The 
Greatest Mathematicians of All Time
 
 

Isaac Newton
Archimedes
Carl Gauss
Leonhard Euler
Bernhard Riemann
Henri Poincaré
 

J.-L. Lagrange
David Hilbert
Euclid
G.W. Leibniz
Alex. Grothendieck
Pierre de Fermat

 

The Greatest Mathematicians of All Time
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.
 

 
  1. Isaac Newton
  2. Archimedes
  3. Carl F. Gauss
  4. Leonhard Euler
  5. Bernhard Riemann
 
  1. Henri Poincaré
  2. Joseph-Louis Lagrange
  3. David Hilbert
  4. Euclid of Alexandria
  5. Gottfried W. Leibniz
 
  1. Alexandre Grothendieck
  2. Pierre de Fermat
  3. Niels Abel
  4. Évariste Galois
  5. John von Neumann
  1. Karl W. T. Weierstrass
  2. René Déscartes
  3. Brahmagupta
  4. Peter G. L. Dirichlet
  5. Carl G. J. Jacobi
 
  1. Srinivasa Ramanujan
  2. Augustin Cauchy
  3. Hermann K. H. Weyl
  4. Eudoxus of Cnidus
  5. Georg Cantor
 
  1. Arthur Cayley
  2. Emma Noether
  3. Pythagoras of Samos
  4. Leonardo `Fibonacci'
  5. Muhammed al-Khowârizmi

At some point a longer list will become a List of Great Mathematicians rather than a List of Greatest Mathematicians. I've expanded the List 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.
 

  1. Kurt Gödel
  2. Charles Hermite
  3. Aryabhatta
  4. Apollonius of Perga
  5. Richard Dedekind
 
  1. William R. Hamilton
  2. Pierre-Simon Laplace
  3. Diophantus of Alexandria
  4. Bháscara Áchárya
  5. Blaise Pascal
 
  1. Gaspard Monge
  2. Felix Christian Klein
  3. Jean le Rond d'Alembert
  4. Jacques Hadamard
  5. Archytas of Tarentum
  1. George Boole
  2. Élie Cartan
  3. Johannes Kepler
  4. Hipparchus of Nicaea
  5. Godfrey H. Hardy
 
  1. Andrey N. Kolmogorov
  2. Ferdinand Eisenstein
  3. Jean-Victor Poncelet
  4. Jacob Bernoulli
  5. Joseph Fourier
 
  1. Stefan Banach
  2. Alhazen ibn al-Haytham
  3. Carl Ludwig Siegel
  4. Hermann G. Grassmann
  5. Julius Plücker
  1. F.E.J. Émile Borel
  2. Liu Hui
  3. Christiaan Huygens
  4. André Weil
  5. L.E.J. Brouwer
 
  1. M. E. Camille Jordan
  2. Joseph Liouville
  3. François Viète
  4. Jakob Steiner
  5. Pafnuti Chebyshev
 
  1. Henri Léon Lebesgue
  2. Michael F. Atiyah
  3. James J. Sylvester
  4. Jean-Pierre Serre
  5. Alan M. Turing
  1. John Wallis
  2. Siméon-Denis Poisson
  3. Giuseppe Peano
  4. Panini (of Shalatula)
  5. Francesco B. Cavalieri
 
  1. Atle Selberg
  2. Pappus of Alexandria
  3. John E. Littlewood
  4. Shiing-Shen Chern
  5. Johann Bernoulli
 
  1. Hermann Minkowski
  2. Ernst E. Kummer
  3. George Pólya
  4. Felix Hausdorff
  5. Hippocrates of Chios
 
  1. Omar al-Khayyám
  2. Marius Sophus Lie
  3. Daniel Bernoulli
  4. Adrien M. Legendre
  5. George D. Birkhoff
 
  1. Paul Erdös
  2. Thabit ibn Qurra
  3. Johann H. Lambert
  4. Nicolai Lobachevsky
  5. Thales of Miletus
I've appended five additional names to the List of One Hundred Greatest Mathematicians. Maxwell, Einstein, etc. are among the greatest applied mathematicians in history, but may lack the importance as pure mathematicians to qualify for The Hundred. Nevertheless, I would certainly include them in any longer list.

I think One Hundred (or 105) is a good list size, but will bring it up to 125 (not a very "round" number, but a cubical one :-), just to show some "spares." (For this extended list, I relax the birth-date rule slightly to include two greats born in the 1930's.)

             


Still other contenders:       Ahmes   Al-Kindi   Apastambha   Barrow   Beltrami   Bolyai   Bolzano   Bombelli   Chasles   Clifford   Courant   Cremona   Copernicus   Deligne   deMoivre   Dirac   Eratosthenes   Fréchet   Germain   Gordan   Green   Gregory   Heron   Hypatia   Kronecker   Landau   L.daVinci   Lefschetz   Levi-Civita   Lindemann   Maclaurin   Madhava   Möbius   Oresme   Plato   Ptolemy   Qin   Regiomontanus   Roberval   Russell   Seki   Shannon   Smale   Sturm   Tao   Tate   Theaetetus   J.G.Thompson   Torricelli   Volterra   Witten   Wittgenstein   Zariski   Zeno   et cetera.
 

This is primarily a list of Greatest Mathematicians of the Past, but I use 1930 birth as an arbitrary cutoff, and three of the "Top 100" are still alive as I write.

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! (Sorry if mathematician "100." displays as "00." Either my html is flawed, or Microsoft I-E doesn't like lists longer than 99.)

Biographies of the greatest mathematicians are in separate files by birth year:

(Or you can View the List and Bios as a single page.)


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