Erik Ivar Fredholm (7 April 1866 – 17 August 1927) was a Swedish mathematician whose work on integral equations and operator theory foreshadowed the theory of Hilbert spaces.

He obtained his PhD at Uppsala University in 1898, under the supervision of Gösta Mittag-Leffler.

[3] Beside his academic career he was recruited to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency when it was founded in 1902.

He later served as an actuary at the insurance company Skandia (1904-1927), where his Fredholm equation was used to calculate buyback-prices.

Fredholm was a member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters and of the Accademia dei Lincei; he was awarded the Poncelet Prize for 1908.