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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#551
Tamara Broderick
#52445
Overall Influence
Tamara Ann Broderick is an American computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works on machine learning and Bayesian inference. Education and early career Broderick is from Parma Heights, Ohio. She attended Laurel School and graduated in 2003. Whilst at high school she took part in the inaugural Massachusetts Institute of Technology Women's Technology Program. She studied mathematics at Princeton University, earning a bachelor's degree in 2007. She was a Marshall scholar, allowing her to pursue graduate research at the University of Cambridge. She was a runner-up in the Association for Women in Mathematics Alice T.
Go to Profile#552
Esther Arkin
#65575
Overall Influence
Esther M. Arkin is an Israeli–American mathematician and computer scientist whose research interests include operations research, computational geometry, combinatorial optimization, and the design and analysis of algorithms. She is a professor of applied mathematics and statistics at Stony Brook University. At Stony Brook, she also directs the undergraduate program in applied mathematics and statistics, and is an affiliated faculty member with the department of computer science.
Go to Profile#553
Renu C. Laskar
#58099
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Renu Chakravarti Laskar is an Indian-born American mathematician, specializing in graph theory. She is Professor Emerita of Mathematical sciences at Clemson University. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962. Renu Chakravarti Laskar's life was marked by a personal loss when her husband, Amulya L. Laskar, a distinguished professor of physics, died in 1991. His obituary in The New York Times recognized his contributions to physics and his role at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Go to Profile#554
Pascale Garaud
#49701
Overall Influence
Pascale Garaud is a French astrophysicist and applied mathematician interested in fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and their applications to astrophysics and geophysics. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently serves as the department chair.
Go to Profile#555
Irene M. Gamba
#49392
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Irene Martínez Gamba is an Argentine–American mathematician. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the W.A. Tex Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Computational Engineering and Sciences and is head of the Applied Mathematics Group in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.
Go to Profile#556
Vicky Neale
#67400
Overall Influence
Victoria Neale was a British mathematician and writer. She was Whitehead Lecturer at Oxford's Mathematical Institute and Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol College. Her research specialty was number theory. The author of the 2017 book Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers, she was interviewed on several BBC radio programs as a mathematics expert. In addition, she wrote for The Conversation and The Guardian. Her other educational and outreach activities included lecturing at the PROMYS Europe high-school program and helping to organize the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad.
Go to Profile#557
Kari Hag
#65809
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kari Jorun Blakkisrud Hag is a Norwegian mathematician known for her research in complex analysis on quasicircles and quasiconformal mappings, and for her efforts for gender equality in mathematics. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . With Frederick Gehring she is the author of the book The Ubiquitous Quasidisk .
Go to Profile#558
Inez Fung
#30317
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Inez Fung is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Berkeley, jointly appointed in the department of earth and planetary science and the department of environmental science, policy and management. She is also the co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.
Go to Profile#559
Leslie Cheng
#52356
Overall Influence
Leslie C. Cheng is an American mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis. She holds the Rachel C. Hale Chair in Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Cheng did poorly in calculus in high school, and began her undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr in 1988 intending to study the humanities. However, she was converted to mathematics by faculty member Rhonda Hughes and graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1992. She went to the University of Pittsburgh for graduate study, completing her Ph.D. there in 1998. Her dissertation, Estimates for Oscillatory Integral Operators, was supervis...
Go to Profile#560
Pilar Bayer
#60636
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pilar Bayer Isant is a Spanish mathematician specializing in number theory. She is a professor emerita in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Barcelona. Education and career Bayer was born in Barcelona on February 13, 1946. Before becoming a mathematician, she was certified as a piano teacher by the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona in 1967.
Go to Profile#561
Helena C Kraemer
#79834
Overall Influence
#562
Dianne P. O'Leary
#46394
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dianne Prost O'Leary is an American mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns scientific computing, computational linear algebra, and the history of scientific computing. She is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the author of the book Scientific Computing with Case Studies .
Go to Profile#563
Danuta Gierulanka
#52041
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Danuta Gierulanka was a Polish mathematics educator, psychologist, philosopher, and translator. She was associated with Roman Ingarden and known for her work in phenomenology and the philosophy of mathematics.
Go to Profile#564
Nerida Ellerton
#61706
Overall Influence
Nerida Fay Ellerton is an Australian mathematics educator and historian of mathematics. She is professor of mathematics education at Illinois State University. As well as studying the present state of mathematics education, she and her husband McKenzie A. Clements have researched the history of mathematics education, in the process discovering school worksheets in the Harvard Library that are among the oldest known writings of Abraham Lincoln.
Go to Profile#565
Eva Miranda
#54576
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eva Miranda Galcerán is a Spanish mathematician specializing in dynamical systems, especially in symplectic geometry. Her research includes work with Victor Guillemin on the mathematics underlying the three-body problem in celestial mechanics.
Go to Profile#566
Barbara Fantechi
#74320
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Barbara Fantechi is an Italian mathematician and Professor at the International School for Advanced Studies. Her research area is algebraic geometry. She is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. Early life and education Fantechi received her Laurea from the University of Pisa in 1988, with thesis Secanti di varietà proiettive e applicazioni. Her doctoral advisor was Fabrizio Catanese.
Go to Profile#567
Irene Fischer
#32728
Overall Influence
1907 - 2009 (102 years)
Irene Kaminka Fischer was an Austrian-American mathematician and geodesist. She was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and inductee of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency Hall of Fame. Fischer became one of two internationally known women scientists in the field of geodesy during the golden age of the Project Mercury and the Apollo program. Her Mercury datum , as well as her work on the lunar parallax, were instrumental in conducting these missions. "In his preface to the ACSM publication, Fischer's former colleague, Bernard Chovit...
Go to Profile#568
Ailsa Keating
#56640
Overall Influence
Ailsa Macgregor Keating is a French and British mathematician specialising in symplectic geometry and homological mirror symmetry. She is a lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#569
Concha Gómez
#67095
Overall Influence
Concha Maria Gómez is an American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at Diablo Valley College. Gómez is known for being one of the co-founders of the women's organization The Noetherian Ring at the University of California Berkeley in 1991 while attending as a doctoral student. She is an advocate for diversity in the STEM fields and worked for the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, whose goal was to promote retention of minority students in STEM.
Go to Profile#570
Gloria Ford Gilmer
#66873
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Gloria C. Gilmer was an American mathematician and educator, notable for being the first African American woman to publish a non-PhD thesis. Early life and education Gilmer was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 28, 1928. She studied for her Bachelor of Science degree at Morgan State University, where she was part of the class of 1949. While there, she published two papers with her supervisor Luna Mishoe; these were the first two research papers published by an African American woman, being published in 1956, under her maiden name of Gloria C. Ford. She was also a student of Clarence Stephe...
Go to Profile#571
Mara Alagic
#68176
Overall Influence
Mara Alagic is a Serbian mathematics educator and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Graduate Coordinator at Wichita State University.
Go to Profile#572
Catherine Greenhill
#66894
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Catherine Greenhill is an Australian mathematician known for her research on random graphs, combinatorial enumeration and Markov chains. She is a professor of mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, and an editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.
Go to Profile#573
Lesley Ward
#68820
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Lesley Ann Ward is an Australian mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis, complex analysis, and industrial applications of mathematics. She is a professor in the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences of the University of South Australia, director of the Mathematics Clinic at the university, and former chair of the Women in Mathematics Group of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#574
Caroline Klivans
#67672
Overall Influence
#575
Bettye Anne Case
#68126
Overall Influence
Bettye Anne Busbee Case is Olga Larson Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Florida State University. Her mathematical research concerns complex variables; she has also published on mathematics education and the history of mathematics. She is the editor of the books A Century of Mathematical Meetings and Complexities: Women in Mathematics .
Go to Profile#576
Ursula Hamenstädt
#72972
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ursula Hamenstädt is a German mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Bonn. Her primary research subject is differential geometry. Education and career Hamenstädt earned her PhD from the University of Bonn in 1986, under the supervision of Wilhelm Klingenberg. Her dissertation, Zur Theorie der Carnot-Caratheodory Metriken und ihren Anwendungen [The theory of Carnot–Caratheodory metrics and their applications], concerned the theory of sub-Riemannian manifolds.
Go to Profile#577
Hasibun Naher
#68977
Overall Influence
Hasibun Naher is a Bangladeshi applied mathematics researcher and educator. In February 2018, she was one of five young women from developing countries to receive the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Award. Her research has included the application of mathematics to tsunamis in order to improve predictions of how they develop. She is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at BRAC University, Dhaka.
Go to Profile#578
Eva Kallin
#69126
Overall Influence
Eva Marianne Kallin Pohlmann is a professor emerita of mathematics at Brown University. Her research concerns function algebrass, polynomial convexity, and Tarski's axioms for Euclidean geometry. Kallin attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate, and graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1953 and an M.S. in 1956. In 1956–1957, working as a student of Alfred Tarski, Kallin helped simplify Tarski's axioms for the first-order theory of Euclidean geometry, by showing that several of the axioms originally presented by Tarski did not need to be stated as axioms, but could...
Go to Profile#579
Ursula Martin
#28013
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ursula Hilda Mary Martin is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics. Since 2019, she has served as a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#580
Brigitte Vallée
#40998
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Brigitte Vallée is a French mathematician and computer scientist. She entered the École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles in 1970, and received her PhD in 1986 at the University of Caen . Her doctoral advisor was Jacques Stern.
Go to Profile#581
Geraldine Claudette Darden
#55250
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Geraldine Claudette Darden is an American mathematician. She was the fourteenth African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Early life and education Darden was born in Nansemond County, Virginia. Darden earned a bachelor's degrees in mathematics in 1957 from the Hampton Institute, a historically black institute, and took a teaching position at S.H. Clarke Junior High School in Portsmouth, Virginia. In the summer of 1958, Darden saw an opportunity for aspiring mathematicians created by the launch of Russian satellite Sputnik and ensuing US interest in mathematics and science a yea...
Go to Profile#582
Joyce Snell
#45699
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
E. Joyce Snell is a British statistician who taught in the mathematics department at Imperial College London. She is known for her work on residuals and ordered categorical data, and for her books on statistics.
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Gordana Matic
#69073
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gordana Matic is a Croatian-American mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Georgia. Her research concerns low-dimensional topology and contact geometry. Matic earned her doctorate from the University of Utah in 1986, under the supervision of Ronald J. Stern, and worked as a C.L.E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the University of Georgia faculty.
Go to Profile#584
Kirsi Peltonen
#68381
Overall Influence
Kirsi Peltonen is a Finnish mathematician whose research interests include differential geometry and the connections between mathematics and art. She is a Senior University Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis at Aalto University, and a docent at the University of Helsinki. Her work has included the design of an innovative interdisciplinary course on mathematics, art, and architecture, the creation of a major exhibit at the Heureka science center near Helsinki, and presentations on mathematics at Finnish schools.
Go to Profile#585
Christine O'Keefe
#64929
Overall Influence
Christine Margaret O'Keefe is an Australian mathematician and computer scientist whose research has included work in finite geometry, information security, and data privacy. She is a researcher at CSIRO, and was the lead author of a 2017 report from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on best practices for de-identification of personally identifying data.
Go to Profile#586
Serena Dipierro
#66183
Overall Influence
Serena Dipierro is an Italian mathematician whose research involves partial differential equations, the regularity of their solution, their phase transitions, nonlocal operators, and free boundary problems, with applications including population dynamics, quantum mechanics, crystallography, and mathematical finance. She is a professor in the School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing at the University of Western Australia, where she heads the department of mathematics and statistics.
Go to Profile#587
Hema Srinivasan
#77605
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Hema Srinivasan is a mathematician specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Originally from India, she is a professor of mathematics at the University of Missouri. Srinivasan was a National Science Talent Scholar in India beginning in 1975. She obtained her B.Sc. from Bombay University, where she won the Ghia Prize for mathematics in 1978, as well as an M.S. from Indiana University Bloomington in 1982. She completed her Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 1986. Her dissertation, supervised by David Buchsbaum, was Multiplicative Structures on Some Canonical Resolutions. After w...
Go to Profile#588
Donna Spiegelman
#77747
Overall Influence
Donna Spiegelman is a biostatistician and epidemiologist who works at the interface between the two fields as a methodologist, applying statistical solutions to address potential biases in epidemiologic studies.
Go to Profile#589
Misha Kilmer
#56331
Overall Influence
Misha Elena Kilmer is an American applied mathematician known for her work in numerical linear algebra and scientific computing. She is William Walker Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University. Starting July 1, 2021, she will serve as Deputy Director of ICERM, where she served on the Scientific Advisory Board.
Go to Profile#590
Shelly Harvey
#69369
Overall Influence
Shelly Lynn Harvey is a professor of Mathematics at Rice University. Her research interests include knot theory, low-dimensional topology, and group theory. Early life Harvey grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, California and graduated California Polytechnic State University in 1997. She received her Ph.D. from Rice University in 2002 under the supervision of Tim Cochran. After postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she returned to Rice University in 2005 as the first female tenure-track mathematician there.
Go to Profile#591
Ayşe Şahin
#37305
Overall Influence
Ayşe Arzu Şahin is a Turkish-American mathematician who works in dynamical systems. She was appointed the Dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at Wright State University in June 2020, and is a co-author of two textbooks on calculus and dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#592
Chris Soteros
#54657
Overall Influence
Christine Elaine Soteros is a Canadian applied mathematician. She is professor and acting head of the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Saskatchewan, and site director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences for their Saskatchewan site. Her research involves the folding and packing behavior of DNA, proteins, and other string-like biomolecules, and the knot theory of random space curves.
Go to Profile#593
Anna Fino
#68943
Overall Influence
Anna Maria Fino is an Italian mathematician specializing in differential geometry, complex geometry, and Lie groups. She is a professor of mathematics in the Giuseppe Peano Department of Mathematics at the University of Turin, and founding editor-in-chief of the journal Complex Manifolds.
Go to Profile#594
Rose Baker
#57732
Overall Influence
Rose Dawn Baker is a British physicist, mathematician, and statistician. She is a professor emeritus of applied statistics in the Salford Business School at the University of Salford. Education and career Baker read physics at the University of Cambridge, earned a master's degree there in 1968, and completed her Ph.D. in 1972. Her dissertation concerned bubble chambers.
Go to Profile#595
Eva-Maria Feichtner
#68923
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Eva-Maria Elisabeth Feichtner is a German mathematician, the founder and director of the Institute for Algebra, Geometry, Topology and their Applications at the University of Bremen, where she is professor of algebra and vice president of internationalization and diversity. Topics in her research have included tropical geometry, matroid polytopes, Chow rings, toric varieties, lattices and semilattices, and the wonderful compactification.
Go to Profile#596
Anne Lester Hudson
#69132
Overall Influence
Anne Lester Hudson is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. Her research specialty is the theory of topological semigroups; she is also known for her skill at mathematical problem-solving, and has coached students to success in both the International Mathematical Olympiad and the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. She is a professor emeritus at the Georgia Southern University-Armstrong Campus .
Go to Profile#597
Patricia D. Shure
#66187
Overall Influence
Patricia D. Shure is an American mathematics educator. With Morton Brown and B. Alan Taylor, she is known for developing "Michigan calculus", a style of teaching calculus and combining cooperative real-world problem solving by the students with an instructional focus on conceptual understanding. She is a senior lecturer emerita of mathematics at the University of Michigan, where she taught from 1982 until her retirement in 2006.
Go to Profile#598
Maura Mast
#61327
Overall Influence
Maura B. Mast is an Irish-American mathematician, mathematics educator, and academic administrator, specializing in differential geometry and quantitative reasoning. With Ethan D. Bolker, she is the author of the textbook Common Sense Mathematics. Mast is dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, part of Fordham University.
Go to Profile#599
Nathalie Eisenbaum
#49954
Overall Influence
Nathalie Eisenbaum is a French mathematician, statistician, and probability theorist. She works as a director of research with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, associated with the laboratory for applied mathematics at Paris Descartes University and was previously a researcher in the Laboratoire de Probabilités, Statistique et Modélisation at Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Go to Profile#600
Dagmar R. Henney
#26623
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Dagmar Renate Kirchner Henney is a German-born American mathematician and former professor of calculus, finite mathematics, and measure and integration at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
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