I had always heard the names of Newton, Archimedes, and Gauss to be the top three. They certainly deserve to rated highly, but not everyone puts them in the top three spots.
I found several websites. I thought I could compile these in some manner to come up with a fool-proof, master ranking. So, here we go.
This is from a website, http://www.eoht.info/page/Greatest+mathematician+ever that has their own ranking, then list several others as well. They (Their site is "Hmolpedia - an encyclopedia of human thermodynamics, human chemistry and human physics", no sure what that even means) have their own list.
Hmolpedia
- Euler
- Gauss
- Newton
- Euclid
- Archimedes
- Descartes
- Lagrange
- Leibniz
- Poincare
- Pythagorus
The-Top-Tens.com
- Euler
- Gauss
- Archimedes
- Aryabhatta
- Euclid
- Lagrange
- Leibniz
- Pythagorus
- Descartes
- Newton
Eells - 1962
- Newton
- Leibniz
- Lagrange
- Euler
- Laplace
- Euclid
- Gauss
- Archimedes
- Descartes
- Cardano
Bellos - 2010
- Pythagoras
- Hypatia
- Cardano
- Euler
- Gauss
- Cantor
- Erdos
- Conway
- Perlman
- Tao
Pickover - 2001
- Newton
- Gauss
- Euclid
- Euler
- Hilbert
- Poincare
- Riemann
- Galois
- Descartes
- Pascal
Allen - 1998
- Newton
- Archimedes
- Gauss
- Euler
- Riemann
- Euclid
- Poincare
- Lagrange
- Hilbert
- Leibniz
The voting seems surprisingly close. Bellos, I'm sure a fine person, did seem to wander off from the rest of the herd a bit, but that's fine. So, let's use a 10 point scale, with first place getting 10 points, and so on. Here is the definite, not to be debated, beyond approach, all-time top ten mathematicians.
- Leonhard Euler - 48
- Carl Gauss - 45
- Isaac Newton - 39
- Euclid - 31
- Archimedes - 26
- Joseph Lagrange - 20
- Gottfried Leibniz - 17
- Rene Descartes - 11
- Henri Poincare - 11
- Bernhard Riemann - 10
