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.
 

 

Isaac Newton Archimedes Carl F. Gauss Leonhard Euler Bernhard Riemann		Henri Poincaré Joseph-Louis Lagrange Euclid of Alexandria David Hilbert Gottfried W. Leibniz		Alexandre Grothendieck Pierre de Fermat Évariste Galois John von Neumann Niels Abel
Karl W. T. Weierstrass René Descartes Peter G. L. Dirichlet Carl G. J. Jacobi Srinivasa Ramanujan		Augustin Cauchy Brahmagupta Georg Cantor Hermann K. H. Weyl Arthur Cayley		Emma Noether Pythagoras of Samos Leonardo `Fibonacci' William R. Hamilton Aryabhata
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. In compiling this list, I've considered contributions outside mathematics. I already give lower weight to breadth and influence in mathematical physics, but if I reduced the weight to zero, the List would be much different. Newton contributed little to number theory, but is considered to have breadth because of his physics, which is also his main influence. If only breadth and influence in pure mathematics are considered, Newton wouldn't be #1 (though still in the Top Ten).
Charles Hermite Richard Dedekind Apollonius of Perga Pierre-Simon Laplace Muhammed al-Khowârizmi		Kurt Gödel Diophantus of Alexandria Bháscara Áchárya Eudoxus of Cnidus Blaise Pascal		Felix Christian Klein Jean le Rond d'Alembert Élie Cartan Hipparchus of Nicaea Godfrey H. Hardy
Archytas of Tarentum Alhazen ibn al-Haytham Carl Ludwig Siegel Gaspard Monge Jacques Hadamard		Andrey N. Kolmogorov Johannes Kepler Joseph Liouville Hermann G. Grassmann Julius Plücker		F.E.J. Émile Borel François Viète Joseph Fourier Stefan Banach Jacob Bernoulli
F. Gotthold Eisenstein Giuseppe Peano Liu Hui André Weil Jakob Steiner		Jean-Victor Poncelet M. E. Camille Jordan Panini of Shalatula Bonaventura Cavalieri Christiaan Huygens		Jean-Pierre Serre Pafnuti Chebyshev L.E.J. Brouwer James J. Sylvester Henri Léon Lebesgue
Galileo Galilei James C. Maxwell Albert Einstein Aristotle Girolamo Cardano		Alan M. Turing Michael F. Atiyah Siméon-Denis Poisson Pappus of Alexandria Atle Selberg		John E. Littlewood Johann Bernoulli Shiing-Shen Chern Hermann Minkowski Ernst E. Kummer
George Pólya Felix Hausdorff F. L. Gottlob Frege Alfred Tarski Thales of Miletus		George D. Birkhoff John Wallis Marius Sophus Lie Johann H. Lambert Adrien M. Legendre		Daniel Bernoulli Omar al-Khayyám George Boole Israel M. Gelfand Simon Stevin
I've appended five additional names to the List of Seventy-five Greatest Mathematicians. Maxwell, Einstein, etc. are among the greatest applied mathematicians in history, but lack the importance as pure mathematicians to qualify for The Top 75. Nevertheless I'd want to include them in any longer list. Because of their ambiguous status, I've left these five without rank numbers. I think One Hundred is a good list size, but it's not a multiple of fifteen, and I don't want to change the way I've formatted the list.   :-)     I've finally brought the List up to One Hundred Fifty; and that's the end of this project! For this extended list, I relax the birth-date rule slightly to include two greats born in the 1930's.
John Willard Milnor John Horton Conway Thabit ibn Qurra Jean Gaston Darboux Hippocrates of Chios		Nicolai Lobachevsky Andrei A. Markov Nasir al-Din al-Tusi Sofia Kovalevskaya Paul Erdös		Oliver Heaviside Alexis C. Clairaut James Gregory Leopold Kronecker John Napier of Merchiston
Norbert Wiener Emil Artin Georg F. Frobenius Tullio Levi-Civita J. Müller `Regiomontanus'		Alfred Clebsch Oswald Veblen Lennart A.E. Carleson Gérard Desargues Abu Rayhan al-Biruni		Colin Maclaurin Ptolemy of Alexandria S.G. Vito Volterra Qin Jiushao & Zhu Shiejie Brook Taylor
R. Maurice Fréchet Michel F. Chasles Henri P. Cartan Thoralf A. Skolem Samuel Eilenberg		Henry J.S. Smith Augustus F. Möbius   Luigi Cremona Rafael Bombelli Edmund G.H. Landau		Leonardo da Vinci Paul A.M. Dirac   Jamshid Al-Kashi William K. Clifford Nicole Oresme
This webpage started as a Top Ten List, and it took a lot of reading by me to finally realize Leibniz and Grothendieck were the two I needed to add to get a Top Twelve. And on and on and on until the List has grown to 150 names! But the task seems increasingly overwhelming! I won't make the List any bigger than it already is, but I do solicit comments: Surely the 150 I've chosen are not the very very "greatest"! My list is biased against modern mathematicians. An average 6+ on the List of 150 were born in each decade from 1800 to 1919, but only 4 born in the 1920's, 2 in the 1930's, and none more recently. I welcome submission of suggested names and mini-bios for more recent mathematicians.   Other Likely Contenders: Following are 50 more mathematicians if you prefer a List of 200. (Click here for an even longer List of 260.)       Ahmes   Al-Karaji   Al-Kindi   Aleksandrov   Apastambha   Babbage   Beltrami   Bhaskara.I   Bolyai   Bolzano   Boscovich   Brioschi   Chang   Copernicus   Courant   Dehn   Deligne   de.Moivre   Eratosthenes   Germain   L.Gersonides   Gibbs   Heron   ibn.Sinan   Lefschetz   Leray   Madhava   Mandelbrot   Mittag-Leffler   Nash   Perelman   Plato   Pontryagin   Roberval   Russell   Seki   Shannon   Shelah   Smale   Sturm   Tao   Tartaglia   Tate   Theaetetus   J.G.Thompson   Torricelli   Witten   Wittgenstein   Zariski   Zeno   Zhu