![]() Isaac Newton |
![]() Archimedes |
![]() Carl Gauss |
![]() Leonhard Euler |
![]() Bernhard Riemann |
![]() David Hilbert |
![]() J.-L. Lagrange |
![]() Euclid |
![]() Alex. Grothendieck |
![]() G.W. Leibniz |
![]() John von Neumann |
![]() Henri Poincaré |
The Greatest
Mathematicians of the Past
ranked in approximate order of "greatness."
To qualify, the mathematician
must be born before 1930 and his work must have
breadth,
depth, and
historical importance.
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| At some point a longer list will become a List of Great Mathematicians rather than a List of Greatest Mathematicians. I've expanded my original List of Thirty to an even Hundred, but you may prefer to reduce it to a Top Seventy, Top Sixty, Top Fifty, Top Forty or Top Thirty list, or even Top Twenty, Top Fifteen or Top Ten List.
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| Einstein, Maxwell, Cardano, Aristotle and Galileo are among the greatest applied mathematicians in history, but lack the importance as pure mathematicians to qualify for The Top 70. Nevertheless I'd want to include them in any longer list, so I've tucked these ambiguous cases into the #71-#75 slots.
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| This is primarily a list of Greatest Mathematicians of the Past, but I use 1930 birth as an arbitrary cutoff, and one of the "Top 100" (Jean-Pierre Serre) is still alive as of 2023. Click here for a longer List of 200 including many more 20th-century mathematicians.) |
Click for a discussion of certain omissions. Please send me e-mail if you believe there's a major flaw in my rankings (or an error in any of the biographies). Obviously the relative ranks of, say Fibonacci and Ramanujan, will never satisfy everyone since the reasons for their "greatness" are different. I'm sure I've overlooked great mathematicians who obviously belong on this list. Please e-mail and tell me!
Biographies of the greatest mathematicians are in separate files by birth year:
(Or you can View the Complete List and Bios as a single page.)