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,
#701
Marlis Hochbruck
#74624
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Marlis Hochbruck is a German applied mathematician and numerical analyst known for her research on matrix exponentials, exponential integrators, and their applications to the numerical solution of differential equations. She is a professor in the Institute for Applied and Numerical Mathematics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#702
Frances Kuo
#70939
Overall Influence
Frances Y. Kuo is an applied mathematician known for her research on low-discrepancy sequences and quasi-Monte Carlo methods for numerical integration and finite element analysis. Originally from Taiwan, she was educated in New Zealand, and works in Australia as a professor in applied mathematics at the University of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#703
Astrid Beckmann
#47049
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Astrid Beckmann is a German physicist, a professor of mathematics and mathematics education, and was a long-serving university president. Beckmann served as president of the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd from 2010 to 2018. She also taught at the University of Ulm.
Go to Profile#704
Tasha Inniss
#69691
Overall Influence
Tasha Rose Inniss is an American mathematician and the director of education and industry outreach for the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences . Early life and education Inniss was born in New Orleans and grew up without a father. She became interested in mathematics in fourth grade, and decided she would study it as a freshman in high school. She studied mathematics at Xavier University of Louisiana, graduating summa cum laude. In 1992 she was listed in the Who's Who Among Colleges and Universities for her academic achievements. She earned a master's degree in applie...
Go to Profile#705
Maria Emelianenko
#67956
Overall Influence
Maria Emelianenko is a Russian-American applied mathematician and materials scientist known for her work in numerical algorithms, scientific computing, grain growth, and centroidal Voronoi tessellations. She is a professor of mathematical sciences at George Mason University.
Go to Profile#706
Sylvia Richardson
#58438
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sylvia Therese Richardson is a French/British Bayesian statistician and is currently Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge. In 2021 she became the president of the Royal Statistical Society for the 2021–22 year.
Go to Profile#707
Sue Geller
#67749
Overall Influence
Sue Geller is an American mathematician and a professor emerita of mathematics at the department of mathematics at Texas A&M University. She is noted for her research background in algebraic K-theory, as well as her interdisciplinary work in bioinformatics and biostatistics, among other disciplines.
Go to Profile#708
Mariel Vázquez
#61468
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mariel Vázquez is a Mexican mathematical biologist who specializes in the topology of DNA. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis, jointly affiliated with the departments of mathematics and of microbiology and molecular genetics.
Go to Profile#709
Gail Carpenter
#14979
Overall Influence
Gail Alexandra Carpenter is an American cognitive scientist, neuroscientist and mathematician. She is now a "Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University." She had also been a Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, and the director of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems Technology Lab at Boston University.
Go to Profile#710
Malgorzata Dubiel
#69931
Overall Influence
Malgorzata Dubiel is a Polish mathematician and mathematics educator who works as a senior lecturer at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Education and career Dubiel is the daughter of a Polish military rocket scientist and engineer. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw, supervised by theoretical computer scientist and mathematical logician Victor W. Marek. In 1982, she moved to Canada.
Go to Profile#711
Maeve McCarthy
#61843
Overall Influence
C. Maeve Lewis McCarthy is an Irish mathematician whose research interests include inverse problems and modelling biological systems. She is the Jesse D. Jones Endowed Professor of Mathematics at Murray State University in Kentucky.
Go to Profile#712
Ellen Gethner
#71126
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ellen Gethner is a US mathematician and computer scientist specializing in graph theory who won the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize in 2002 with co-authors Stan Wagon and Brian Wick for their paper A stroll through the Gaussian Primes.
Go to Profile#713
Amy Shell-Gellasch
#69386
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Amy Shell-Gellasch is a mathematician, historian of mathematics, and book author. She has written or edited the booksAlgebra in Context: Introductory Algebra from Origins to Applications In Service to Mathematics: The Life and Work of Mina Rees Mathematical Time Capsules: Historical Modules for the Mathematics Classroom Hands on History: A Resource for Teaching Mathematics From Calculus to Computers: Using the Last 200 Years of Mathematics History in the Classroom Her article "The Spirograph & mathematical models from 19th-century Germany" was selected for inclusion in The Best Writing on Mat...
Go to Profile#714
Susan H. Marshall
#71754
Overall Influence
Susan Hammond Marshall is an American mathematician specializing in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and mathematical proof techniques. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Monmouth University.
Go to Profile#715
Jennifer Schultens
#80991
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jennifer Carol Schultens is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology and knot theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis. Education Schultens earned her Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, Classification of Heegaard Splittings for Some Seifert Manifolds, was supervised by Martin Scharlemann.
Go to Profile#716
Jennifer Mueller
#68346
Overall Influence
Jennifer L. Mueller is an applied mathematician and biomedical engineer whose research concerns inverse problems and their applications, particularly to problems in medical imaging related to electrical impedance tomography. She is a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University, where she also holds a joint appointment in the school of biomedical engineering and the department of electrical and computer engineering.
Go to Profile#717
Beatrice Aitchison
#46335
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Beatrice Aitchison was an American mathematician, statistician, and transportation economist who directed the Transport Economics Division of the United States Department of Commerce, and later became the top woman in the United States Postal Service and the first policy-level appointee there.
Go to Profile#718
Valentina Harizanov
#62093
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Valentina Harizanov is a Serbian-American mathematician and professor of mathematics at The George Washington University. Her main research contributions are in computable structure theory , where she introduced the notion of degree spectra of relations on computable structures and obtained the first significant results concerning uncountable, countable, and finite Turing degree spectra. Her recent interests include algorithmic learning theory and spaces of orderss on groupss.
Go to Profile#719
Virginia R. Young
#72004
Overall Influence
Virginia Ruth Young is the Cecil J. and Ethel M. Nesbitt Professor of Actuarial Mathematics at the University of Michigan, and an expert on the mathematics of insurance. Education and career Young graduated from Cumberland College in 1981, and completed a PhD in mathematics, specializing in algebraic topology, at the University of Virginia in 1984. Her dissertation, Branched coverings arising from group actions, was supervised by Robert Evert Stong. After postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study, she returned to Cumberland as a faculty member from 1986 to 1990. However, after ...
Go to Profile#720
Olympia Nicodemi
#71333
Overall Influence
Olympia E. Nicodemi is a mathematician and mathematics educator whose research interests range from wavelets to the history of mathematics. She was a distinguished teaching professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Geneseo until 2020, when she retired.
Go to Profile#721
Elaine Kasimatis
#72175
Overall Influence
Elaine Ann Kasimatis was an American mathematician specializing in discrete geometry and mathematics education. She was a professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at California State University, Sacramento.
Go to Profile#722
Jeanette McLeod
#65966
Overall Influence
Jeanette Claire McLeod is a New Zealand mathematician specialising in combinatorics, including the theories of Latin squares and random graphs. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury, a principal investigator for Te Pūnaha Matatini, a Centre of Research Excellence associated with the University of Auckland, an honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University, and the president for three terms from 2018 to 2020 of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia.
Go to Profile#723
Ina Kersten
#82790
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ina Kersten is a German mathematician and former president of the German Mathematical Society. Her research concerns abstract algebra including the theory of field extensions and algebraic groups. She is a professor emerita at the University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#724
Raegan Higgins
#70166
Overall Influence
Raegan J. Higgins is an American mathematician and co-director of the EDGE program for Women. She is also one of the co-founders of the website Mathematically Gifted & Black, which highlights the accomplishments of Black mathematicians.
Go to Profile#725
Fumiko Futamura
#69207
Overall Influence
Fumiko Futamura is a Japanese-American mathematician known for her work on the mathematics of perspective and perspective drawing. She is a professor of mathematics at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and Lord Chair in Mathematics and Computer Science at Southwestern.
Go to Profile#726
Claire Mathieu
#27155
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Claire Mathieu is a French computer scientist and mathematician, known for her research on approximation algorithms, online algorithms, and auction theory. She works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
Go to Profile#727
Magnhild Lien
#50002
Overall Influence
Magnhild Lien is a Norwegian mathematician specializing in knot theory. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at California State University, Northridge, and the former executive director of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#728
Teresa W. Haynes
#70580
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Teresa W. Haynes is an American professor of mathematics and statistics at East Tennessee State University known for her research in graph theory and particularly on dominating sets. Education and career Haynes earned three degrees from Eastern Kentucky University: a B.S. in mathematics and education in 1975, M.A. in mathematics and education in 1978, and M.S. in mathematical sciences in 1984. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science in 1988 from the University of Central Florida. Her dissertation was -Insensitive Domination and was supervised by Robert C. Brigham.
Go to Profile#729
Michela Varagnolo
#72545
Overall Influence
Michela Varagnolo is a mathematician whose research topics have included representation theory, Hecke algebra, Schur–Weyl duality, Yangians, and quantum affine algebras. She earned a doctorate in 1993 at the University of Pisa, under the supervision of Corrado de Concini, and is maître de conférences in the department of mathematics at CY Cergy Paris University, affiliated there with the research laboratory on analysis, geometry, and modeling.
Go to Profile#730
Elena Fernández
#69303
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elena Fernández Aréizaga is a Spanish operations researcher, the former president of the Association of European Operational Research Societies. Topics in her research include facility location, network design, the vehicle routing problem, and heuristic methods for mathematical optimization. She is a professor of statistics and operations research at the University of Cádiz.
Go to Profile#731
Vivienne Malone-Mayes
#53255
Overall Influence
1932 - 1995 (63 years)
Vivienne Lucille Malone-Mayes was an American mathematician and professor. Malone-Mayes studied properties of functions, as well as methods of teaching mathematics. She was the fifth African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics in the United States, and the first African-American member of the faculty of Baylor University.
Go to Profile#732
Laura Person
#72642
Overall Influence
Laura J. Person is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology. She is a distinguished teaching professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Education and career Person completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1988. Her dissertation, A Piece-Wise Linear Proof That The Singular Norm Is The Thurston Norm, concerned the Thurston norm, an invariant of three-dimensional spaces; it was supervised by Martin Scharlemann. She joined the faculty at SUNY Potsdam in 1989. At Potsdam, she is also the academic coo...
Go to Profile#733
Joan E. Walsh
#51023
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Joan Eileen Walsh was a British mathematician, a professor of numerical analysis at the University of Manchester, and the founding chair of the Numerical Algorithms Group. She was the first female professor of mathematics in the UK.
Go to Profile#734
Suzanne Dorée
#69697
Overall Influence
Suzanne Ingrid Dorée is a professor of mathematics at Augsburg University, where she is also chair of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science,. She is chair of the Congress of the Mathematical Association of America and, as such, serves on its board of directors and the Section Visitors Program . Her doctoral research concerned group theory; she has also published in mathematics education.
Go to Profile#735
Bonnie Gold
#54707
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Bonnie Gold is an American mathematician, mathematical logician, philosopher of mathematics, and mathematics educator. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at Monmouth University. Education and career Gold completed her Ph.D. in 1976 at Cornell University, under the supervision of Michael D. Morley.
Go to Profile#736
Dianna Xu
#68836
Overall Influence
Yilun Dianna Xu is a mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns the computational geometry of curves and surfaces, computer vision, and computer graphics. She is a professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College where she chairs the computer science department.
Go to Profile#737
Susan Martonosi
#70560
Overall Influence
Susan Elizabeth Martonosi is an American mathematician who works at Harvey Mudd College as the Joseph B. Platt Professor of Mathematics and as the director of the Global Clinic Program at Harvey Mudd. Her research studies operations research, game theory, social networks, and their applications to counter-terrorism, epidemiology, and sports analytics.
Go to Profile#738
Kate Smith-Miles
#70118
Overall Influence
Kate Amanda Smith-Miles is an Australian applied mathematician, known for her research on neural networks and combinatorial optimization. She is a Melbourne Laureate Professor of applied mathematics at the University of Melbourne, and a former president of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#739
Jacqueline Jensen-Vallin
#72173
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Ann Jensen-Vallin is an American mathematician. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Lamar University, the editor-in-chief of MAA FOCUS, the newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America , and the governor of the Texas Section of the MAA. Her research interests include combinatorial group theory, low-dimensional topology, and knot theory; she is also known for her work in mathematics education and the history of women in mathematics.
Go to Profile#740
Gail F. Burrill
#72416
Overall Influence
Gail F. Burrill is a mathematics educator who was president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics from 1996 to 1998. She works as a specialist in the Program in Mathematics Education at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#741
M. Grazia Speranza
#69644
Overall Influence
Maria Grazia Speranza is an Italian applied mathematician and operations researcher. Her research involves the application of mathematical optimization to problems including portfolio optimization and the combination of inventory management with vehicle routing.
Go to Profile#742
Virginia Kiryakova
#72219
Overall Influence
Virginia S. Kiryakova is a Bulgarian mathematician known for her work on the fractional calculus, on special functions in fractional calculus including the Mittag-Leffler functions, and on the history of calculus. She is a professor in the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#743
Toniann Pitassi
#52601
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Toniann Pitassi is a Canadian-American mathematician and computer scientist specializing in computational complexity theory. She is currently Jeffrey L. and Brenda Bleustein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and was Bell Research Chair at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#744
Naiomi Cameron
#73074
Overall Influence
Naiomi Tuere Cameron is an American mathematician working in the field of combinatorics. She is an associate professor at Spelman College as well as the vice president of National Association of Mathematicians. She was previously an associate professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.
Go to Profile#745
Jennifer Flegg
#69652
Overall Influence
Jennifer A. Flegg is an Australian mathematician and is a Professor of applied mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. Education and career Flegg received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from Queensland University of Technology in 2009. Her dissertation, "Mathematical Modelling of Chronic Wound Healing", was supervised by Dr. Sean McElwain. From 2010 to 2013, she was a researcher at the University of Oxford developing mathematical models for the spread of resistance to antimalarial drugs. From 2014 to early 2017, she was a mathematical lecturer in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University.
Go to Profile#746
Elena Yanovskaya
#74777
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Elena Yanovskaya is a Soviet and Russian mathematician and economist known for her contributions to cooperative game theory. Biography Elena Yanovskaya was born in Leningrad on May 20, 1938. She studied at the School of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Leningrad State University majoring in probability theory and statistics. After graduation in 1959, she started working as a junior researcher at the Leningrad Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where she worked until 1965. Yanovskaya defended her doctoral thesis in 1964. From 1965 to 1975, Yanovskaya worked at the Leningrad branc...
Go to Profile#747
Susan Hermiller
#72041
Overall Influence
Susan Marie Hermiller is an American mathematician specializing in the computational, combinatorial, and geometric theory of groups. She is a Willa Cather Professor of Mathematics and a former Graduate Chair for Mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Go to Profile#748
Jeannette Janssen
#68123
Overall Influence
Jeannette Catharina Maria Janssen is a Dutch and Canadian mathematician whose research concerns graph theory and the theory of complex networks. She is a professor of mathematics at Dalhousie University, the chair of the Dalhousie Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and the chair of the Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#749
Susan Morey
#72737
Overall Influence
Susan Morey is an American mathematician and a professor and chair of the Mathematics department at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Education and career Morey received a B.S. in mathematics with Honors from the University of Missouri in 1990 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University in 1995. Her dissertation The Equations of Rees Algebras of ideals of Low Codimension was supervised by Wolmer Vasconcelos. After receiving her Ph.D., Morey held a postdoctoral position at the University of Texas at Austin. She became an assistant professor at Texas State in 1997. Morey wa...
Go to Profile#750
Ling Long
#72145
Overall Influence
Ling Long is a Chinese mathematician whose research concerns modular forms, elliptic surfaces, and dessins d'enfants, as well as number theory in general. She is a professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University.
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