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The Most Famous

MATHEMATICIANS from Austria

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This page contains a list of the greatest Austrian Mathematicians. The pantheon dataset contains 823 Mathematicians, 17 of which were born in Austria. This makes Austria the birth place of the 13th most number of Mathematicians behind India and China.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Austrian Mathematicians of all time. This list of famous Austrian Mathematicians is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Austrian Mathematicians.

Photo of Kurt Gödel

1. Kurt Gödel (1906 - 1978)

With an HPI of 72.89, Kurt Gödel is the most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 92 different languages on wikipedia.

Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( GUR-dəl, German: [kʊʁt ˈɡøːdl̩] ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel profoundly influenced scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century (at a time when Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics), building on earlier work by Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege. Gödel's discoveries in the foundations of mathematics led to the proof of his completeness theorem in 1929 as part of his dissertation to earn a doctorate at the University of Vienna, and the publication of Gödel's incompleteness theorems two years later, in 1931. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example, Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.

Photo of Josef Stefan

2. Josef Stefan (1835 - 1893)

With an HPI of 63.64, Josef Stefan is the 2nd most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 48 different languages.

Josef Stefan (Slovene: Jožef Štefan; 24 March 1835 – 7 January 1893) was a Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire.

Photo of Paul Ehrenfest

3. Paul Ehrenfest (1880 - 1933)

With an HPI of 61.02, Paul Ehrenfest is the 3rd most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 37 different languages.

Paul Ehrenfest (18 January 1880 – 25 September 1933) was an Austrian theoretical physicist who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem. He befriended Albert Einstein on a visit to Prague in 1912 and became a professor in Leiden, where he frequently hosted Einstein. He died by murder-suicide in 1933; he killed his disabled son Wassik, and then himself.

Photo of Georg von Peuerbach

4. Georg von Peuerbach (1423 - 1461)

With an HPI of 59.20, Georg von Peuerbach is the 4th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.

Georg von Peuerbach (also Purbach, Peurbach; Latin: Purbachius; born May 30, 1423 – April 8, 1461) was an Austrian astronomer, poet, mathematician and instrument maker, best known for his streamlined presentation of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Theoricae Novae Planetarum. Peuerbach was instrumental in making astronomy, mathematics and literature simple and accessible for Europeans during the Renaissance and beyond.

Photo of Emil Artin

5. Emil Artin (1898 - 1962)

With an HPI of 56.37, Emil Artin is the 5th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.

Emil Artin (German: [ˈaʁtiːn]; March 3, 1898 – December 20, 1962) was an Austrian mathematician of Armenian descent. Artin was one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century. He is best known for his work on algebraic number theory, contributing largely to class field theory and a new construction of L-functions. He also contributed to the pure theories of rings, groups and fields. Along with Emmy Noether, he is considered the founder of modern abstract algebra.

Photo of Hans Hahn

6. Hans Hahn (1879 - 1934)

With an HPI of 55.65, Hans Hahn is the 6th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 27 different languages.

Hans Hahn (German: [haːn]; 27 September 1879 – 24 July 1934) was an Austrian mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to functional analysis, topology, set theory, the calculus of variations, real analysis, and order theory. In philosophy he was among the main logical positivists of the Vienna Circle.

Photo of Georg Alexander Pick

7. Georg Alexander Pick (1859 - 1942)

With an HPI of 55.21, Georg Alexander Pick is the 7th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Georg Alexander Pick (10 August 1859 – 26 July 1942) was an Austrian Jewish mathematician who was murdered during The Holocaust. He was born in Vienna to Josefa Schleisinger and Adolf Josef Pick and died at Theresienstadt concentration camp. Today he is best known for Pick's theorem for determining the area of lattice polygons. He published it in an article in 1899; it was popularized when Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus included it in the 1969 edition of Mathematical Snapshots. Pick studied at the University of Vienna and defended his Ph.D. in 1880 under Leo Königsberger and Emil Weyr. After receiving his doctorate he was appointed an assistant to Ernst Mach at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. He became a lecturer there in 1881. He took a leave from the university in 1884 during which he worked with Felix Klein at the University of Leipzig. Other than that year, he remained in Prague until his retirement in 1927 at which time he returned to Vienna. Pick headed the committee at the (then) German university of Prague, which appointed Albert Einstein to a chair of mathematical physics in 1911. Pick introduced Einstein to the work of Italian mathematicians Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita in the field of absolute differential calculus, which later in 1915 helped Einstein to successfully formulate general relativity. Charles Loewner was one of his students in Prague. He also directed the doctoral theses of Josef Grünwald, Walter Fröhlich, and Saly Struik. Pick was elected a member of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, but was expelled after Nazis took over Prague. After retiring in 1927, Pick returned to Vienna, the city where he was born. After the Anschluss when the Nazis marched into Austria on 12 March 1938, Pick returned to Prague. In March 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Pick was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp on 13 July 1942. He died there two weeks later.

Photo of Karl Menger

8. Karl Menger (1902 - 1985)

With an HPI of 54.06, Karl Menger is the 8th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 24 different languages.

Karl Menger (January 13, 1902 – October 5, 1985) was an Austrian–American mathematician, the son of the economist Carl Menger. In mathematics, Menger studied the theory of algebras and the dimension theory of low-regularity ("rough") curves and regions; in graph theory, he is credited with Menger's theorem. Outside of mathematics, Menger has substantial contributions to game theory and social sciences.

Photo of Philipp Frank

9. Philipp Frank (1884 - 1966)

With an HPI of 53.79, Philipp Frank is the 9th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Philipp Frank (March 20, 1884 – July 21, 1966) was a physicist, mathematician and philosopher of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was a logical positivist, and a member of the Vienna Circle. He was influenced by Mach and was one of the Machists criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

Photo of Hermann Bondi

10. Hermann Bondi (1919 - 2005)

With an HPI of 52.29, Hermann Bondi is the 10th most famous Austrian Mathematician.  His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

Sir Hermann Bondi (1 November 1919 – 10 September 2005) was an Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist. He is best known for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. He contributed to the theory of general relativity, and was the first to analyze the inertial and gravitational interaction of negative mass and the first to explicate correctly the nature of gravitational waves. In his 1990 autobiography, Bondi regarded the 1962 work on gravitational waves as his "best scientific work".: 79 

Pantheon has 17 people classified as mathematicians born between 1423 and 1921. Of these 17, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased mathematicians include Kurt Gödel, Josef Stefan, and Paul Ehrenfest. As of April 2022, 3 new mathematicians have been added to Pantheon including Simon von Stampfer, Hilda Geiringer, and Leopold Vietoris.

Deceased Mathematicians

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Newly Added Mathematicians (2022)

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Which Mathematicians were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 16 most globally memorable Mathematicians since 1700.