Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,

#601

Yusu Wang

#63755

Overall Influence

Yusu Wang is a Chinese computer scientist and mathematician who works as a professor at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego . Her research concerns computational geometry and computational topology, including results on discrete Laplace operators, curve simplification, and Fréchet distance.

#602

Jean D. Gibbons

#76482

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jean Dickinson Gibbons is an American statistician, an expert in nonparametric statistics and an author of books on statistics. She was the first chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association, and the Jean Dickinson Gibbons Graduate Program in Statistics at Virginia Tech is named for her.

#603

Barbara L. Osofsky

#68341

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Barbara L. Osofsky is a retired professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Her research concerns abstract algebra. Osofsky's contributions to mathematics include her characterization of semisimple rings in terms of properties of cyclic modules. Osofsky also established a logical equivalence between the continuum hypothesis and statements about the global dimension of associative rings.

#604

Dorothy Wallace

#52294

Overall Influence

Dorothy Irene Wallace Andreoli is an American number theorist, mathematical biologist, and mathematics educator. She is a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. Education Wallace is a graduate of Yale University. She completed her Ph.D. in 1982 at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation, Selberg's Trace Formula and Units in Higher Degree Number Fields, concerned number theory and was supervised by Audrey Terras.

#605

Ju-Lee Kim

#70482

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Ju-Lee Kim is a South Korean mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Her research involves the representation theory of p-adic groups. Education and career Kim completed her undergraduate studies at KAIST in 1991, and earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997 supervised by Roger Howe; at Yale, she was also mentored by Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro.

#606

Sara van de Geer

Sara van de Geer

#36314

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sara Anna van de Geer is a Dutch statistician who is a professor in the department of mathematics at ETH Zurich. She is the daughter of psychologist John P. van de Geer. Education She earned a master's degree in 1982 and a doctorate in mathematics in 1987 from Leiden University. Her dissertation, entitled Regression Analysis and Empirical Processes, was supervised by Willem Rutger van Zwet and Richard D. Gill.

#607

Ulrica Wilson

#64786

Overall Influence

Ulrica Wilson is a mathematician specializing in the theory of noncommutative rings and in the combinatorics of matrices. She is an associate professor at Morehouse College, associate director of diversity and outreach at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics , and a former vice president of the National Association of Mathematicians.

#608

Helen Moore

#55543

Overall Influence

Helen Elizabeth Moore is an American mathematician. Originally a differential geometer, she moved from academia to industry and from pure to applied mathematics, and in particular the applications of control theory to combination therapy in the health industry. She is affiliated with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

#609

Claudia Polini

#62284

Overall Influence

Claudia Polini is an Italian mathematician specializing in commutative algebra. She is the Glynn Family Honors Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, and directs the Center of Mathematics at Notre Dame.

#610

Maria Eulália Vares

#51079

Overall Influence

Maria Eulália Vares is a Brazilian mathematical statistician and probability theorist who is known for her expertise in stochastic processes and large deviations theory. She is a professor of statistics in the Institute of Mathematics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, from 2006 to 2009 was the editor-in-chief of the journal Stochastic Processes and their Applications, publisher by Elsevier for the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, and from 2015 to 2017 was the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Probability, published by the Institute of Mathematical Stati...

#611

Anna Erschler

#68578

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Anna Gennadievna Erschler, née Dyubina, , is a Russian mathematician, working in France. She specializes in geometric group theory and probability theory, in particular, random walks on groups. Education and career Beginning in 1994 Erschler studied mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University receiving there her M.Sc. in 1999 and then studied in the academic year 1999–2000 at Tel Aviv University. In 2001 she received her Ph.D. from Saint Petersburg State University under the direction of Anatoly Vershik, with a thesis titled Geometric und probabilistic properties of wreath products. In O...

#612

Ellen Kirkman

#56460

Overall Influence

Ellen Elizabeth Kirkman is professor of mathematics at Wake Forest University. Her research interests include noncommutative algebra, representation theory, and homological algebra. Education She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics and M.A. in Statistics from Michigan State University in 1975. Her doctoral dissertation, On the Characterization of Inertial Coefficient Rings, was supervised by Edward C. Ingraham.

#613

Deborah Frank Lockhart

#64163

Overall Influence

Deborah Frank Lockhart is a mathematician known for her work with the National Science Foundation. Career Lockhart graduated in 1965 from the Bronx High School of Science. She received her BS in mathematics from New York University, and went on to receive her Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the area of continuum mechanics.

#614

Viveka Erlandsson

#69504

Overall Influence

Viveka Erlandsson is a Swedish mathematician specialising in low-dimensional topology and geometry, and known in particular for extending the work of Maryam Mirzakhani on counting geodesics on hyperbolic manifolds. She is a lecturer at the University of Bristol.

#615

Guofang Wei

#75459

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Guofang Wei is a mathematician in the field of differential geometry. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Education Wei earned a doctorate in mathematics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1989, under the supervision of Detlef Gromoll. Her dissertation produced fundamental new examples of manifolds with positive Ricci curvature and was published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. These examples were later expanded upon by Burkard Wilking.

#616

Kaisa Miettinen

#41037

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Kaisa Miettinen is a Finnish mathematician and the former vice rector of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. She is a professor of industrial optimization with the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In addition, she heads the Multiobjective Optimization Group .

#617

Věra Trnková

#71781

Overall Influence

1934 - 2018 (84 years)

Věra Šedivá-Trnková was a Czech mathematician known for her work in topology and in category theory. Early life and education Trnková was born on March 16, 1934, in Berehove, then in Czechoslovakia and now in Ukraine; her father was a forester. By the time she was in high school, her family lived in Prague, and she went to Charles University for study in mathematics. There, she worked with Miroslav Katětov on general topology, earning a master's degree in 1957 with the thesis Collectionwise normal and strongly paracompact spaces on strengthened definitions for normal spaces.

#618

Elizabeth Meckes

#74719

Overall Influence

1980 - 2020 (40 years)

Elizabeth Samantha Meckes was an American mathematician specializing in probability theory. Her research included work on Stein's method for bounding the distance between probability distributions and on random matrices. She was a professor of mathematics, applied mathematics, and statistics at Case Western Reserve University. She died in December 2020 after a brief battle with cancer.

#619

Ellina Grigorieva

#68185

Overall Influence

Ellina Grigorieva is a Russian mathematician and mathematics educator known for her books on mathematical problem solving. She is a professor in the Texas Woman's University Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and an expert on control theory and its applications to the spread of disease.

#620

Jennifer McLoud-Mann

#47822

Overall Influence

Jennifer McLoud-Mann is an American mathematician known for her 2015 discovery, with Casey Mann and undergraduate student David Von Derau, of the 15th and last class of convex pentagons to tile the plane. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington Bothell, where she is currently the Vice Dean of Curriculum & Instruction of the School of STEM. Beyond tiling, her research interests include knot theory and combinatorics.

#621

Margaret Greig

#40616

Overall Influence

1922 - 1999 (77 years)

Dorothy Margaret Greig née Hannah was an English mathematician who worked upon the theory of worsted spinning, especially the superdraft system invented by Geoffrey Ambler. During WW2, she worked on the analysis of strategic bombing. She married in 1948 and started lecturing at Leeds University in the same year. She subsequently lectured at Constantine Technical College and Durham University.

#622

Stefanie Petermichl

Stefanie Petermichl

#71863

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Stefanie Petermichl is a German mathematical analyst who works as a professor at the University of Toulouse, in France. Topics of her research include harmonic analysis, several complex variables, stochastic control, and elliptic partial differential equations.

#623

Margaret Bayer

#63556

Overall Influence

Margaret M. Bayer is an American mathematician working in polyhedral combinatorics. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas. Education Bayer earned her Ph.D. in 1983 from Cornell University. Her dissertation, Facial Enumeration in Polytopes, Spheres and Other Complexes, was supervised by Louis Billera.

#624

Grace Alele-Williams

#10213

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

Grace Alele-Williams was a Nigerian professor of mathematics education, who made history as the first Nigerian woman to receive a doctorate, and the first Nigerian female vice-chancellor at the University of Benin.

#625

Hee Oh

#68876

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Hee Oh is a South Korean mathematician who works in dynamical systems. She has made contributions to dynamics and its connections to number theory. She is a student of homogeneous dynamics and has worked extensively on counting and equidistribution for Apollonian circle packings, Sierpinski carpets and Schottky dances. She is currently the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.

#626

Gabriella Tarantello

Gabriella Tarantello

#58060

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Gabriella Tarantello is an Italian mathematician specializing in partial differential equations, differential geometry, and gauge theory. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

#627

Clemency Montelle

#63557

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Clemency Montelle is a New Zealand historian of mathematics known for her research on Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Canterbury, and a fellow of the New Zealand India Research Institute of the Victoria University of Wellington.

#628

Gail S. Nelson

#73374

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Gail Susan Nelson is a mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Carleton College. Education and career Nelson did her undergraduate studies at the University of North Dakota. She completed her Ph.D. in 1988 at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation concerned partial differential equations, and was supervised by Eugene Barry Fabes; it was Bounds for the Fundamental Solutions of Degenerate Parabolic Partial Differential Equations. She joined the Carleton College faculty in the same year.

#629

Matilde Lalín

#70203

Overall Influence

Matilde Noemí Lalín is an Argentine-Canadian mathematician specializing in number theory and known for her work on L-functions, Mahler measure, and their connections. She is a professor of mathematics at the Université de Montréal.

#630

Heike Fassbender

#71983

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Heike Fassbender is a German mathematician specializing in numerical linear algebra. She is a professor in the Institute for Computational Mathematics at the Technical University of Braunschweig, and the president for the 2017–2019 term of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik .

#631

Constance van Eeden

#64099

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

Constance van Eeden was a Dutch mathematical statistician who made "exceptional contributions to the development of statistical sciences in Canada". She was interested in nonparametric statistics including maximum likelihood estimation and robust statistics, and did foundational work on parameter spaces.

#632

Ermelinda DeLaViña

#68609

Overall Influence

Ermelinda DeLaViña is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory. She is a professor in the Computer and Mathematical Sciences Department of the University of Houston–Downtown, where she is also Associate Dean of the College of Science and Technology.

#633

Dawn Lott

#54030

Overall Influence

Dawn Alisha Lott is an applied mathematician at Delaware State University, where she is a professor in the department of physical and computational sciences and, since 2009, the director of the university's honors program.

#634

Vanja Dukic

#73725

Overall Influence

Vanja Dukic is an expert in computational statistics and mathematical epidemiology who works as a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research includes work on using internet search engine access patterns to track diseases, and on the effects of climate change on the spread of diseases.

#635

Esther Seiden

#65078

Overall Influence

1908 - 2014 (106 years)

Esther Seiden was a mathematical statistician known for her research on the design of experiments and combinatorial design theory. In the study of finite geometry, she introduced the concept of the complement of an oval, and her work with Rita Zemach on orthogonal arrays of strength four was described as "the first significant progress" on the subject.

#636

Karen L. Collins

#68950

Overall Influence

Karen Linda Collins is an American mathematician at Wesleyan University, where she is the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science, and Professor of Integrative Sciences. The main topics in her research are combinatorics and graph theory.

#637

Enriqueta González Baz

#58334

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Enriqueta González Baz y de la Vega was a Mexican mathematician, a co-founder of the Mexican Mathematical Society, and the first woman to earn a degree in mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1944.

#638

Ineke De Moortel

#66073

Overall Influence

Ineke De Moortel is a Belgian applied mathematician in Scotland, where she is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of St Andrews, director of research in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at St Andrews, and president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. Her research concerns the computational and mathematical modelling of solar physics, and particularly of the sun's corona.

#639

Anne Taormina

#58783

Overall Influence

Anne Taormina is a Belgian mathematical physicist whose research topics include string theory, conformal field theory, and monstrous moonshine. Beyond mathematical physics, she has also studied the icosahedral symmetry of virus capsids. She is Professor of Theoretical Particle Physics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Durham University.

#640

Lynne H. Walling

#68674

Overall Influence

Lynne Heather Walling was an American mathematician specializing in number theory, who became a reader in pure mathematics at the University of Bristol. She was known for her research in number theory. She died on 28 May 2021.

#641

Yuriko Renardy

#46163

Overall Influence

Yuriko Yamamuro Renardy is a Japanese–American expert in fluid dynamics who works as a Class Of 1950 Endowed Professor of Mathematics at Virginia Tech. Education and career Renardy earned a bachelor's degree from the Australian National University in 1977, and a doctorate in 1981 from the University of Western Australia. Her dissertation, supervised by John J. Mahony, was entitled Water Waves above a Sill.

#642

Karen Marrongelle

#48719

Overall Influence

Karen Ann Marrongelle is an American mathematics educator specializing in collaborative learning in undergraduate-level mathematics education. Formerly the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State University, in 2018 she became the head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation.

#643

Carol S. Woodward

#63843

Overall Influence

Carol San Soucie Woodward is an American computational mathematician who works in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She was elected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2017, "for the development and application of numerical algorithms and software for large-scale simulations of complex physical phenomena".

#644

Laura Gardini

#52198

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Laura Gardini is an Italian mathematician who studies chaos in dynamical systems, with applications in mathematical finance. She is professor in mathematics for economic applications at the University of Urbino.

#645

Anne Greenbaum

#73268

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Anne Greenbaum is an American applied mathematician and professor at the University of Washington. She was named a SIAM Fellow in 2015 "for contributions to theoretical and numerical linear algebra". She has written graduate and undergraduate textbooks on numerical methods.

#646

Anna Romanowska

#70249

Overall Influence

Anna B. Romanowska is a Polish mathematician specializing in abstract algebra. She is professor emeritus of algebra and combinatorics at the Warsaw University of Technology, and was the first convenor of European Women in Mathematics.

#647

Joan Hutchinson

#71361

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Joan Prince Hutchinson is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College. Education Joan Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; her father was a demographer and university professor, and her mother a mathematics teacher at the Baldwin School, which Joan also attended. She studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1967 summa cum laude with an honors paper directed by Prof. Alice Dickinson. After graduation she worked as a computer programmer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and at the Harvard University Computing Center then studied mathematics at the University of Warwick in Coventry England.

#648

Aimee Johnson

#49091

Overall Influence

Aimee Sue Anastasia Johnson is an American mathematician who works in dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at Swarthmore College, the winner of the George Pólya Award, and the co-author of the book Discovering Discrete Dynamical Systems.

#649

Mary Schaps

#30552

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mary Elizabeth Schaps , also known as Malka Elisheva Schaps, is an Israeli-American mathematician. She is Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences at Bar Ilan University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has published in deformation theory, group theory, and representation theory. She is also a writer, authoring several novels under the pseudonym Rachel Pomerantz.

#650

Bryna Kra

#73826

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Bryna Rebekah Kra is an American mathematician and Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor at Northwestern University who is on the board of trustees of the American Mathematical Society and was elected the president of American Mathematical Society in 2021. As a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences, Kra has made significant contributions to the structure theory of characteristic factors for multiple ergodic averages. Her academic work centered on dynamical systems and ergodic theory, and uses dynamical methods to address problems in number theory and combin...

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