The 
Greatest Mathematicians of All Time
 
 

Isaac Newton
Archimedes
Carl Gauss
Leonhard Euler
Bernhard Riemann
Euclid
 

Henri Poincaré
J.-L. Lagrange
David Hilbert
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. Euclid
  2. Henri Poincaré
  3. Joseph-Louis Lagrange
  4. David Hilbert
  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. Carl G. J. Jacobi
  5. Srinivasa Ramanujan
 
  1. Augustin Cauchy
  2. Peter G. L. Dirichlet
  3. Hermann K. H. Weyl
  4. Eudoxus of Cnidus
  5. Georg Cantor
 
  1. Muhammed al-Khowârizmi
  2. Arthur Cayley
  3. Emma Noether
  4. Pythagoras of Samos
  5. Leonardo `Fibonacci'

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. Pierre-Simon Laplace
 
  1. Richard Dedekind
  2. Diophantus of Alexandria
  3. William R. Hamilton
  4. Blaise Pascal
  5. Bháscara Áchárya
 
  1. Gaspard Monge
  2. Jean le Rond d'Alembert
  3. Felix Christian Klein
  4. George Boole
  5. Stefan Banach
  1. Ferdinand Eisenstein
  2. Jacques Hadamard
  3. Johannes Kepler
  4. Élie Cartan
  5. Archytas of Tarentum
 
  1. Jean-Victor Poncelet
  2. Jacob Bernoulli
  3. Hipparchus of Nicaea
  4. Godfrey H. Hardy
  5. Andrey N. Kolmogorov
 
  1. André Weil
  2. Julius Plücker
  3. François Viète
  4. Joseph Fourier
  5. Siméon-Denis Poisson
  1. Alhazen ibn al-Haytham
  2. Carl Ludwig Siegel
  3. Hermann G. Grassmann
  4. F.E.J. Émile Borel
  5. Liu Hui
 
  1. Christiaan Huygens
  2. L.E.J. Brouwer
  3. Michael F. Atiyah
  4. Henri Léon Lebesgue
  5. John Wallis
 
  1. Jakob Steiner
  2. Pappus of Alexandria
  3. Pafnuti Chebyshev
  4. John E. Littlewood
  5. M. E. Camille Jordan
  1. Giuseppe Peano
  2. Jean-Pierre Serre
  3. Atle Selberg
  4. Shiing-Shen Chern
  5. Panini (of Shalatula)
 
  1. Johann Bernoulli
  2. Francesco B. Cavalieri
  3. James J. Sylvester
  4. Adrien M. Legendre
  5. Ernst E. Kummer
 
  1. Hermann Minkowski
  2. George Pólya
  3. Hippocrates of Chios
  4. Alan M. Turing
  5. Emil Artin
  1. Felix Hausdorff
  2. Omar al-Khayyám
  3. Girolamo Cardano
  4. Joseph Liouville
  5. Johann H. Lambert
 
  1. Paul Erdös
  2. Alexis C. Clairaut
  3. Marius Sophus Lie
  4. Nicolai Lobachevsky
  5. Thales of Miletus
 

The way I've formatted this list, it "wants" to be a multiple of fifteen in size, so I've added five extra names to the List of One Hundred Greatest Mathematicians. These extra great mathematicians are among the greatest thinkers in history, but too much of their greatness was outside of pure math for them to qualify among "100 Greatest Mathematicians." Still, I would include them on a 125 Greatest Mathematicians List, along with perhaps Copernicus who was a mathematician, and among the most influential scientists. I think One Hundred is a good list size, but will bring it up to 125, just to show some "spares."     :-)

 
       


Still other contenders:       Ahmes   Al-Kindi   Apastambha   Barrow   Beltrami   Bolyai   Bolzano   Bombelli   Chasles   Clebsch   Clifford   Cremona   Deligne   deMoivre   Eratosthenes   Fréchet   Germain   Gordan   Green   Gregory   Heron   Hypatia   Kronecker   Landau   L.daVinci   Levi-Civita   Lindemann   Maclaurin   Milnor   Möbius   Perelman   Plato   Ptolemy   Regiomontanus   Roberval   Russell   Seki   Shannon   Smale   Sturm   Tate   Theaetetus   J.G.Thompson   Torricelli   Volterra   Wiles   Wittgenstein   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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