Famous Mathematicians

The most famous mathematicians in history include Euclid, Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss. There is no official ranking, though, and no objective way to name the single “greatest” mathematician: results of different eras and fields cannot be weighed against each other. This page gives you a list of important mathematicians with short profiles, sorted by time, so you can see who did what and when.

You also find the ancient Greek mathematicians, famous female mathematicians, Indian and Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages, Black mathematicians and some of the names that matter today. All dates come from the fact-checked table of the German site, where almost every person has a detailed biography (marked “in German”).

List of famous mathematicians in order of time

Ancient Greek mathematicians

The Greeks turned calculation into proof. Babylonian and Egyptian scribes had long known useful rules, but from about 600 BC Greek thinkers asked why a rule is true and demanded an argument. Besides the five below, Eudoxus, Eratosthenes (who measured the size of the Earth), Apollonius (conic sections), Hipparchus (early trigonometry), Heron, Ptolemy and Pappus shaped Greek mathematics. Hypatia, whose profile is in the section on women, is one of the last great names of the Greek world.

Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–546 BC)

Thales is the earliest named Greek mathematician. He is credited with giving reasons for geometric statements, among them that an angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle (Thales’ theorem). None of his writings survive, so later authors had to describe what he did, and some of it may be legend. Thales (in German)

Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 570–495 BC)

Pythagoras founded a school in southern Italy that treated numbers as the basis of everything. The theorem named after him, a² + b² = c² in right triangles, was known in Babylon about a thousand years earlier, and it is unclear what he himself proved. Pythagoras (in German)

Euclid (about 300 BC)

Euclid worked in Alexandria. His Elements arranged the geometry and number theory of his time into definitions, axioms and proofs. It remained a textbook for more than two thousand years, and it includes the proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euclid (in German)

Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287–212 BC)

Archimedes computed areas and volumes of curved shapes with methods that anticipated calculus. With 96-sided polygons he showed that π lies between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. He also found the law of the lever and the principle of buoyancy. The story of “Eureka” in the bath is a later legend. Archimedes (in German)

Diophantus of Alexandria (ca. 200–284)

Diophantus wrote the Arithmetica, a collection of problems about equations whose solutions must be rational numbers. He was among the first to abbreviate the unknown with a symbol, a step toward algebraic notation. Diophantus (in German)

Mathematicians of India, China and the Islamic world

While Europe’s universities were still small, scholars in India, China and Baghdad developed algebra, trigonometry and our number system. The Hindu-Arabic numerals are a product of this exchange.

Liu Hui (ca. 225–295)

Liu Hui wrote a commentary on the Chinese classic Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art. He gave π as about 3.14 using a polygon with 192 sides and described an elimination method for systems of equations. Liu Hui (in German)

Aryabhata (476–550)

Aryabhata’s Aryabhatiya contains a sine table, a method for linear equations with whole-number solutions and the value π ≈ 3.1416, which he calls an approximation. Aryabhata (in German)

Brahmagupta (598–after 665)

Brahmagupta wrote down, in 628, the first rules for calculating with zero and negative numbers. Nearly all agree with ours today; only his rule for dividing by zero was wrong. Brahmagupta (in German)

Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780–850)

Working in Baghdad, al-Khwarizmi wrote the book on al-jabr from which the word algebra comes, and a text that spread the Indian digits. The word “algorithm” is a form of his name. Al-Khwarizmi (in German)

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131)

Khayyam, better known in the West as a poet, solved cubic equations geometrically with conic sections and studied the parallel postulate. Other important scholars of the Islamic world are al-Karaji (polynomials), Ibn al-Haytham (optics) and al-Tusi (trigonometry), all with German biographies on the site. Omar Khayyam (in German)

Madhava of Sangamagrama (ca. 1340–1425)

Madhava found infinite series for π, sine, cosine and arctangent about 250 years before Gregory, Newton and Leibniz. He is the best-known mathematician of the Kerala school. Madhava (in German)

From Fibonacci to Euler

Leonardo of Pisa, called Fibonacci (ca. 1170–after 1240)

Fibonacci’s Liber abaci (1202) taught European merchants to calculate with the Indian digits. A rabbit problem in it gave rise to the Fibonacci sequence. Fibonacci (in German)

Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576)

In his Ars Magna of 1545, Cardano published solution formulas for equations of the third and fourth degree, found with Tartaglia and Ferrari. He was also one of the first to calculate with square roots of negative numbers. Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari (in German)

René Descartes (1596–1650)

Descartes joined geometry and algebra in the coordinate system, which is why we speak of Cartesian coordinates. In 1637 he introduced the habit of using x, y and z for unknowns and a, b and c for knowns. Descartes (in German)

Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665)

A lawyer by profession, Fermat founded modern number theory. His “Last Theorem” about the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ stayed unproved until 1994. With Pascal he laid the basis of probability theory. Fermat (in German)

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

Pascal co-founded probability theory, studied the triangle that carries his name and built the Pascaline, one of the first mechanical calculators. Pascal (in German)

Isaac Newton (1643–1727)

Newton developed calculus (which he called fluxions), the binomial series and Newton’s method for finding zeros. His Principia of 1687 explains the motion of planets with mathematics. Newton (in German)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

Leibniz developed calculus independently of Newton. The notation dx and ∫ is his. He described the binary system in 1703, which is the basis of the binary number system in computers. Leibniz (in German)

Leonhard Euler (1707–1783)

Euler wrote on almost every field of mathematics: analysis, number theory, graph theory and mechanics. He shaped today’s notation with e, i, f(x) and Σ, and he made the symbol π standard. Euler (in German)

The 19th and 20th centuries

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855)

Gauss constructed the regular 17-gon with compass and straightedge as a young man, wrote the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, proved the fundamental theorem of algebra and developed the method of least squares and the normal distribution. He is often named as one of the greatest mathematicians ever. Gauss (in German)

Évariste Galois (1811–1832)

Galois gave a criterion for when an equation can be solved with roots and thereby created group theory in its modern form. He died in a duel at the age of 20. Galois (in German)

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866)

Riemann created Riemannian geometry, the Riemann integral and Riemann surfaces. His hypothesis about the zeros of the zeta function is still unproved and one of the Millennium Prize Problems. Riemann (in German)

Georg Cantor (1845–1918)

Cantor founded set theory and showed with his diagonal argument that there are different sizes of infinity. Cantor (in German)

David Hilbert (1862–1943)

In 1900 Hilbert listed 23 problems that guided mathematics for a century. He also gave geometry a new axiomatic foundation and gave his name to the Hilbert space. Hilbert (in German)

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920)

Ramanujan taught himself mathematics in India and filled notebooks with almost 3,900 formulas on infinite series, partitions and continued fractions. In England he worked with G. H. Hardy and died at 32. Hardy and Ramanujan (in German)

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978)

Gödel proved in 1931 that every consistent mathematical system that is rich enough for arithmetic contains true statements that it cannot prove. Gödel (in German)

Alan Turing (1912–1954)

Turing described the abstract Turing machine, showed that some problems cannot be decided by any program and helped to break the Enigma code in Bletchley Park. Turing (in German)

Paul Erdős (1913–1996)

Erdős wrote about 1,500 papers with about 500 co-authors, mostly on combinatorics, graph theory and number theory. Erdős (in German)

Andrew Wiles (born 1953)

Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994 and 1995, after seven years of secret work, and received the Abel Prize in 2016. Wiles (in German)

Grigori Perelman (born 1966)

Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture in 2002 and 2003. He declined both the Fields Medal and the Millennium Prize. Perelman (in German)

Famous female mathematicians

For most of history women were barred from universities, academies and professorships, so many used pseudonyms or found other ways. Their stories are told in the German article on women in mathematics. The list below shows the best known.

Hypatia (ca. 355–415)

Hypatia taught mathematics and philosophy in Alexandria and was the best-known scholar of her time. None of her texts survive. What we know comes from letters of her student Synesius and later reports of her murder in 415. Hypatia (in German)

Sophie Germain (1776–1831)

Barred from the École polytechnique, Germain studied lecture notes and wrote to Lagrange and Gauss as “Monsieur Le Blanc.” She proved results toward Fermat’s Last Theorem (Sophie Germain primes are named after her) and won a prize of the Paris Academy in 1816 for her theory of vibrating plates. Sophie Germain (in German)

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852)

Lovelace translated an article about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in 1843 and added notes that were longer than the text. Note G contains the first published algorithm intended for a machine. Ada Lovelace (in German)

Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850–1891)

Kovalevskaya earned a doctorate at Göttingen in 1874 and became the first woman professor of mathematics in Northern Europe, in Stockholm. Her name is in the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem. Kovalevskaya (in German)

Emmy Noether (1882–1935)

Noether’s theorem of 1918 links symmetries to conservation laws in physics, and her abstract algebra changed 20th-century mathematics. She could habilitate only in 1919 and never held a regular professorship. Emmy Noether (in German)

Julia Robinson (1919–1985)

Robinson’s work was a key step toward the solution of Hilbert’s tenth problem, finished by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970. Robinson and Matiyasevich (in German)

Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017)

Mirzakhani, who grew up in Tehran, worked on the geometry of curved surfaces. In 2014 she became the first woman and the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal. She died at 40, and her birthday, May 12, is now the International Day of Women in Mathematics. Mirzakhani (in German)

Karen Uhlenbeck was the first woman to receive the Abel Prize (2019). Maryna Viazovska won the Fields Medal in 2022, and Hong Wang is the third woman to receive it, in 2026. Their work is part of the story of 21st-century mathematics (in German).

Black and African American mathematicians

For Black History Month and beyond, these are names often listed. Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) calculated flight paths for early American spaceflights at NASA’s Langley center. David Blackwell (1919–2010) worked on probability, game theory and statistics. In 1965 he became the first African American member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Euphemia Lofton Haynes earned a mathematics PhD in 1943, the first African American woman to do so, and around 1949 Evelyn Boyd Granville and Marjorie Lee Browne followed as the next two. Granville later worked on programs for the space flights of Project Mercury and Apollo.

Mathematicians working today

People ask for the “best living mathematician,” but there is no such ranking. Names that often appear in the news for major results or prizes include Andrew Wiles (Fermat’s Last Theorem), Grigori Perelman (Poincaré conjecture), Shing-Tung Yau (Calabi conjecture, Fields Medal 1982), Yuri Matiyasevich (Hilbert’s tenth problem), Maryna Viazovska and Hong Wang. Stand: November 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the most famous mathematicians?

The names mentioned most often are Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Leibniz, Euler and Gauss. There is no official ranking, because the achievements of different eras cannot be compared directly. The list above gives dates and key results.

Who are the great ancient Greek mathematicians?

Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Apollonius, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Diophantus and Hypatia. See the Greek section.

Who are the famous female mathematicians?

Hypatia, Sophie Germain, Ada Lovelace, Sofya Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether, Julia Robinson and Maryam Mirzakhani are among the best known. Read their short profiles in the women section.

Who is the father of mathematics?

There is no single holder of the title. Depending on the source it is Thales, Euclid, Archimedes or Pythagoras. A longer answer is on the page Who invented math?

Who are famous Indian mathematicians?

Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II, Madhava and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Profiles of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Madhava and Ramanujan are above.

Who was the first mathematician?

Nobody knows. The oldest name tied to a mathematical text is the Egyptian scribe Ahmes (about 1550 BC), and Thales is the earliest named Greek mathematician. See the first mathematician.

Sources and further reading

• MacTutor History of Mathematics: Biographies index
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: biographies of mathematicians
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Katherine Johnson and David Harold Blackwell
• MacTutor: Evelyn Boyd Granville
• MacTutor: Sofia Kovalevskaya
• Quanta Magazine: Hong Wang Wins 2026 Fields Medal, the Third Woman Ever (23 July 2026)
• Institute for Advanced Study: Karen Uhlenbeck Awarded 2019 Abel Prize
• Hans Wußing: 6000 Jahre Mathematik. Eine kulturgeschichtliche Zeitreise, Springer, Berlin 2008 and 2009 (in German).