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,
#801
Maggie Cheng
#70770
Overall Influence
Maggie Xiaoyan Cheng is an applied mathematician and computer scientist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Scientific Computation. Her research interests include cyber security and Machine Learning.
Go to Profile#802
María J. Carro
#82705
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
María Jesús Carro Rossell is a Spanish mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis, including Fourier analysis, functional analysis, harmonic analysis, operator theory and the analysis of Lorentz spaces. She is a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, in the Department of Mathematical Analysis and Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#803
Patrizia Gianni
#61237
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Patrizia M. Gianni is an Italian mathematician specializing in computer algebra. She is known for her early research on Gröbner bases including her discovery of the FGLM algorithm for changing monomial orderings in Gröbner bases, and for her development of the components of the Axiom computer algebra system concerning polynomials and rational functions.
Go to Profile#804
Louise Nixon Sutton
#69625
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Louise Nixon Sutton was a mathematician. She was the first African-American woman to be awarded a PhD in mathematics education by New York University, and the first chair of the Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics at Elizabeth City State University.
Go to Profile#805
Mihyun Kang
#74185
Overall Influence
Mihyun Kang is a South Korean mathematician specializing in combinatorics, including graph enumeration and the topological properties of random graphs. She is a professor in the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at the Graz University of Technology.
Go to Profile#806
Bonita V. Saunders
#73477
Overall Influence
Bonita Valerie Saunders is an American mathematician specializing in mathematical visualization. She works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Division of the Information Technology Laboratory, where she contributes to the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions as the Visualization Editor and the principal designer of visualizations and graphs.
Go to Profile#807
Brenda MacGibbon
#71255
Overall Influence
Kathryn Brenda MacGibbon-Taylor was a Canadian mathematician, statistician, and decision scientist. She was a professor of mathematics at the Université du Québec à Montréal and was affiliated with the Group for Research in Decision Analysis.
Go to Profile#808
Anna Panorska
#72462
Overall Influence
Anna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. Research Panorska's research interests include studying extreme eventss in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.
Go to Profile#809
Maria Cristina Villalobos
#63625
Overall Influence
Maria Cristina Villalobos is an American applied mathematician at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she is Myles and Sylvia Aaronson Endowed Professor of mathematics, associate dean of sciences, and director of the Center of Excellence in STEM Education. Her research interests include mathematical optimization, control theory, and their application to retinitis pigmentosa treatment and to antenna design.
Go to Profile#810
Rose Peltesohn
#74210
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Rose Pauline Peltesohn was an Israeli mathematician of German origin. Life Rose Peltesohn was the daughter of the physician Ludwig Peltesohn and of Cilly Caro. After graduation in March 1931 she studied mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin and got her Ph.D. in Mathematics at 1936 with Issai Schur as supervisor . Her dissertation was valued opus valde laudabile. Being Jewish she emigrated through Italy to Palestine, arriving 1938. Between the years 1939–1942 she worked in a bank and later as a lawyer's secretary and translator in Tel Aviv. She married her cousin Gerhard Pelte...
Go to Profile#811
Sommer Gentry
#52354
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Sommer Elizabeth Gentry is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy and as a research associate in surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her research concerns operations research and its applications to the optimization of organ transplants, and has led to the discovery of geographic inequities in organ allocation. She is also interested in dancing, teaches swing dancing at the Naval Academy, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the mathematics and robotics of dance.
Go to Profile#812
Diana Thomas
#60030
Overall Influence
Diana Maria Thomas is an American applied mathematician known for her research on nutrition and body weight. She is a professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy . Education and career Thomas is originally from Glendive, Montana, where her father was a physician; she is a graduate of Dawson County High School in Glendive, and majored in mathematics at the University of Montana, graduating in 1991. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1996 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her dissertation, Dynamics of Lattice Systems, was supervised by Shui-Nee Chow.
Go to Profile#813
Adélia Sequeira
#73189
Overall Influence
Adélia da Costa Sequeira is a Portuguese applied mathematician specializing in the mathematical modeling of blood flow and the circulatory system. She is a professor of mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico, part of the University of Lisbon, where she is coordinator for the Scientific Area on Numerical Analysis and Applied Analysis and director of the Research Center for Computational and Stochastic Mathematics.
Go to Profile#814
Anastasia Stavrova
#74469
Overall Influence
Anastasia Konstantinovna Stavrova is a Russian mathematician specializing in algebraic groups, non-associative algebra, and algebraic K-theory. She is a researcher in the Chebyshev Laboratory at Saint Petersburg State University.
Go to Profile#815
Jackie Stedall
#40654
Overall Influence
1950 - 2014 (64 years)
Jacqueline Anne "Jackie" Stedall was a British mathematics historian. She wrote nine books, and appeared on radio on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme. Early life Stedall was born in Romford, Essex, and attended Queen Mary's High School in Walsall. Her academic achievements included a BA in mathematics from Girton College, Cambridge, an MSc in statistics from the University of Kent, a PGCE from Bristol Polytechnic , and a PhD in the history of mathematics from the Open University. Her PhD focused upon John Wallis' 1685 work Treatise of Algebra.
Go to Profile#816
Sina Greenwood
#65974
Overall Influence
Sina Ruth Greenwood is a New Zealand mathematician whose interests include continuum theory, discrete dynamical systems, inverse limits, set-valued analysis, and Volterra spaces. She is an associate professor of mathematics and Associate Dean Pacific in the faculty of science at the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#817
Carolina Araujo
#70472
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Carolina Bhering de Araujo is a Brazilian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry, including birational geometry, Fano varieties, and foliations. Education and career Araujo was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She did her undergraduate studies in Brazil, completing a degree in mathematics in 1998 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She earned her PhD in 2004 at Princeton University, where her dissertation, supervised by János Kollár, was titled The Variety of Tangents to Rational Curves.
Go to Profile#818
Roselyn E. Williams
#73834
Overall Influence
Roselyn Elaine Williams is an American mathematician who is an Associate Professor and former chair of the mathematics department at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Her decades long involvement in the National Association of Mathematicians includes a 14 year term as secretary-treasurer.
Go to Profile#819
Konstantina Trivisa
#73290
Overall Influence
Konstantina Trivisa is a Greek-American applied mathematician whose research involves nonlinear partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the mathematical modeling of flocking. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she directs the Institute for Physical Science & Technology.
Go to Profile#820
Sally Cockburn
#78010
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sally Patricia Cockburn is a mathematician whose research ranges from algebraic topology and set theory to geometric graph theory and combinatorial optimization. A Canadian immigrant to the US, she is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Hamilton College, and former chair of the mathematics department at Hamilton.
Go to Profile#821
Alessandra Lunardi
#73093
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alessandra Lunardi is an Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis. She is a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the University of Parma. She is particularly interested in Kolmogorov equations and free boundary problems.
Go to Profile#822
Phyllis Chinn
#68772
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Phyllis Zweig Chinn is an American mathematician who holds a professorship in mathematics, women's studies, and teaching preparation at Humboldt State University in California. Her publications concern graph theory, mathematics education, and the history of women in mathematics.
Go to Profile#823
Elizabeth Mansfield
#74967
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Louise Mansfield is an Australian mathematician whose research includes the study of moving frames and conservation laws for discretisations of physical systems. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and was a Vice-President thereof from January 2015 until December 2018. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at the University of Kent. She was one of the co-editors of the LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics, a journal published by the London Mathematical Society from 1998 to 2015. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of t...
Go to Profile#824
Hollylynne Lee
#73002
Overall Influence
Hollylynne Stohl Lee is an American mathematics educator and statistics educator who describes herself as an "educational designer" focusing on technology-based learning. She is a professor of mathematics education in the College of Education at North Carolina State University, where she directs the Hub for Innovation and Research in Statistics Education in the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.
Go to Profile#825
Véronique Gayrard
#73567
Overall Influence
Véronique Gayrard is a French mathematician specializing in probability and statistical physics, with research topics including Hopfield networks, the long-term behavior of the random energy model and similar glassy systems, and metastability in reversible diffusion. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the Marseille Institute of Mathematics operated jointly by CNRS and Aix-Marseille University. At I2M, she is affiliated with the research group on the mathematics of randomness , which she headed from 2015 to 2021.
Go to Profile#826
Zofia Szmydt
#77458
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Zofia Szmydt was a Polish mathematician working in the areas of differential equations, potential theory and the theory of distributions. She was a winner of the Stefan Banach Prize for mathematics in 1956.
Go to Profile#827
Neda Bokan
#74354
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Neda Bokan is a Serbian mathematician specializing in differential geometry. Education and career Bokan joined the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts as an assistant in 1969, began working at the University of Belgrade in 1971, and completed a Ph.D. there in 1979, with a dissertation on transformation groups of almost-contact manifolds supervised by Mileva Prvanović.
Go to Profile#828
Anne Chao
#72814
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Lien-Ju Anne Chao is a Taiwanese environmental statistician. She works in the Institute of Statistics at National Tsing Hua University, where she is Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor and a former Taiwan National Chair Professor. Chao has described herself as "60% statistician, 30% mathematician and 10% ecologist". She is known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating the size and diversity of populations.
Go to Profile#829
L. Adrienne Cupples
#81769
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
L. Adrienne Cupples was a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health. Early life and education Cupples was born to Rev. Shirley Sherrill and his wife, Mary Lea Sherrill. She studied history and American studies at Raymond College, part of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California before earning a masters and doctorate in statistics from Boston University.
Go to Profile#830
Petra Bonfert-Taylor
#57531
Overall Influence
Petra Bonfert-Taylor is a German-born mathematician known for research in complex analysis and her work in web development for the International Mathematical Union Committee for Women in Mathematics. She is professor of engineering and Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Go to Profile#831
Julia Pevtsova
#75035
Overall Influence
Julia Pevtsova is a Russian-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Her research concerns representation theory and in particular modular representation theory.
Go to Profile#832
Pamela G. Coxson
#74716
Overall Influence
Pamela Gail Coxson is an American applied mathematician specialized in disease modelling. She is a specialist in the division of general and internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations.
Go to Profile#833
Lisa Mantini
#65267
Overall Influence
Lisa Mantini is an American mathematician. Education Mantini earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Master of Arts and PhD from Harvard University. All these degrees were in mathematics.
Go to Profile#834
Pauline Mellon
#64065
Overall Influence
Pauline E. Mellon is an Irish mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at University College Dublin. Her research specialties include functional analysis, the theory of Banach spaces, and the symmetries of manifolds. From 2019 to 2020 she was president of the Irish Mathematical Society and has been a member of the Royal Irish Academy's Physical, Chemical and Mathematical Sciences committee.
Go to Profile#835
Wenxian Shen
#74562
Overall Influence
Wenxian Shen is a Chinese-American mathematician known for her work in topological dynamics, almost-periodicity, waves and other spatial patterns in dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at Auburn University.
Go to Profile#836
Chrysoula Tsogka
#74593
Overall Influence
Chrysoula Tsogka is a Greek applied mathematician whose research involves remote sensing, wave propagation, and imaging through complex media. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Merced.
Go to Profile#837
Joceline Lega
#72364
Overall Influence
Joceline Claude Lega is a French physicist and applied mathematician, interested in nonlinear dynamics. She is a professor in the departments of mathematics, applied mathematics, and epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona, and editor-in-chief of Physica D.
Go to Profile#838
Mina Ossiander
#74470
Overall Influence
Mina Egbert Ossiander is an American mathematician specializing in probability theory and central limit theorems. She is a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University, where she also holds an adjunct appointment in statistics.
Go to Profile#839
Margaret Wiecek
#57513
Overall Influence
Margaret M. Wiecek is a Polish-American operations researcher and professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson University, known for her research in multi-objective optimization, Pareto efficiency, robust design, and three-dimensional packing problems in mechanical engineering.
Go to Profile#841
Nkechi Agwu
#34003
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nkechi Madonna Adeleine Agwu is a mathematics teacher. Agwu is a naturalized American citizen, tenured faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, and was a director of the college's Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.
Go to Profile#842
Lorna Stewart
#74904
Overall Influence
Lorna Kay Stewart is a retired Canadian computer scientist and discrete mathematician whose research concerns algorithms in graph theory and special classes of graphs, including cographs, permutation graphs, interval graphs, comparability graphs and their complements, well-covered graphs, and asteroidal triple-free graphs. She earned her Ph.D. in 1985 at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Derek Corneil, and is a professor emerita at the University of Alberta.
Go to Profile#843
Virginia Torczon
#73823
Overall Influence
Virginia Joanne Torczon is an American applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research on nonlinear optimization methods including pattern search. She is dean of graduate studies and research, and chancellor professor of computer science, at the College of William & Mary.
Go to Profile#844
Joan Moschovakis
#67065
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Joan Rand Moschovakis is a logician and mathematician focusing on intuitionistic logic and mathematics. She is professor emerita at Occidental College and a guest at UCLA. Moschovakis earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 under the direction of Stephen Kleene, with a dissertation titled Disjunction, Existence and *-Eliminability in Formalized Intuitionistic Analysis.
Go to Profile#845
Kathleen Kavanagh
#73983
Overall Influence
Kathleen Rose Kavanagh is an American applied mathematician whose research involves simulation-based engineering, particular for problems involving air quality, water quality, and sustainable irrigation. She is a professor of mathematics at Clarkson University, and a director of the New York State Education IMPETUS for Career Success providing science enrichment for middle and high school students in three counties of New York State.. Kavanagh is also the associate director for the Institute for STEM Education at Clarkson University.
Go to Profile#846
Katy Milkman
#10464
Overall Influence
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
Go to Profile#847
Judith Covington
#75286
Overall Influence
Judith Lynnette Covington is an American mathematician and mathematics educator who works as a professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University Shreveport . Education and career Covington earned her Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with a dissertation in topological group theory jointly supervised by Victor P. Schneider and Bradd Clark, and in the same year joined the LSUS faculty. In the mid-1990s, she became one of the first cohort of fellows of Project NExT, a professional development program of the Mathematical Association of America, and she has continued t...
Go to Profile#848
Joyce McLaughlin
#82138
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Joyce Rogers McLaughlin was an American mathematician, the Ford Foundation Professor of Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests were primarily in applied mathematics, and in particular in inverse problems.
Go to Profile#849
Ana Carpio
#75322
Overall Influence
Ana María Carpio Rodríguez is a Spanish applied mathematician whose research has included inverse problems, the propagation of dislocations in crystals, fluid dynamics, reaction–diffusion systems, and cancer metastasis. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Go to Profile#850
Carolyn Yackel
#75122
Overall Influence
Carolyn Yackel is an American mathematician who has been Professor of Mathematics at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia since 2001. From 1998 to 2001 she was Max Zorn Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Indiana University.
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