Is Euler really the greatest?

A few weeks ago, someone told me: “Everything in mathematics could eventually be named after Euler, because he was truly the greatest”. First of all, I’m not a mathematician at all, so I’m not the person to argue about this. But I am truly interested in mathematics, especially when they are related to IT in general, and more specifically graph theory, data science and deep learning in particular. And already with this basic math knowledge, I have to admit that Euler was truly one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

But: was he truly the greatest? Triggered by my interest for graph theory, I did a small experiment. I found a list of 96 mathematicians in “The Princeton Companion to Mathematics”, a book by Timothy Gowers, University of Cambridge. Then I looked up these 96 mathematicians on Wikipedia, and wrote a program to count the number of links to the others. Doing so, I could make a ranking of the most central mathematicians within this network of 96 — not “of all time,” but relative to each other, based purely on how their Wikipedia pages link together.

First of all, the list of mathematicians:

#	Name	Years
1	Pythagoras	ca. 569 B.C.
2	Euclid	ca. 325 B.C.
3	Archimedes	ca. 287 B.C.
4	Apollonius	ca. 262 B.C.
5	Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī	800 - 847
6	Leonardo of Pisa (known as Fibonacci)	1170 - 1250
7	Girolamo Cardano	1501 - 1576
8	Rafael Bombelli	1526 - 1572
9	François Viète	1540 - 1603
10	Simon Stevin	1548 - 1620
11	René Descartes	1596 - 1650
12	Pierre Fermat	1600 - 1665
13	Blaise Pascal	1623 - 1662
14	Isaac Newton	1642 - 1727
15	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	1646 - 1716
16	Brook Taylor	1685 - 1731
17	Christian Goldbach	1690 - 1764
18	The Bernoullis	—
19	Leonhard Euler	1707 - 1783
20	Jean Le Rond d'Alembert	1717 - 1783
21	Edward Waring	1735 - 1798
22	Joseph Louis Lagrange	1736 - 1813
23	Pierre-Simon Laplace	1749 - 1827
24	Adrien-Marie Legendre	1752 - 1833
25	Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier	1768 - 1830
26	Carl Friedrich Gauss	1777 - 1855
27	Siméon-Denis Poisson	1781 - 1840
28	Bernard Bolzano	1781 - 1848
29	Augustin-Louis Cauchy	1789 - 1857
30	August Ferdinand Möbius	1790 - 1868
31	Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevskii	1792 - 1856
32	George Green	1793 - 1841
33	Niels Henrik Abel	1802 - 1829
34	János Bolyai	1802 - 1860
35	Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi	1804 - 1851
36	Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet	1805 - 1859
37	William Rowan Hamilton	1805 - 1865
38	Augustus De Morgan	1806 - 1871
39	Joseph Liouville	1809 - 1882
40	Ernst Eduard Kummer	1810 - 1893
41	Évariste Galois	1811 - 1832
42	James Joseph Sylvester	1814 - 1897
43	George Boole	1815 - 1864
44	Karl Weierstrass	1815 - 1897
45	Pafnuty Chebyshev	1821 - 1894
46	Arthur Cayley	1821 - 1895
47	Charles Hermite	1822 - 1901
48	Leopold Kronecker	1823 - 1891
49	Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann	1826 - 1866
50	Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind	1831 - 1916
51	Émile Léonard Mathieu	1835 - 1890
52	Camille Jordan	1838 - 1922
53	Sophus Lie	1842 - 1899
54	Georg Cantor	1845 - 1918
55	William Kingdon Clifford	1845 - 1879
56	Gottlob Frege	1848 - 1925
57	Christian Felix Klein	1849 - 1925
58	Ferdinand Georg Frobenius	1849 - 1917
59	Sofya (Sonya) Kovalevskaya	1850 - 1891
60	William Burnside	1852 - 1927
61	Jules Henri Poincaré	1854 - 1912
62	Giuseppe Peano	1858 - 1932
63	David Hilbert	1862 - 1943
64	Hermann Minkowski	1864 - 1909
65	Jacques Hadamard	1865 - 1963
66	Ivar Fredholm	1866 - 1927
67	Charles-Jean de la Vallée Poussin	1866 - 1962
68	Felix Hausdorff	1868 - 1942
69	Élie Joseph Cartan	1869 - 1951
70	Emile Borel	1871 - 1956
71	Bertrand Arthur William Russell	1872 - 1970
72	Henri Lebesgue	1875 - 1941
73	Godfrey Harold Hardy	1877 - 1947
74	Frigyes (Frédéric) Riesz	1880 - 1956
75	Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer	1881 - 1966
76	Emmy Noether	1882 - 1935
77	Waclaw Sierpiński	1882 - 1969
78	George Birkhoff	1884 - 1944
79	John Edensor Littlewood	1885 - 1977
80	Hermann Weyl	1885 - 1955
81	Thoralf Skolem	1887 - 1963
82	Srinivasa Ramanujan	1887 - 1920
83	Richard Courant	1888 - 1972
84	Stefan Banach	1892 - 1945
85	Norbert Wiener	1894 - 1964
86	Emil Artin	1898 - 1962
87	Alfred Tarski	1901 - 1983
88	Andrej Nicolaevich Kolmogorov	1903 - 1987
89	Alonzo Church	1903 - 1995
90	William Vallance Douglas Hodge	1903 - 1975
91	John von Neumann	1903 - 1957
92	Kurt Gödel	1906 - 1978
93	André Weil	1906 - 1998
94	Alan Turing	1912 - 1954
95	Abraham Robinson	1918 - 1974
96	Nicolas Bourbaki	1935 -

I wrote a Python program to scrape the Wikipedia pages of these mathematicians, and asked for 3 measures:

• PageRank: a recursive measure: a node is important if it’s linked to by other important nodes, not just by many nodes. It captures a kind of “endorsement quality” — being cited by Euler counts for more than being cited by an obscure footnote, which makes it a natural correction to in-degree’s blind spot.
• Indegree: the number of incoming edges a node receives — here, how many other mathematicians cite, build on, or reference a given one. It’s the simplest measure of raw popularity or recognition, but it treats every incoming link as equal, regardless of who’s giving it.
• Betweenness: measures how often a node sits on the shortest path between other pairs of nodes — it’s a measure of brokerage, not popularity. A mathematician with high betweenness may not be the most cited, but they’re the bridge connecting otherwise-separate schools of thought.

A note on methodology. Before diving into the results, one clarification matters: these rankings are computed on the subgraph formed by the 96 mathematicians only, not on the full Wikipedia link graph. So when I say “Abel beats Euler,” I mean: within this curated list, the network structure concentrates relatively more influence on Abel — not that Abel outranks Euler across all of Wikipedia. That’s still a meaningful finding, but it’s a narrower one, and worth stating plainly.

The graph is directed, built from name mentions across these mathematicians’ Wikipedia pages, and PageRank was computed with the standard damping factor of 0.85.

The outcome was sometimes as expected, sometimes surprising. Below is a table with the main result. Giving all 96 would be overload:

Top 20 Most Influential Mathematicians (Within This Network of 96)

PR Rank	Mathematician	PageRank	InDegree	ID Rank	Betweenness	BW Rank
1	Niels Henrik Abel	0.03905	0.30526	5	0.04869	7
2	Carl Friedrich Gauss	0.03831	0.33684	1	0.10914	2
3	Isaac Newton	0.03420	0.30526	5	0.04432	9
4	Euclid	0.03405	0.32632	2	0.03293	13
5	Leonhard Euler	0.03376	0.30526	5	0.06979	5
6	David Hilbert	0.03192	0.31579	3	0.11249	1
7	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	0.02494	0.21053	9	0.07558	3
8	Joseph Louis Lagrange	0.02359	0.20000	11	0.02576	20
9	Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann	0.02222	0.28421	7	0.07345	4
10	Augustin-Louis Cauchy	0.02208	0.21053	9	0.02035	25
11	Pierre Fermat	0.02194	0.16842	17	0.03781	10
12	Pierre-Simon Laplace	0.02058	0.16842	17	0.01714	28
13	Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi	0.01947	0.20000	11	0.01466	31
14	Apollonius	0.01868	0.08421	40	0.01779	27
15	Georg Cantor	0.01815	0.18947	14	0.05613	6
16	Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier	0.01809	0.22105	8	0.01077	38
17	Archimedes	0.01799	0.09474	33	0.00788	49
18	René Descartes	0.01753	0.11579	27	0.02615	19
19	Bertrand Arthur William Russell	0.01592	0.16842	17	0.02740	17
20	Jules Henri Poincaré	0.01588	0.18947	14	0.03529	11

Key Findings

The network analysis reveals several surprising insights:

Abel beats Euler — within this network. Contrary to the popular belief that Euler dominated mathematics, Niels Henrik Abel ranks #1 in PageRank influence among these 96, followed by Gauss and Newton. Euler, while still among the elite, ranks #5 — suggesting that within this particular set of peers, his influence is more distributed than concentrated, rather than uniquely dominant.

Different metrics tell different stories. Gauss dominates in citation count (InDegree rank #1), making him the most directly referenced mathematician in this set. But David Hilbert, ranked only #6 in PageRank, achieves the highest Betweenness centrality (#1), meaning he serves as the crucial bridge connecting different mathematical traditions and schools of thought — a role that raw popularity metrics miss entirely.

Ancient mathematics endures. Euclid (#4), Archimedes (#17), and Apollonius (#14) still rank among the top influences despite living over 2,000 years ago. This suggests that foundational, geometric thinking remains essential to modern mathematics.

Influence is not monolithic. The variation in rankings across the three metrics shows that influence operates on different levels: raw citation count, network centrality, and bridge-building. A mathematician might be widely cited (high InDegree) but not central to connecting fields (low Betweenness), or vice versa — a reminder that “who mattered most” depends entirely on which kind of mattering you measure.

What strikes me most, though, isn’t really about mathematicians. It’s a pattern I recognize from 25 years in ERP consulting: success gets attributed to a single genius, a single hero-consultant, a single “who saved the project.” But the network — much like Hilbert’s high betweenness despite a lower PageRank — usually tells a different story. The bridge-builders, the ones connecting disconnected parts of a system, rarely get the credit that the most-cited or most-visible node does. Whether it’s mathematical influence or an ERP implementation, the myth of the lone genius tends to obscure the structure that actually did the work.

View the interactive network visualization (opens in a new tab)