The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#501
Cynthia Wyels
#46569
Overall Influence
Cynthia Jean Wyels is an American mathematician whose interests include linear algebra, combinatorics, and mathematics education, and who is known for her research in graph pebbling and radio coloring of graphs. She is a professor of mathematics at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, California, where she also co-directs the Alliance for Minority Participation.
Go to Profile#502
Meike Akveld
#57687
Overall Influence
Meike Maria Elisabeth Akveld is a Swiss mathematician and textbook author, whose professional interests include knot theory, symplectic geometry, and mathematics education. She is a tenured senior scientist and lecturer in the mathematics and teacher education group in the Department of Mathematics at ETH Zurich. She is also the organizer of the Mathematical Kangaroo competitions in Switzerland, and president of the Association Kangourou sans Frontières, a French-based international society devoted to the popularization of mathematics.
Go to Profile#503
Rhonda Hughes
#54808
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Rhonda Jo Hughes is an American mathematician, the Helen Herrmann Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Education Hughes grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She attended Gage Park High School, where she was a cheerleader and valedictorian of her class. She studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for one and a half years, then left school and worked for six months before resuming her education at the University of Illinois at Chicago on an Illinois State Scholarship studying mathematics. There, she came under the mentorship of Yoram Sagher, who encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in mathematics.
Go to Profile#504
Marie-France Vignéras
#53357
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marie-France Vignéras is a French mathematician. She is a Professor Emeritus of the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. She is known for her proof published in 1980 of the existence of isospectral non-isometric Riemann surfaces. Such surfaces show that one cannot hear the shape of a hyperbolic drum. Another highlight of her work is the establishment of the mod-l local Langlands correspondence for GL in 2000. Her current work concerns the p-adic Langlands program.
Go to Profile#505
Christel Rotthaus
#66622
Overall Influence
Christel Rotthaus is a professor of mathematics at Michigan State University. She is known for her research in commutative algebra. Career Rotthaus received her Ph.D. from Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 1975 under Hans-Joachim Nastold. Rotthaus now works at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#506
Sylvie Corteel
#64006
Overall Influence
Sylvie Corteel is a French mathematician at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Paris Diderot University and the University of California, Berkeley, who was an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. Her research concerns the enumerative combinatorics and algebraic combinatorics of permutations, tableaux, and partitions.
Go to Profile#507
Victoria Powers
#53916
Overall Influence
Victoria Ann Powers is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and known for her work on positive polynomials and on the mathematics of electoral systems. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at Emory University.
Go to Profile#508
Ewa Damek
#67320
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ewa Damek is a Polish mathematician at the University of Wrocław whose research interests include harmonic analysis, branching processes, and Siegel domains. Education and career Damek is a professor in the mathematical institute of the University of Wrocław, which she directed from 2002 to 2007.
Go to Profile#509
Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein
#31677
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Genevieve Marie Grotjan Feinstein was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst. She worked for the Signals Intelligence Service throughout World War II, during which time she played an important role in deciphering the Japanese cryptography machine Purple, and later worked on the Cold War-era Venona project.
Go to Profile#510
Miriam Leiva
#66014
Overall Influence
Miriam Almaguer Leiva is a Cuban-American mathematician and mathematics educator, the first American Hispanic woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics and mathematics education. She is the Bonnie Cone Distinguished Professor for Teaching Emerita in the Department of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the founder of TODOS: Mathematics for All, an organization devoted to advocacy for and encouragement of Latinx students in mathematics. She is also an author of many secondary-school mathematics textbooks.
Go to Profile#511
Apala Majumdar
#50686
Overall Influence
Apala Majumdar is a British applied mathematician specialising in the mathematics of liquid crystals. She is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Strathclyde. Education and career Majumdar did her undergraduate studies at the University of Bristol. As a graduate student at Bristol, she also worked with Hewlett Packard Laboratories. She was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Bristol in 2006; her dissertation, Liquid crystals and tangent unit-vector fields in polyhedral geometries, was jointly supervised by Jonathan Robbins and Maxim Zyskin.
Go to Profile#512
Naomi Jochnowitz
#49804
Overall Influence
Naomi G. Jochnowitz is an American mathematician interested in algebraic number theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester. Jochnowitz earned her Ph.D. in 1976 from Harvard University. Her dissertation, Congruences Between Modular Forms and Implications for the Hecke Algebra, was supervised by Barry Mazur. At Rochester, she is known for her enthusiastic encouragement and support for incoming students to participate in the mathematics program, which contributed to a tripled number of mathematics majors from 1999 to 2002.
Go to Profile#513
Anne Bourlioux
#50410
Overall Influence
Anne Bourlioux is a Canadian mathematician whose research involves the numerical simulation of turbulent combustion. She is a winner of the Richard C. DiPrima Prize, and a professor of mathematics and statistics at the Université de Montréal.
Go to Profile#514
Ginestra Bianconi
#60106
Overall Influence
Ginestra Bianconi is a network scientist and mathematical physicist, known for her work on statistical mechanics, network theory, multilayer and higher-order networks, and in particular for the Bianconi–Barabási model of growing of complex networks and for the Bose–Einstein condensation in complex networks. She is a professor of applied mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Physics: Complexity.
Go to Profile#515
Jacqui Ramagge
#60583
Overall Influence
Jacqui Ramagge is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science at Durham University and Honorary Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sydney. She was born in London, emigrated to Australia in 1991, and returned to the UK to take up the position at Durham University in 2020.
Go to Profile#516
Frédérique Lenger
#58373
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Frédérique Papy-Lenger was a Belgian mathematician and mathematics educator active in the New Math movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Early life and education Frédérique Lenger was born on August 12, 1921, in Arlon, Belgium, one of three daughters of a lawyer. After studying classics in the Lycée Royal d’Arlon, she studied for a licentiate in mathematics at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 1939 to 1943. The University officially closed in 1941 to prevent its takeover by the German occupation, and her studies continued underground.
Go to Profile#517
Janet Beery
#52792
Overall Influence
Janet Lynn Beery is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics who serves as a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Redlands. She also served as the editor-in-chief of mathematics history journal Convergence from 2009 to 2019, and has authored a book on the mathematics of Thomas Harriot.
Go to Profile#518
Liliana Borcea
#55607
Overall Influence
Liliana Borcea is the Peter Field Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in scientific computing and applied mathematics, including the scattering and transport of electromagnetic waves.
Go to Profile#519
Sherry Li
#38216
Overall Influence
Xiaoye Sherry Li is a researcher in numerical methods at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she works as a senior scientist. She is responsible there for the SuperLU package, a high-performance parallel system for solving sparse systems of linear equations by using their LU decomposition. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she heads the Scalable Solvers Group.
Go to Profile#520
Lorraine Foster
#50970
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lorraine Lois Foster is an American mathematician. In 1964 she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from California Institute of Technology. Her thesis advisor at Caltech was Olga Taussky-Todd. Foster's Erdos number is 2.
Go to Profile#521
Anne Broadbent
#53440
Overall Influence
Anne Lise Broadbent is a mathematician at the University of Ottawa who won the 2016 Aisenstadt Prize for her research in quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum information. Early life and education Broadbent specialised in music at De La Salle High School in Ottawa, graduating in 1997. Her interest in science led her to major in mathematics for her undergraduate degree.
Go to Profile#522
Cynthia A. Phillips
#55469
Overall Influence
Cynthia A. Phillips is a researcher at the Center for Computing Research of Sandia National Laboratories, known for her work in combinatorial optimization. Education Phillips earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1985, and a doctorate in computer science from MIT in 1990. Her dissertation, on parallel algorithms, was supervised by Charles Leiserson.
Go to Profile#523
Rachel Ward
#41523
Overall Influence
Rachel Ward is an American applied mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin. She is known for work on machine learning, optimization, and signal processing. At the University of Texas, she is W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Distinguished Professor in Computational Engineering and Sciences—Data Science, and professor of mathematics.
Go to Profile#524
Suzan Kahramaner
#39897
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Suzan Kahramaner was one of the first female mathematicians in Turkish academia. Education Kahramaner was born in Üsküdar, in Istanbul. Her mother was Müzeyyen Hanım, the daughter of Halep's district treasurer, and her father was surgeon Dr. Rifki Osman Bey. She studied at the Moda Nümune Inas primary school between 1919 and 1924. After enrolling in Notre Dame De Sion in 1924, she completed her secondary education and obtained her French bachelor's degree in 1934.
Go to Profile#525
Christine Proust
#53123
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Christine Proust is a French historian of mathematics and Assyriologist known for her research on Babylonian mathematics. She is a senior researcher at the SPHERE joint team of CNRS and Paris Diderot University, where she and Agathe Keller are co-directors of the SAW project headed by Karine Chemla .
Go to Profile#526
Jessica Utts
#24461
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jessica Utts is a parapsychologist and statistics professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is known for her textbooks on statistics and her investigation into remote viewing. Statistics education In 2003, Utts published an article in American Statistician, a journal published by the American Statistical Association, calling for significant changes to collegiate level statistics education. In the article she argued that curricula do a fine job of covering the mathematical side of statistics, but do a poor job of teaching students the skills necessary to properly interpret statistical results in scientific studies.
Go to Profile#527
Kathryn Roeder
#60402
Overall Influence
Kathryn M. Roeder is an American statistician known for her development of statistical methods to uncover the genetic basis of complex disease and her contributions to mixture models, semiparametric inference, and multiple testing. Roeder holds positions as professor of statistics and professor of computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads a project focused on discovering genes associated with autism.
Go to Profile#528
Helen Byrne
#61324
Overall Influence
Helen M. Byrne is a mathematician based at the University of Oxford. She is Professor of Mathematical Biology in the university's Mathematical Institute and a Professorial Fellow in Mathematics at Keble College. Her work involves developing mathematical models to describe biomedical systems including tumours. She was awarded the 2019 Society for Mathematical Biology Leah Edelstein-Keshet Prize for exceptional scientific achievements and for mentoring other scientists and was appointed a Fellow of the Society in 2021.
Go to Profile#529
Anna Seigal
#49891
Overall Influence
Anna Seigal is a British mathematician who conducts research in applied algebraic geometry at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. She was awarded the 2020 SIAM Richard C. DiPrima Prize and the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#530
Rhonda Hatcher
#64230
Overall Influence
Rhonda Lee Hatcher is an American mathematician whose research topics include analytic number theory and L-functions as well as topics in recreational mathematics. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Texas Christian University.
Go to Profile#531
Colva Roney-Dougal
#62350
Overall Influence
Colva Mary Roney-Dougal is a British mathematician specializing in group theory and computational algebra. She is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra at St Andrews. She is also known for her popularization of mathematics on BBC radio shows, including appearances on In Our Time about the mathematics of Emmy Noether and Pierre-Simon Laplace and on The Infinite Monkey Cage about the nature of infinity and numbers in the real world.
Go to Profile#532
Lida Barrett
#65687
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Lida Baker Kittrell Barrett was an American mathematics professor and administrator. She served on many committees and boards and contributed to mathematics, mathematics education, and increasing the participation of members of underrepresented groups in mathematics. She served as president of the Mathematical Association of America in 1989 and 1990.
Go to Profile#533
Anne Gelb
#57990
Overall Influence
Anne E. Gelb is a mathematician interested in numerical analysis, partial differential equations and Fourier analysis of images. She is John G. Kemeny Parents Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#534
Judith D. Sally
#67897
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Judith D. Sally is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Northwestern University. Her research is in commutative algebra, particularly in the study of Noetherian local rings and graded rings. Life and education Judith Donovan was born to Dr. and Mrs. Edward J. Donovan in Manhattan, New York in 1937. She finished high school at the Convent of Sacred Heart in New York and pursued her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, earning her bachelor's degree in 1958. After graduating from Barnard, she began graduate studies in mathematics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. At Brandeis, she met Paul J.
Go to Profile#535
Michelle Schatzman
#44088
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Michelle Schatzman was a French mathematician, specializing in applied mathematics, who combined research as a CNRS research director and teaching as a professor at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1.
Go to Profile#536
Lynn Batten
#66522
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lynn Margaret Batten was a Canadian-Australian mathematician known for her books about finite geometry and cryptography, and for her research on the classification of malware. Education and career Batten earned her Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in 1977. Her dissertation was D-Partition Geometries.
Go to Profile#537
Irène Gijbels
#63596
Overall Influence
Irène Gijbels is a mathematical statistician at KU Leuven in Belgium, and an expert on nonparametric statistics. She has also collaborated with TopSportLab, a KU Leuven spin-off, on software for risk assessment of sports injuries.
Go to Profile#538
Hélène Frankowska
#61950
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Hélène Frankowska, or Halina Frankowska is a Polish and French mathematician known for her research in control theory and set-valued analysis. She is a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and works in the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu of Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Go to Profile#539
Claudia Sagastizábal
#60529
Overall Influence
Claudia Alejandra Sagastizábal is an applied mathematician known for her research in convex optimization and energy management, and for her co-authorship of the book Numerical Optimization: Theoretical and Practical Aspects. She is a researcher at the University of Campinas in Brazil. Since 2015 she has been editor-in-chief of the journal Set-Valued and Variational Analysis.
Go to Profile#540
Anna Mazzucato
#66476
Overall Influence
Anna Laura Mazzucato is a professor of mathematics, distinguished senior scholar, and associate head of the mathematics department at Pennsylvania State University. Her mathematical research involves functional analysis, function spaces, partial differential equations, and their applications in fluid mechanics and elasticity.
Go to Profile#541
Clàudia Valls
#66290
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Clàudia Valls Anglés is a mathematician and an expert in dynamical systems. She is an associate professor in the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Education Valls completed a doctorate at the University of Barcelona in 1999. Her dissertation, The Classical Arnold Example of Diffusion with Two Equal Parameters, was supervised by .
Go to Profile#542
Nanny Wermuth
#52859
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nanny Wermuth is the Professor emerita of Statistics, Chalmers University of Technology/University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are Multivariate statistical models and their properties, especially graphical Markov models, as well as their applications in the life sciences and in the natural sciences.
Go to Profile#543
Rachel Whiteread
#5078
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Dame Rachel Whiteread is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993. Whiteread was one of the Young British Artists who exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997. Among her most renowned works are House, a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house; the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, resembling the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards; and Untitled Monument, her resin sculpture for the empty fourth plinth in London's...
Go to Profile#544
Christina Goldschmidt
#33309
Overall Influence
Christina Anna Goldschmidt is a British probabilist known for her work in probability theory including coalescent theory, random minimum spanning trees, and the theory of random graphs. She is professor of probability in the department of statistics, University of Oxford and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Go to Profile#545
Nira Dyn
#63423
Overall Influence
Nira Dyn is an Israeli mathematician who studied geometric modeling, subdivision surfaces, approximation theory, and image compression. She is a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and has been called a "pioneer and leading researcher in the subdivision community".
Go to Profile#546
Jing-Rebecca Li
#62296
Overall Influence
Jing-Rebecca Li is an applied mathematician known for her work on magnetic resonance imaging and Lyapunov equations. She is a researcher with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation , at their Saclay research center.
Go to Profile#547
Cynthia Rudin
#21704
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Cynthia Diane Rudin is an American computer scientist and statistician specializing in machine learning and known for her work in interpretable machine learning. She is the director of the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab at Duke University, where she is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, statistical science, and biostatistics and bioinformatics. In 2022, she won the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for her work on the importance of transparency f...
Go to Profile#548
Bianca Viray
#67789
Overall Influence
Bianca L. Viray is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She works in arithmetic geometry, which is a blend of algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.
Go to Profile#549
Andrea R. Nahmod
#76200
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Andrea Rica Nahmod is a mathematician at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is known for her work in nonlinear partial differential equations and other areas of nonlinear analysis. Career Nahmod received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1991. She went to work as a research fellow at Macquarie University from 1992 to 1994, followed by positions at University of Texas, Austin, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study, before coming to work at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1998.
Go to Profile#550
Adele Cutler
#29676
Overall Influence
Adele Cutler is a statistician known as one of the developers of archetypal analysis and of the random forest technique for ensemble learning. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Utah State University.
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