brussels. She completed her doctorate in 1980 at the Université libre de Bruxelles; her dissertation, Déformations formelles de l'algèbre des fonctions différentiables sur une variété symplectique, was jointly supervised by Michel Cahen and .
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Igor Chueshov
#74018
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Igor Dmitrievich Chueshov was a Ukrainian mathematician. He was both a correspondent member of the Mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a professor in the Department of Mathematical Physics and Computational Mathematics at the National University of Kharkiv.
Go to Profile#4795
Brendan Arnold Maher
#97845
Overall Influence
#4796
Jean Berstel
#61153
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Jean Berstel is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to combinatorics on words and formal language theory. He is a currently a professor emeritus at the University of Marne-la-Vallée.
Go to Profile#4797
Ian T. Jolliffe
#97865
Overall Influence
#4798
Zdzisław Skupień
#90070
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Zdzisław Skupień is a Polish mathematician, expert in optimization, discrete mathematics, and graph theory, professor, dr. hab. . In 1964 Skupień introduced the concept of "locally Hamiltonian graphs".
Go to Profile#4799
Graeme Milton
#63452
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Graeme Milton is an American mathematician, currently distinguished professor at University of Utah and also previously the Eisenbud Professor at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 2010 and also a full professor at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#4800
Pierre Conner
#77383
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Pierre Euclide Conner was an American mathematician, who worked on algebraic topology and differential topology . In 1955 Conner received his Ph.D from Princeton University under Donald Spencer with thesis The Green's and Neumann's Problems for Differential Forms on Riemannian Manifolds. He was a post-doctoral fellow from 1955 to 1957 at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was in the 1960s a professor at the University of Virginia, where he collaborated with his colleague Edwin E. Floyd, and then in the 1970s a professor at Louisiana State University.
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