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,
#4851
Vlastimil Pták
#74768
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Vlastimil Pták was a Czech mathematician, who worked in functional analysis, theoretical numerical analysis, and linear algebra. Notable early work include generalizations of the open mapping theorem .
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Andrej Dujella
#98663
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Andrej Dujella is a Croatian professor of mathematics at the University of Zagreb and a fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Life Born in Pula, a native of Zadar, Dujella took part in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won a bronze medal in 1984. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Zagreb with a dissertation titled "Generalized Diophantine–Davenport problem". His main area of research is number theory, in particular Diophantine equations, elliptic curves, and applications of number theory in cryptography. Dujella is author of th...
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Tim Chartier
#82832
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Timothy P. Chartier is Joseph R. Morton Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College, known for his expertise in sports analytics and bracketology, for his popular mathematics books, and for the "mime-matics" shows combining mime and mathematics that he and his wife Tanya have staged.
Go to Profile#4854
Stefan Grigorievich Samko
#97899
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Stefan Grigorievich Samko is a mathematician active in the field of functional analysis, function spaces and operator theory. He is a retired professor of Mathematics at Algarve University and Rostov State University.
Go to Profile#4855
Ernesto Estrada
#89638
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Ernesto Estrada is a Cuban-Spanish scientist. He has been Senior ARAID Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Applications at the University of Zaragoza, Spain since 2019. Before that he was the chair in Complexity Science, and full professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom. He is known by his contributions in different disciplines, including mathematical chemistry and complex network theory.
Go to Profile#4856
Monique Combescure
#32089
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Monique Combescure , is a French physicist specializing in mathematical physics. In 2001, she became director of research at the Lyon Institute of Nuclear Physics. From 2000 to 2008, she was director of the European Mathematics and Quantum Physics Research Group which aims to promote synergy between theoretical physicists and mathematicians in the field of quantum physics. She received the Irène-Joliot-Curie Prize in 2007 and the rank of Officer of the National Order of Merit in 2011.
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Argelia Velez-Rodriguez
#83497
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Argelia Velez-Rodriguez is a Cuban-American mathematician and educator. She was the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in Cuba. Early life When Argelia Velez-Rodriguez was growing up, her father worked in the government under Cuba's leader, Fulgencio Batista. At the start of Batista's governing, he improved the Cuban educational system. Her family was Catholic, so she was educated in Catholic primary and secondary schools. During her schooling, teachers noticed her interest in mathematics, and she won a mathematic competition at age 9.
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Wolfgang R. Wasow
#71656
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Wolfgang R. Wasow was an American mathematician known for his work in asymptotic expansions and their applications in differential equations. Early life Wasow was born as Wolfgang Richard Thal in Vevey, Switzerland, to Jewish parents, Alma Thal and Max Richard Kleineibst, who had met in Paris. Alma Thal was from Jelgava in Latvia, a part of Czarist Russia at the time. Her family had sent her to Switzerland to put an end to her political activities. Richard Kleineibst was also a political activist and later gained prominence as a leftwing social democrat in the Weimar Republic. He became a f...
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Griffith Baley Price
#82968
Overall Influence
1905 - 2006 (101 years)
G. Baley Price was an American mathematician and historian of American mathematics. He was a president of the Mathematical Association of America. Career After graduating with an A.B. from Mississippi College in 1925, G. B. Price went to Harvard University, where he received his M.A. in 1928 and his Ph.D. in 1932 under G. D. Birkhoff with thesis Double Pendulum and Similar Dynamical Systems. Apart from a period of service with the U.S. Army Air Force in England in World War II, Price was a mathematics professor at the University of Kansas from 1937 to 1975 and chair of the mathematics department from 1951 to 1970.
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Ahmed I. Zayed
#32453
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Ahmed I. Zayed is an Egyptian American mathematician. His research interests include Sampling Theory, Wavelets, Medical Imaging, Fractional Fourier transform，Sinc Approximations, Boundary Value Problemss, Special Functions and Orthogonal polynomials, Integral transforms.
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Eva K. Lee
#69720
Overall Influence
Eva K Lee is an American applied mathematiciann and operations researcher who applies combinatorial optimization and systems biology to the study of health care decision making and organizational transformation. She is an analytic member of the Medical and Public Health Information Sharing Environment system. Since July 2021, Lee has been the chief scientific officer for a private technology company, heading the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare and the Center for Operations Research in Homeland Security. Previously she was a professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Robert Bartnik
#65983
Overall Influence
Robert Bartnik was an Australian mathematician based at Monash University. He was known for his contributions to the rigorous mathematical study of general relativity. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Melbourne University and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1983, where his advisor was Shing-Tung Yau. In 2004 he was elected to the Australian Academy of Science, with citation: His work with John McKinnon has been widely studied in the physics literature. They show that there is a discrete set of static solutions to the coupled Einstein/Yang-Mills equations which are geodesically complete and asymptotically flat.
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Guy Nason
#98323
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Guy Philip Nason is a British statistician, and professor of Statistics at Imperial College London. Nason received his BSc from the University of Bath in 1988, a diploma in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Cambridge in 1989, and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Bath in 1992. He served as a Council member of the Royal Statistical Society , and was Vice-President 2016–2020. He is a member of the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team for Mathematics. He was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow during 2000–5 and was awarded the Guy Medal in bronze by the Royal Statistical Society in 2001.
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Allan Sly
#62736
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Allan Murray Sly is an Australian mathematician and statistician specializing in probability theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.
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Saeid Abbasbandy
#57581
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Saeid Abbasbandy is an Iranian mathematician and university professor at Imam Khomeini International University. Abbasbandy was born on March 17, 1967, in Tehran. He finished his high school course in Shariati High school and attended in the university entrance exam, then could enter University of Tehran.
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Ivan Oseledets
#37557
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Ivan Oseledets is a Russian computer scientist and mathematician and professor at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. He is best known for the tensor train decomposition, which is more commonly called a matrix product state in the area of tensor networks.
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Daniel P. Friedman
#5752
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Daniel Paul Friedman is a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is a prominent author in the field. With David Wise, Friedman wrote a highly influential paper on lazy programming, specifically on lazy streams . The paper, entitled "Cons should not evaluate its arguments," is one of the first publications pushing for the exploration of a programming style with potentially infinite data structures and a form of programming that employs no computational effects . Over the 1970s, Friedman and Wise explor...
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Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest
#30788
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Yi Lin , also known as Jeffrey Forrest and Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest, is a professor of mathematics, systems science, economics, and finance at Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and at several major universities in China. Lin has been an active researcher in the field of systems science since mid-1980s and serves as the founder and president of the International Institute for General Systems Studies .
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Guerino Mazzola
#83227
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Guerino Bruno Mazzola is a Swiss mathematician, musicologist, and jazz pianist, as well as a writer. Education and career Mazzola obtained his PhD in mathematics at University of Zürich in 1971 under the supervision of Herbert Groß and Bartel Leendert van der Waerden. In 1980, he habilitated in Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory. In 2000, he was awarded the medal of the Mexican Mathematical Society. In 2003, he habilitated in Computational Science at the University of Zürich.
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Sonja Lyttkens
#83213
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Sonja Lyttkens was a Swedish mathematician, the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate in Sweden and the first of these women to obtain a permanent university position in mathematics. She is also known for her work to make academia less hostile to women, and for pointing out that the Swedish taxation system of the time, which provided an income deduction for husbands of non-working wives, pressured women even in low-income families not to work. Her observations helped push Sweden into taxing married people separately from their spouses.
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March Boedihardjo
#82367
Overall Influence
1998 - Present (27 years)
March Tian Boedihardjo is a Hong Kong mathematician. He is a former child prodigy of ethnic Hokkien descent with ancestry from Anxi, Quanzhou, China. Biography Boedihardjo was born to an ethnic Chinese family in Hong Kong, with family roots in Anxi, China. Boedihardjo moved to the United Kingdom in 2005, when his older brother Horatio began studying at the University of Oxford.
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David Benney
#77108
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
David John Benney was a New Zealand applied mathematician, known for work on the nonlinear partial differential equations of fluid dynamics. Education and early life Born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 8 April 1930 to Cecil Henry Benney and Phyllis Marjorie Jenkins, Benney was educated at Wellington College. He graduated BSc from Victoria University College in 1950, and MSc from the same institution in 1951. He then went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from where he graduated BA in the Mathematical Tripos in 1954. He was at Canterbury University College for two years as a lecturer, before ta...
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David Simchi-Levi
#59187
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
David Simchi-Levi is an American academic working as a Professor of Engineering Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the founder or co-founder of several companies. Simchi-Levi's research focuses on supply chain management, revenue management, and business analytics.
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Wilhelm Winter
#94355
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Wilhelm Winter is a German mathematician, specializing in operator algebras . Education and career Winter received in 1996 his Diplom from the Heidelberg University and in 2000 his doctorate from the University of Münster with thesis advisor Joachim Cuntz and thesis Covering Dimension for Nuclear C*-Algebras. At the University of Münster he was a research assistant from 2001 to 2007 and habilitated there in 2006 in Münster. In Fall 2002 he was a visiting assistant professor at Texas A & M University. From 2007 to 2011 he was at University of Nottingham, first as a lecturer and later as a reader.
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Stephen Schneider
#17679
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
Stephen Henry Schneider was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, a Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Schneider served as a consultant to federal agencies and White House staff in the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
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Max Roser
#13484
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Max Roser is an economist and philosopher who focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality. At the University of Oxford he is the director of the program on global development, based at the Oxford Martin School.
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David Evans
#72445
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
David M. Evans is Professor of Statistical Genetics and Head of Genomic Medicine at the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Queensland in 2003, after which he completed a four-year postdoc at the University of Oxford's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. During his postdoc, he conducted research for the International HapMap Project and the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. In 2007, he became a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he conducted research on genome-wide association studies based on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.
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S. Brent Morris
#54860
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
S. Brent Morris is an American author who writes on Freemasonry. He is a Master Mason, a 33° Scottish Rite Mason, and retired in 2021 as the editor of The Scottish Rite Journal, a publication of the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction.
Go to Profile#4879
Lisl Gaal
#74150
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (101 years)
Lisl Novak Gaal is an Austrian-born American mathematician known for her contributions to set theory and Galois theory. She was the first woman to hold a tenure-track position in mathematics at Cornell University, and is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.
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Mark A. Lewis
#43008
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Mark Alun Lewis is a professor and Canada Research Chair of mathematical biology in the University of Alberta Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences and Department of Biological Sciences. Among other topics, he has written extensively on the Allee effect, invasive species, parasitism, and biological dispersal.
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Xavier Buff
#79720
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Xavier Buff is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems. Buff received in 1996 his Ph.D. from the University of Paris-Sud under Adrien Douady with thesis Points fixe de renormalisation. As a postdoc he was in the academic year 1997–1998 the H. C. Wang Assistant Professor at Cornell University. At the Paul Sabatier University he became in 1998 a maître de conférences, achieved in 2006 his habilitation with habilitation thesis Disques de Siegel et ensembles de Julia d'aire strictement positive, and became in 2008 a full professor.
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Stephen S. Kudla
#92626
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Stephen S. Kudla is an American mathematician working in arithmetic geometry and automorphic forms. He is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto. Life After receiving his doctorate, Kudla spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, following which he joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 2006, he has been a Canada Research Chair Professor at the University of Toronto.
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Philip Greenland
#99454
Overall Influence
#4884
Jan W. De Leeuw
#99476
Overall Influence
#4885
Carlos Castillo-Chavez
#50462
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Carlos Castillo-Chavez is a Mexican-American mathematician who was Regents Professor and Joaquín Bustoz Jr. Professor of Mathematical Biology at Arizona State University. Castillo-Chavez was founder and the Executive Director of the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute and the Institute for Strengthening the Understanding of Mathematics and Science. For 2019, Castillo-Chavez was Provost Visiting Professor in the Applied Mathematics Division and Data Science Initiative at Brown University. Castillo-Chavez retired from Arizona State University at the end of spring 2020.
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Thyrsa Frazier Svager
#73575
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Thyrsa Anne Frazier Svager was an American academic who was one of the first African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics. Born in Ohio, she graduated from high school at the age of 16, going to Antioch College in Ohio and then doing her postgraduate degrees at Ohio State University. Frazier Svager was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Central State University in Ohio for decades, ending her academic career as provost and dean for academic affairs. She and her husband, physics professor Aleksandar Svager, invested one of their salaries during their careers to build a legacy for scholarships.
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Cassie Kozyrkov
#14335
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Cassie Kozyrkov is a South African data scientist and statistician. She worked at Google in Developer Relations team and with Decision Intelligence at Google. Early life and education Kozyrkov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. As a child, Kozyrkov became interested in data when she discovered spreadsheet software and later became interested in the relationship between information and decision-making. She began her studies in economics and mathematical statistics at Nelson Mandela University at the age of fifteen, and transferred to the University of Chicago to complete her undergraduate degree.
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Arthur Robert Calderbank
#99513
Overall Influence
#4889
Henri Skoda
#87529
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Henri Skoda is a French mathematician, specializing in the analysis of several complex variables. Skoda studied from 1964 at l'École normale supérieure and received there in 1967 his agrégation in mathematics. He received in 1972 his Ph.D. from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis under André Martineau and Pierre Lelong with thesis Étude quantitative des sous-ensembles analytiques de Cn et des idéaux de functions holomorphes. Skoda became a professor in Toulon and since 1976 has been a professor at the University of Paris VI.
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Gregory Keyes
#24616
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Gregory Keyes is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy who has written both original and media-related novels under both the names J. Gregory Keyes and Greg Keyes. Early life Keyes was born in Meridian, Mississippi, as John Gregory Keyes. He received degrees in anthropology from Mississippi State University and the University of Georgia before becoming a full-time writer.
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Alfred Foster
#70200
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Alfred Leon Foster was an American mathematician. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1934 until 1971. In 1932 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Zürich. In 1934 he accepted a regular position at Berkeley. At that time Griffith Evans was Head of the Mathematics Department and was charged by President Sproul with building a first-class mathematics center, which he did. Alfred Foster and Charles Morrey were Evans' first two appointments. Except for subsequent sabbatical leaves, spent most notably in Freiburg and Tübingen, Foster served continuously at Berkele...
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Stuart Crampin
#99542
Overall Influence
#4893
Chunsheng Wang
#99575
Overall Influence
#4894
Werner Müller
#91960
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Werner Müller is a German mathematician. His research focuses on global analysis and automorphic forms. Biography Werner Müller grew up in the German Democratic Republic . He studied mathematics at the Humboldt University of Berlin in East Berlin. In 1977 he completed his PhD under the supervision of Herbert Kurke. In his thesis, Analytische Torsion Riemannscher Mannigfaltigkeiten, he solved, at the same time as but independently of Jeff Cheeger, the Ray–Singer conjecture on the equality between analytic torsion and Reidemeister torsion. Thereafter he moved to the Karl-Weierstraß-Institut für Mathematik of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.
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Stephen Gelbart
#57802
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Stephen Samuel Gelbart is an American-Israeli mathematician who holds the Nicki and J. Ira Harris Professorial Chair in mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013 "for contributions to the development and dissemination of the Langlands program."
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Siavash Shahshahani
#83200
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Siavash Mirshams Shahshahani is an Iranian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics and head of Mathematical Sciences Department at Sharif University of Technology. He headed up the IRNIC registry for the .ir ccTLD until his retirement from that position in late 2008. He has also served as a director of APTLD between 2007 and his retirement from that position in February 2009.
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Marina Logares
#91741
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Marina Logares Jiménez is a Spanish mathematician and LGBT+ activist. She was named one of the 50 most influential LGBT+ people in Spain in 2019. Career Logares was awarded her PhD in Mathematics in 2006 from the Autonomous University of Madrid. She later worked at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, the University of Oxford, the University of Porto and the University of Plymouth. She is currently a visiting professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. Logares studies within the field of geometry. Her areas of interest in research focus on algebraic and complex geometry and mathematical physics.
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Sunčica Čanić
#88310
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Sunčica Čanić is a Croatian-American mathematician, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Center for Mathematical Biosciences at the University of Houston, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in mathematically modeling the human cardiovascular system and medical devices for it.
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Robert L. Brent
#99697
Overall Influence
#4900
Kristian Seip
#98563
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Kristian Seip is a Norwegian mathematician. He obtained his doctor's degree at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1988, and became a professor in 1994. The Norwegian Institute of Technology was renamed into the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 1996. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998. Seip was among the editorial staff for the journal Acta Mathematica from 2003 to 2012 and is an editor of Journal of Functional Analysis since 2016.
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