On 3/2/06, Shripad M. Garge <smgarge@gmail.com> wrote:

I think Serre is the most influential mathematician today.

I've never heard of him, though my background is mostly physics. Physics drives a lot of math (look at all the stuff string theory has produced), so you could probably count physicists among your influential mathematicians. Big names there include Hawking and Penrose; they're big enough celebrities that people far outside the field have heard of them. I don't know, however, how much their work has influenced the direction of mathematics. Nearly all computer hobbyists have played with John Conway's game of life at one point or another. Does that count as "influential"? I think category theory has a decent claim to unifying a lot of math and opening new ways of understanding things (e.g. 3d quantum gravity as a 2-functor from 3Cob_2 to Hilb), so you might consider Eilenberg and MacLane. -- Mike Stay metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike