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,
#4801
Jack D. Kalbfleisch
#97981
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
#4802
Bhaskar Kumar Ghosh
#98009
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Bhaskar Kumar Ghosh was an Indian-American statistician especially known for his contributions to sequential analysis. Life and career Ghosh was born in Calcutta, India, on February 10, 1936. During 1951 to 1955 he studied at the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, the last two years being in the Statistics Honours BSc Program. There he received his first degree in statistics. During 1955 to 1959 he continued his studies of statistics in the PhD–program of the University College London. With his dissertation "Sequential Analysis of Components of Variance in Hierarchical Classifications", supervised by Norman Lloyd Johnson, he earned his PhD in 1959.
Go to Profile#4803
Christopher D. Sogge
#93156
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Christopher Donald Sogge is an American mathematician. He is the J. J. Sylvester Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University and the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Mathematics. His research concerns Fourier analysis and partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#4804
Boris Rufimovich Vainberg
#90124
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Boris Rufimovich Vainberg is a professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He was born in 1938. He received his Dr.S. from Moscow State University, under the supervision of Samarii Galpern. He taught mathematics at Moscow State University for nearly 30 years, then held a visiting professor position at the University of Delaware before taking his current position at UNCC.
Go to Profile#4805
Rina Foygel Barber
#42273
Overall Influence
Rina Foygel Barber is an American statistician whose research includes works on the Bayesian statistics of graphical models, false discovery rates, and regularization. She is the Louis Block Professor of statistics at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#4806
Anne Boutet de Monvel
#81627
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Anne-Marie Boutet de Monvel is a French applied mathematician and mathematical physicist, and a professor emerita in the University of Paris, affiliated with the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris Rive Gauche.
Go to Profile#4807
Richard Statman
#81727
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Richard Statman is an American computer scientist whose principal research interest is the theory of computation, especially symbolic computation. His research involves lambda calculus, type theory, and combinatory algebra.
Go to Profile#4808
Aad van der Vaart
#59107
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Adrianus Willem "Aad" van der Vaart is a Dutch professor of Stochastics at the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics at Delft University of Technology. Education and career Van der Vaart was born in Vlaardingen. He earned his PhD at Leiden University in 1987 with a thesis titled: "Statistical estimation in large parameter spaces" under the supervision of Willem van Zwet. He became a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 1997. He was appointed as professor of Stochastics at Leiden University in 2012. In 2021 he moved to the Technical University of Delft.
Go to Profile#4809
Ludwig Staiger
#57648
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Ludwig Staiger is a German mathematician and computer scientist at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Jena in 1976; Staiger wrote his doctoral thesis, Zur Topologie der regulären Mengen, under the direction of and Rolf Lindner.
Go to Profile#4810
Jalal Allakhverdiyev
#78846
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Jalal Eyvaz oglu Allakhverdiyev was an Azerbaijani mathematician and a member of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, which was called the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1972.
Go to Profile#4811
Michael Somos
#88603
Overall Influence
Michael Somos is an American mathematician, who was a visiting scholar in the Georgetown University Mathematics and Statistics department for four years and is a visiting scholar at Catholic University of America. In the late eighties he proposed a conjecture about certain polynomial recurrences, now called Somos sequences, that surprisingly in some cases contain only integers. Somos' quadratic recurrence constant is also named after him.
Go to Profile#4812
Edward Ng
#34122
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Edward W Ng was an American applied mathematician who had also held the positions of senior scientist, senior engineer and technical manager in the U.S. Space Program. He is noted for his broad variety of mathematical applications in space science and engineering. He has also contributed conscientiously in the spin-off of technology from the space program, with applications in such diverse subjects as Bose–Einstein distribution in mathematical physics, symbolic and algebraic computation, computational physics and biomedical research.
Go to Profile#4813
Victor Mazurov
#97989
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Victor Danilovich Mazurov is a Russian mathematician. He is well known for his works in group theory and is the founder of the Novosibirsk school of finite groups. Mazurov is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#4814
Pierre van Moerbeke
#66777
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Pierre van Moerbeke is a Belgian mathematician. He studied mathematics at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he received his degree in 1966. He then obtained a PhD in mathematics at Rockefeller University, New York City . He is a professor of mathematics at Brandeis University and the UCL. He studies non-linear differential equations and partial differential equations, with soliton behavior. In 1988, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Exact Sciences.
Go to Profile#4815
John Newsome Crossley
#40813
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
John Newsome Crossley is a British-Australian mathematician and logician who writes in the field of logic in computer science, history of mathematics and medieval history. He is involved in the field of mathematical logic in Australia and South East Asia.
Go to Profile#4816
Gillian Thornley
#87683
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Gillian Thornley is a retired New Zealand mathematician. Gillian Thornley was born in 1940 in Murchison, New Zealand. Living on the family dairy farm, she won a scholarship to board at Nelson College for Girls and in 1958 enrolled at Canterbury University where she graduated with a masters with first class honours in mathematics in 1963. At Canterbury she was a contemporary of Beatrice Tinsley.
Go to Profile#4817
Vinayak P. Dravid
#98298
Overall Influence
#4818
Dmitri Olegovich Orlov
#95827
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Dmitri Olegovich Orlov, is a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. He is known for the Bondal-Orlov reconstruction theorem . Education and career In 1988 Orlov graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. There he received his Candidate of Sciences degree 1991 with thesis Производные категории когерентных пучков, моноидальные преобразования и многообразия Фано under Vasilii Alekseevich Iskovskikh . At the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Orlov was from April 1996 to April 2011 a researcher in the Algebra Department and is since April 2011 the head of the Algebraic Geometry Department.
Go to Profile#4819
Rinat Kedem
#53282
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Rinat Kedem is an American mathematician and mathematical physicist. Kedem graduated in 1988 with BA in physics from Macalester College. She received her PhD in physics in 1993 from Stony Brook University with thesis advisor Barry M. McCoy. She was a postdoc from 1993 to 1995 at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences , from 1995 to 1996 at the University of Melbourne, and from 1996 to 1997 at the University of California, Berkeley. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was an assistant professor of mathematics from 1997 to 2001. In the mathematics departmen...
Go to Profile#4820
David Silvester
#78970
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
David James Silvester is a British numerical analyst. He has a Chair in Numerical Analysis and is the Head of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. Silvester was born in Dumfries, but was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology , from which he gained his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Numerical Analysis . His Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Ronald Thatcher. He was appointed lecturer in Mathematics at UMIST in 1984, and later promoted to Senior Lecturer and Reader. In 2003 he was promoted to a personal Chair of Numerical Analysis.
Go to Profile#4821
Ana Cannas da Silva
#87849
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Ana M. L. G. Cannas da Silva is a Portuguese mathematician specializing in symplectic geometry and geometric topology. She works in Switzerland as an adjunct professor in mathematics at ETH Zurich. Early life and education Cannas was born in Lisbon. After studying at St. John de Britto College, she earned a licenciatura in mathematics in 1990 from the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon. She then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1994 and completing her Ph.D. in 1996. Her dissertation, Multiplicity Formulas ...
Go to Profile#4822
Allison Henrich
#89559
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Allison Henrich is an American mathematician specializing in knot theory and also interested in undergraduate-level mathematics research mentorship. She is a professor of mathematics at Seattle University.
Go to Profile#4823
Francesca Biagini
#85674
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Francesca Biagini is a German and Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical finance, stochastic calculus, and probability theory. Topics in her research include fractional Brownian motion and portfolio optimization for inside traders. She is a professor of applied mathematics and vice president for international affairs and diversity at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and president of the Bachelier Finance Society.
Go to Profile#4824
Nikos Paragios
#58793
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Nikos Paragios is a distinguished professor of Applied mathematics at CentraleSupélec, the school of engineering of the Paris-Saclay_University and founder, president and chief executive officer of TheraPanacea, an information technology company targeting precision medicine in oncology, neurology and beyond through holistic treatment pathways optimization.
Go to Profile#4825
Keith William Morton
#77711
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Keith William Morton is a British mathematician working on partial differential equations, and their numerical analysis. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1964 under the supervision of Harold Grad at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.
Go to Profile#4826
Michael Dinneen
#60351
Overall Influence
Michael J. Dinneen is an American-New Zealand mathematician and computer scientist working as a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is co-director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. He does research in combinatorial algorithms, distributive programming, experimental graph theory, and experimental algorithmic information theory.
Go to Profile#4827
Alan B. Tayler
#64433
Overall Influence
1931 - 1995 (64 years)
Alan Breach Tayler was a British applied mathematician and pioneer of "industrial mathematics". He was a Founding Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford , the initiator of the Oxford Study Groups with Industry in 1968 , a driving force behind the foundation of the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry in 1985 and President of ECMI , and the first Director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics .
Go to Profile#4828
Olke Uhlenbeck
#76229
Overall Influence
#4829
Ian Sloan
#67267
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Ian Hugh Sloan AO is an Australian applied mathematician. He was educated at the University of Melbourne , University of Adelaide and University College London, where he was supervised by renowned mathematical physicist Sir Harrie Massey, and earned his PhD in 1964. He was a research scientist for the Colonial Sugar Refining company 1964–5, and since 1965 has been at the University of New South Wales, where he has been Scientia Professor since 1999. He served as Head of the School of Mathematics from 1986 to 1990 and from 1992 to 1993.
Go to Profile#4830
David Naccache
#17250
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
David Naccache is a cryptographer, currently a professor at the École normale supérieure and a member of its Computer Laboratory. He was previously a professor at Panthéon-Assas University. Biography He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications. Naccache's most notable work is in public-key cryptography, including the cryptanalysis of digital signature schemes. Together with Jacques Stern he designed the similarly named but very distinct Naccache-Stern cryptosystem and Naccache-Stern knapsack cryptosystem.
Go to Profile#4831
Victor Chernozhukov
#56001
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Victor Chernozhukov is a Russian-American statistician and economist currently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on mathematical statistics and machine learning for causal structural models in high-dimensional environments. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master's in statistics in 1997 and received his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2000.
Go to Profile#4832
Sergei Viktorovich Bochkarev
#83606
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Sergei Viktorovich Bochkarev is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Education and career He received in 1964 his undergraduate degree from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and in 1969 his Russian Candidate of Sciences degree from Moscow State University. His dissertation о рядах Фурье по системе Хаара was supervised by Pyotr Lavrentyevich Ulyanov. From Moscow State University, Bochkarev received in 1974 his Russian Doctor of Science degree . Since 1971 he has worked at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where he holds the title of leading scientific researcher in the Departm...
Go to Profile#4833
Robbert Dijkgraaf
#60195
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Robertus Henricus "Robbert" Dijkgraaf FRSE is a Dutch theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist, and the current Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the Netherlands. From July 2012 until his inauguration as minister in January 2022, he had been the director and Leon Levy professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and a tenured professor at the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#4834
Jamal Nebez
#33042
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Jamal Nebez was a Kurdish linguist, mathematician, politician, author, translator and writer. He studied Islamic law, philosophy, theology, physics and mathematics at the University of Baghdad in the 1950s. In 1956, he prepared a stenciled script on algebra and in 1960, succeeded in publishing the first physics book in Kurdish, including a rich glossary of Kurdish terms pertaining to physics and mathematics. He translated several literary works, including works of Nikolai Gogol and William Shakespeare into Kurdish. He also wrote and published several books on a variety of topics. Most of the ...
Go to Profile#4835
Christine Bernardi
#69871
Overall Influence
1955 - 2018 (63 years)
Christine Bernardi was a French mathematician known for her research on numerical analysis of partial differential equations. Life Bernardi was born in Paris, and entered the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1974. She earned a master's degree in 1975, a diplôme d'études approfondies in numerical analysis in 1978, a doctorat de troisième cycle in 1979, and a doctorat d'état in 1986. Her 1986 dissertation, Contribution à l'analyse numérique de problèmes non linéaires, was supervised by Pierre-Arnaud Raviart. She became a researcher for the CNRS in 1979, becoming a director of research in 1992.
Go to Profile#4836
Paul S. Aspinwall
#86167
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Paul Stephen Aspinwall is a British theoretical physicist and mathematician, who works on string theory and also algebraic geometry. Aspinwall received his early education at Bydales School, Marske-by-the-Sea and Prior Pursglove College, Guisborough. He then studied at the University of Oxford with a focus on theoretical elementary particle physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1985 and his Ph.D. in 1988. He is now a professor of mathematics and physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Go to Profile#4837
Denis Blackmore
#38067
Overall Influence
Denis Louis Blackmore was an American mathematician and a full professor of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He was also one of the founding members of the Center for Applied Mathematics and Statistics at NJIT. Dr. Blackmore was mainly known for his many contributions in the fields of dynamical systems and differential topology. In addition to this, he had many contributions in other fields of applied mathematics, physics, biology, and engineering.
Go to Profile#4838
Izrail Moiseevich Gel'fand
#98689
Overall Influence
#4839
Robert Finn
#72689
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Robert Samuel Finn was an American mathematician. Early life and education Finn was born in Buffalo, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a PhD in mathematics from Syracuse University. Studying under Abe Gelbart, Finn completed a thesis titled On some properties of the solution of a class of non-linear partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#4840
Sigmundur Gudmundsson
#93824
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Sigmundur Gudmundsson is an Icelandic-Swedish mathematician working at Lund University in the fields of differential geometry and global analysis. He is mainly interested in the geometric aspects of harmonic maps and their derivatives, such as harmonic morphisms and p-harmonic functions. His work is partially devoted to the existence theory of complex-valued harmonic morphisms and p-harmonic functions from Riemannian homogeneous spaces of various types, such as symmetric spaces and semisimple, solvable and nilpotent Lie groups.
Go to Profile#4841
Gaven Martin
#58154
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Gaven John Martin FRSNZ FASL FAMS is a New Zealand mathematician. He is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Massey University, the head of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study, the former president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society , and former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Journal of Mathematics. He is a former Vice-President of the Royal Society of New Zealand [Mathematical, Physical Sciences Engineering and Technology. His research concerns quasiconformal mappings, regularity theory for partial differential equations, and connections between the theory of discr...
Go to Profile#4842
Stanley Stewart Davis
#84669
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Stanley Stuart Davis is emeritus professor of pharmacy at the University of Nottingham. Early life and education Davis was born in Warwick, England. He obtained his bachelor's degree in pharmacy from the School of Pharmacy at the University of London in 1964. He remained at the same university to study for a PhD in colloid science .
Go to Profile#4843
Alexander Gamburd
#94242
Overall Influence
Alexander Gamburd is a mathematician at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York known for his work in spectral problems in number theory, probability, and Arithmetic combinatorics. He is a Presidential Professor of Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Go to Profile#4844
Lewis Elton
#20600
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Lewis Richard Benjamin Elton was a German-born British physicist and researcher into education, specialising in higher education. Early life Born in Tübingen to the scholars Victor Ehrenberg and Eva Dorothea Sommer, Ehrenberg moved with his family to Prague in 1929, and from there to England in February 1939, to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. Ehrenberg naturalised as a British subject and changed his name by deed poll in June 1947. He was educated at Rydal School in Colwyn Bay, and thereafter at Christ's College, Cambridge, the Regent Street Polytechnic, London, and University College London.
Go to Profile#4845
Edward B. Saff
#87568
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Edward Barry Saff is an American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis, approximation theory, numerical analysis, and potential theory. Education and career Saff received in 1964 his bachelor's degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 1968 his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park under Joseph L. Walsh with thesis Interpolation and Functions of Class H . As a postdoc he was a Fulbright Fellow at Imperial College London from 1968 to 1969. At the University of South Florida he was from 1969 to 1971 an assistant professor, from 1971 to 1976 an associate professor, from 1976 to 1986 a full professor, and from 1986 to 2001 a distinguished research professor.
Go to Profile#4846
Gunnar Kulldorff
#59885
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Gunnar Kulldorff was a Swedish statistician, specializing in estimation theory, survey sampling and order statistics. From 1989 to 1991, he was the president of the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#4847
Andrew S. C. Ehrenberg
#36180
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Andrew Ehrenberg was a statistician and marketing scientist. For over half a century, he made contributions to data reduction/analysis and presentation, and to understanding buyer behaviour and how advertising works.
Go to Profile#4848
Michael Heizer
#11416
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Michael Heizer is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.
Go to Profile#4849
Nina Gantert
#89858
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Nina Gantert is a Swiss and German probability theorist, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She holds the chair for probability in the department of mathematics at the Technical University of Munich, a position she has held since 2011 when the chair was established.
Go to Profile#4850
Emmanuel David Tannenbaum
#51254
Overall Influence
1978 - 2012 (34 years)
Emmanuel David Tannenbaum was an Israeli/American biophysicist and applied mathematician. He worked as a professor and researcher in the department of chemistry at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the department of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in the fields of mathematical biology, systems biology, and quantum physics.
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