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,
#4901
Tadeusz Figiel
#98135
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Tadeusz Figiel is a Polish mathematician specializing in functional analysis. Biography In 1970 Figiel graduated in mathematics at the University of Warsaw. He received his doctorate in 1972 under the supervision of Aleksander Pełczyński and then habilitated in 1975 with habilitation thesis O modułach wypukłości i gładkości at the . There Figiel was appointed in 1983 an associate professor and in 1990 a full professor. He is the head of the Gdańsk Branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the editor-in-chief of the journal Studia Mathematica.
Go to Profile#4902
María del Carmen Martínez Sancho
#85849
Overall Influence
1901 - 1995 (94 years)
María del Carmen Martínez Sancho was the first woman in Spain to gain a PhD in Mathematics. She was the first Professor of Mathematics to work in secondary school education in Spain, and the first woman to be appointed to the Board of Extension of Studies at the University of Berlin. She was part of Madrid and Seville's Instituto-Escuela.
Go to Profile#4903
Tevian Dray
#47936
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Tevian Dray is an American mathematician who has worked in general relativity, mathematical physics, geometry, and both science and mathematics education. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010.
Go to Profile#4904
Juliette Kennedy
#67254
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Juliette Kennedy is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki. Her main research interests are mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. In the course of her work she has published extensively on the works of Kurt Gödel.
Go to Profile#4905
Justin Jesse Price
#82722
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Justin Jesse Price was an American mathematician, known for several textbooks and contributions to his field. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania was I. Some Duality Theorems II. On the Characters of Certain Compact Abelian Groups advised by Nathan Fine . Price participated in a research project for the Air Force and joined the faculty at Cornell University as associate professor . In 1963 he became professor at Purdue University, retiring in 2004.
Go to Profile#4906
Mark de Berg
#81480
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Mark de Berg is a Dutch computational geometer, known as one of the authors of the textbook Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications . De Berg completed his Ph.D. in 1992 at Utrecht University. His dissertation, Efficient Algorithms for Ray Shooting and Hidden Surface Removal, was supervised by Mark Overmars. He is a professor of computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Go to Profile#4907
Shiri Artstein
#91652
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Shiri Artstein-Avidan is an Israelii mathematician who in 2015 won the Erdős Prize. She specializes in convex geometry and asymptotic geometric analysis, and is a professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#4908
Egon Schulte
#97557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Egon Schulte is a mathematician and a professor of Mathematics at Northeastern University in Boston. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the Technical University of Dortmund; his doctoral dissertation was on Regular Incidence Complexes .
Go to Profile#4909
Pamela Liebeck
#89617
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Pamela Liebeck was a British mathematician and mathematics educator, the author of two books on mathematics. Life Liebeck was born in Bromley on 11 July 1930, grew up in Surrey, and read mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford beginning in 1949. At Oxford, she also played on the cricket and tennis teams. After additional study at the University of Cambridge, she became a mathematics teacher. Her husband Hans Liebeck was also an Oxford mathematics student; they met through a shared love of playing chamber music, married in 1953, and moved together to Cape Town University in South Africa in 1...
Go to Profile#4910
John Harnad
#85991
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
John Harnad is a Hungarian-born Canadian mathematical physicist. He did his undergraduate studies at McGill University and his doctorate at the University of Oxford under the supervision of John C. Taylor. His research is on integrable systems, gauge theory and random matrices.
Go to Profile#4911
Lucian Freud
#1191
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the Briti...
Go to Profile#4912
Panos Papasoglu
#94209
Overall Influence
Panos Papasoglu is a Greek mathematician, Lecturer of Mathematics at the Mathematics Department of the University of Oxford. His main research interests are group theory and geometric group theory.
Go to Profile#4913
Kim-Anh Do
#64914
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Kim-Anh Do is an Australian biostatistician of Vietnamese descent. She is the chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the holder of the Electa C. Taylor Chair for Cancer Research at the center. She also holds adjunct professorships at Texas A&M University and Rice University.
Go to Profile#4914
Pierre Bieliavsky
#87228
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Pierre Bieliavsky , is a Belgian mathematician. Biography Pierre Bieliavsky graduated from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1991. He completed a doctorate in 1995 under the supervision of Michel Cahen at the Université libre de Bruxelles on Symmetric symplectic spaces.
Go to Profile#4915
Boris T. Polyak
#100018
Overall Influence
#4916
Marvin Knopp
#83234
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Marvin Isadore Knopp was an American mathematician who worked primarily in number theory. He made notable contributions to the theory of modular forms. Life and education Knopp was born on January 4, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois. He received his PhD under Paul T. Bateman from the University of Illinois in 1958 where he became friends with fellow student Gene Golub. Over the course of his career, he advised twenty Ph.D. students. He is the father of pianist Seth Knopp, and of Yehudah, Abby, and Elana. Marvin was married to Josephine Zadovsky Knopp for 25 years but the marriage ended in divorce. Knopp died on December 24, 2011, during a vacation in Florida.
Go to Profile#4917
Lauren Williams
#72224
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Lauren Kiyomi Williams is an American mathematician known for her work on cluster algebras, tropical geometry, algebraic combinatorics, amplituhedra, and the positive Grassmannian. She is Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#4918
Sandrine Dudoit
#62467
Overall Influence
Sandrine Dudoit is a professor of statistics and public health at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research applies statistics to microarray and genetic data; she is known as one of the founders of the open-source Bioconductor project for the development of bioinformatics software.
Go to Profile#4919
Malcolm Jobling
#100052
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
#4920
Patrick Maisonneuve
#100073
Overall Influence
#4921
Viacheslav V. Nikulin
#100083
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Viacheslav Valentinovich Nikulin is a Russian mathematician working in the algebraic geometry of K3 surfaces and Calabi–Yau threefoldss, mirror symmetry, the arithmetic of quadratic forms, and hyperbolic Kac–Moody algebras. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Liverpool. A third chair of mathematics was established for Nikulin in 1999, the second chair having been established in 1964 for C. T. C. Wall and the first having been established in 1882. Nikulin has made contributions towards the solution of Hilbert's 16th problem.
Go to Profile#4922
Norbert A'Campo
#87672
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Norbert A'Campo is a Swiss mathematician working on singularity theory. He earned a doctorate in 1972 from the University of Paris-Sud. In 1974 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and in 1988 he was elected president of the Swiss Mathematical Society. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#4923
Lucy Joan Slater
#52272
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Lucy Joan Slater was a mathematician who worked on hypergeometric functions, and who found many generalizations of the Rogers–Ramanujan identities. Early life Slater was born in 1922 and homeschooled for much of her early education. Her father passed away when she was nine years old. Slater was interested in jazz music and played the piano as an accompanist in her early years. She attended college at Bedford College and received her first B.A. from London University in 1944. During the war, she worked teaching soldiers trigonometry.
Go to Profile#4924
Alp Eden
#86069
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Osman Alp Eden is a Turkish mathematician, scientist and professor of mathematics. He is a retired member of the Boğaziçi University Mathematics Department in İstanbul, Turkey. Education Alp Eden was born in İstanbul in 1958. He finished the high school Robert College of Istanbul in 1976. He graduated from Boğaziçi University Civil Engineering and Mathematics departments in 1981. He received his PhD in Mathematics under the supervision of Ciprian Ilie Foiaș at the Indiana University Bloomington in the United States in 1989.
Go to Profile#4925
François Ledrappier
#86171
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
François Ledrappier is a French mathematician. Ledrappier graduated from the École Polytechnique in 1967 and received his doctorate from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1975 under the supervision of Jacques Neveu. Ledrappier taught at Paris 6 and then became a professor at South Bend's University of Notre Dame, where he is now professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#4926
Klaus Fischer
#95036
Overall Influence
1943 - 2009 (66 years)
Klaus Gunter Fischer was a German-American mathematician of German origin. He worked on a wide range of problems in algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, graph theory, and combinatorics. Fischer was chair of the Mathematics Department at George Mason University at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#4927
Võ Nguyên Giáp
#4832
Overall Influence
1911 - 2013 (102 years)
Võ Nguyên Giáp was a self-taught general of the People's Army of Vietnam , communist revolutionary and politician. Regarded as one of the greatest military strategists of the 20th century, Giáp commanded Vietnamese communist forces in various wars. He served as the military commander of the Việt Minh and later the PAVN from 1941 to 1972, as the minister of defence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and later Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1946–1947 and from 1948 to 1980, and as deputy prime minister from 1955 to 1991. He was also a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietn...
Go to Profile#4928
Howard Levi
#79756
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Howard Levi was an American mathematician who worked mainly in algebra and mathematical education. Levi was very active during the educational reforms in the United States, having proposed several new courses to replace the traditional ones.
Go to Profile#4929
Anatole Beck
#85519
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Anatole Beck was an American mathematician. Beck graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1947, studied at Brooklyn College and in 1956 received his PhD from Yale University under Shizuo Kakutani PhD . In 1958 he became Assistant Professor and in 1966 Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He married Jewish feminist writer Evelyn Torton Beck in 1954; they had two children before divorcing in 1974. He met his second wife Eve-Lynn Siegel Beck in 1998, she was cousins with Michael Bleicher, one of Anatole’s longtime friends.
Go to Profile#4930
Adrian Baddeley
#62987
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Adrian John Baddeley is a statistical scientist working in the fields of spatial statistics, statistical computing, stereology and stochastic geometry. Life and career Baddeley was born in Melbourne, Australia and educated at Eltham High School there, and studied mathematics and statistics at the Australian National University and the University of Cambridge . He was elected a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge in the second year of his PhD. Subsequently, he worked for the University of Bath , the CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics, Sydney , the Centrum Wiskunde &...
Go to Profile#4931
John Hunt, Baron Hunt
#4943
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Henry Cecil John Hunt, Baron Hunt, was a British Army officer who is best known as the leader of the successful 1953 British expedition to Mount Everest. Early life and military career Hunt was born in Simla, British India on 22 June 1910, the son of Captain Cecil Edwin Hunt of the Indian Army, and a great-great-nephew of the explorer Sir Richard Burton. His father was killed in action during the First World War. Hunt, from the age of 10, spent much holiday time in the Alps, learning some of the mountaineering skills he would later hone while taking part in several expeditions in the Himalayas while serving in India.
Go to Profile#4932
Ricardo Baeza Rodríguez
#27963
Overall Influence
Ricardo Baeza Rodríguez is a Chilean mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Talca. He earned his Ph.D. in 1970 from Saarland University, under the joint supervision of Robert W. Berger and Manfred Knebusch. His research interest is in number theory.
Go to Profile#4933
Lawrence Schovanec
#84853
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Lawrence E. Schovanec is an American mathematician and academic administrator and the current President of Texas Tech University. He began his career in academia at Texas Tech in 1982, and has served the institution as president since August 1, 2016. Schovanec earned his bachelor's degree from Phillips University, a master's degree from Texas A&M University, and a Ph.D in mathematics from Indiana University.
Go to Profile#4934
Polly Sy
#75334
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Polly Wee Sy is a Filipino mathematician specializing in functional analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of the Philippines Diliman, the former head of the mathematics department at the university, and the former president of the Southeast Asia Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#4935
Aubrey William Ingleton
#94096
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Aubrey William Ingleton was an English mathematician. Ingleton was born in Chester, the son of an accountant. He joined the civil service at age 16, and during World War II was seconded to a radar development project. After the war, he entered Northern Polytechnic, and earned a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1949 as an external student at the University of London, winning first class honours, the Lubbock Prize, and the Sherbrooke Prize. He did his graduate studies in mathematics at King's College London under the supervision of Anthony Francis Ruston, on subjects related to the Hahn–Banach theorem. He took a faculty position at Birkbeck College in 1951, and married in 1952.
Go to Profile#4936
Thomas Lumley
#33540
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Thomas Lumley is an Australian statistician who serves as the chair of biostatistics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Lumley is also a member of the "R Core Team." He was elected as a fellow of the ASA in 2012. Lumley was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2015.
Go to Profile#4937
Naihua Duan
#72009
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Naihua Duan is a Taiwanese biostatistician specializing in mental health services and policy research at Columbia University. Duan is a professor of biostatistics with tenure in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biostatistics at Columbia University Medical Center, and a senior research scientist at NYSPI.
Go to Profile#4938
Jonathan Koomey
#13768
Overall Influence
Jonathan Koomey is a researcher who identified a long-term trend in energy-efficiency of computing that has come to be known as Koomey's law. From 1984 to 2003, Dr. Koomey was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he founded and led the End-Use Forecasting group, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a lecturer and a consulting professor at Stanford and a lecturer at UC Berkeley. He is a graduate of Harvard University and University of California at Berkeley . His research focuses on...
Go to Profile#4939
Louis Hodes
#26759
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
Louis Hodes was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and cancer researcher. Early life and computer science work Louis Hodes got his Bachelor of Science from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He got his Doctor of Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, under Hartley Rogers with a thesis on computability. With John McCarthy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he helped produce the earliest implementations of the programming language Lisp, and under Marvin Minsky he did early research on visual pattern recognition in Lisp. He is also credited by some...
Go to Profile#4940
Lyudmyla Nazarova
#91268
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Lyudmyla Oleksandrivna Nazarova is a Ukrainian mathematician specializing in linear algebra and representation theory. Research With her husband, Andrei Vladimirovich Roiter, Nazarova founded the theory of representations of and differentiation of partially ordered sets, and solved the second Brauer–Thrall conjecture, proving what became known as the Nazarova–Roiter theorem. Her research has also included pioneering work on representations of quivers, and on the wild problem in matrix classification.
Go to Profile#4941
Dénes Petz
#87523
Overall Influence
1953 - 2018 (65 years)
Dénes Petz was a Hungarian mathematical physicist and quantum information theorist. He is well known for his work on quantum entropy inequalities and equality conditions, quantum f-divergences, sufficiency in quantum statistical inference, quantum Fisher information, and the related concept of monotone metrics in quantum information geometry. He proposed the first quantum generalization of Rényi relative entropy and established its data processing inequality.
Go to Profile#4942
Rogemar Mamon
#65833
Overall Influence
Rogemar Sombong Mamon, is a Canadian mathematician, quant, and academic. He is a co-editor of the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics published by Oxford University Press since 2009. Mamon is known for his contributions to the developments and applications of regime-switching framework useful in economic, financial and actuarial modeling. Majority of his works promote regime-switching paradigms modulated by either discrete- or continuous-time hidden Markov models . A recurrent theme of his research is dynamic parameter estimation via HMM filtering recursions. He also made contributions in t...
Go to Profile#4943
Muriel Kennett Wales
#52843
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Muriel Kennett Wales was an Irish-Canadian mathematician, and is believed to have been the first Irish-born woman to earn a PhD in pure mathematics. Life She was born Muriel Kennett on 9 June 1913 in Belfast. In 1914, her mother moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, and soon remarried; henceforth Muriel was known by her mother's new last name, Wales.
Go to Profile#4944
Gary R. Cutter
#100690
Overall Influence
#4945
Greta Panova
#82350
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Greta Cvetanova Panova is a Bulgarian-American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include combinatorics, probability and theoretical computer science.
Go to Profile#4946
Stefan Ralescu
#92309
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Ştefan S. Ralescu is a statistician who has made contributions to the theory of statistical inference, mainly through asymptotic theory. He is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Queens College of the City University of New York in New York City. He studied first at the University of Bucharest obtaining an MA in mathematics . He came to Indiana University in 1977, completing his PhD in 1981 under the direction of Madan Lal Puri. Before moving to New York, Ralescu was an assistant professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University .
Go to Profile#4947
Valérie Berthé
#92066
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Valérie Berthé is a French mathematician who works as a director of research for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale , a joint project between CNRS and Paris Diderot University. Her research involves symbolic dynamics, combinatorics on words, discrete geometry, numeral systems, tessellations, and fractals.
Go to Profile#4948
Michael Trick
#80879
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Michael Alan Trick is an operations researcher who studies combinatorial optimization, and is known for his work on sports scheduling, transportation scheduling, and social choice. He is the Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor of Operations Research in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University , and dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.
Go to Profile#4949
Nira Chamberlain
#42382
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Nira Cyril Chamberlain is a British mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. He is a Principal Consultant at SNC-Lavalin. Early life and education Born in Birmingham, Chamberlain always enjoyed mathematics at school and, despite a lack of encouragement from his teachers, studied a BSc in Mathematics at Coventry Polytechnic, graduating in 1991. He then moved to Loughborough University, where he achieved an MSc in Industrial Mathematical Modelling in 1993. In 2014, he completed a PhD at Portsmouth University, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Osbaldestin entitled "Extension of the gamble...
Go to Profile#4950
Henry Oliver Lancaster
#92070
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Henry Oliver "HOL" Lancaster AO FAA, , was an Australian mathematical statistician and Foundation Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Sydney. After initial actuarial and accounting studies, Lancaster trained in medicine, particularly in pathology, where he employed a strong element of statistical analysis.
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