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,
#901
Michelle L. Wachs
#55966
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michelle Lynn Wachs is an American mathematician who specializes in algebraic combinatorics and works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Miami. Contributions Wachs and her advisor Adriano Garsia are the namesakes of the Garsia–Wachs algorithm for optimal binary search trees, which they published in 1977. She is also known for her research on shellings for simplicial complexes, partially ordered sets, and Coxeter groups, and on random permutation statistics and set partition statistics.
Go to Profile#902
Sarah Rees
#85627
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sarah Elizabeth Rees is Professor of Pure Mathematics at Newcastle University. Her focus of research is on geometrical, combinatorial and computational aspects of group theory. Rees obtained her Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation, supervised by Peter Cameron, was On Diagram Geometry.
Go to Profile#903
Amanda Folsom
#78288
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Amanda L. Folsom is an American mathematician specializing in analytic number theory and its applications in combinatorics. She is a professor of mathematics at Amherst College, where she chairs the department of mathematics and statistics.
Go to Profile#904
Renate Tobies
#75568
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Renate A. Tobies is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics known for her biographies of Felix Klein and Iris Runge. Education and career Tobies grew up in East Germany, and studied mathematics and chemistry at Leipzig University. She completed a doctoral dissertation on the history of chemistry education, Die Entwicklung des allgemeinbildenden Chemieunterrichts auf dem Gebiet der DDR unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der ideologischen Erziehung , there in 1975. After briefly teaching pharmacy, she took a position in Leipzig's Institute for the History of Medicine and Natural Sciences, specializing in the history of mathematics.
Go to Profile#905
Johanna Weber
#12456
Overall Influence
1910 - 2014 (104 years)
Johanna Weber was a German-born British mathematician and aerodynamicist. She is best known for her contributions to the development of the Handley Page Victor bomber and the Concorde. Early life Johanna Weber was born in a family of Walloon origin in Düsseldorf, Germany, on August 8, 1910. Her father died in the First World War. As a 'war orphan', Weber was eligible for financial support, and she attended a convent school.
Go to Profile#906
Sandra Arlinghaus
#65912
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sandra Lach Arlinghaus is an American educator who is adjunct professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns mathematical geography.
Go to Profile#907
Annalisa Buffa
#65164
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Annalisa Buffa is an Italian mathematician, specializing in numerical analysis and partial differential equations . She is a professor of mathematics at EPFL and holds the Chair of Numerical Modeling and Simulation.
Go to Profile#908
Vyjayanthi Chari
#83560
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Vyjayanthi Chari is an Indian–American Distinguished Professor and the F. Burton Jones Endowed Chair for Pure Mathematics at the University of California, Riverside, known for her research in representation theory and quantum algebra. In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#909
Gitta Kutyniok
#67936
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Gitta Kutyniok is a German applied mathematician known for her research in harmonic analysis, deep learning, compressed sensing, and image processing. She has a Bavarian AI Chair for "Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence" in the institute of mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Go to Profile#910
Mary Leontius Schulte
#76272
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Sister Mary Leontius Schulte was an American nun, mathematics educator, and historian of mathematics. Life Schulte was born as Catherine Mary Schulte, on September 4, 1901, in Cleveland, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, in a large farming family descended from German immigrants. After finishing high school in Manitowoc, she began studying home economics at the College of Saint Teresa, but graduated in 1923 with a degree in chemistry and three minors including mathematics. She worked as a high school mathematics teacher in Minnesota from 1923 to 1928, taking vows as a nun in the Sisters of Saint F...
Go to Profile#911
Hannah Markwig
#68090
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Hannah Markwig is a German mathematician specializing in tropical geometry. In 2010 she won both the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Helene Lange Prize for her research.
Go to Profile#912
Anna C. Gilbert
#71301
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Anna Catherine Gilbert is an American mathematician who works as the Herman Goldstine Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. She also holds a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering and computer science at Michigan. Her research expertise is in randomized algorithms for harmonic analysis, image processing, signal processing, and large data sets.
Go to Profile#913
Mariolina Padula
#77477
Overall Influence
Mariarosaria Padula was an Italian mathematical physicist specializing in fluid dynamics, including free boundary problems and compressible flow with viscosity. She was a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Ferrara, and is also known for revitalizing and heading the university's mathematical journal, Annali dell’Università di Ferrara, and forging it into an internationally known journal.
Go to Profile#914
Glenda Glover
#21756
Overall Influence
Glenda Baskin Glover, Ph.D, J.D., CPA, began serving as the eighth president of Tennessee State University on January 2, 2013. Early life and education Glover was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and was raised in the Weaver Road vicinity near Boxtown. She began her educational development as a student at Tennessee State University, where she majored in mathematics. After graduating with honors with a Bachelor of Science degree, she earned the Master of Business Administration at Clark Atlanta University in 1976. She completed her doctorate in business from George Washington University in 1990, a...
Go to Profile#915
Ene-Margit Tiit
#61349
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Ene–Margit Tiit is an Estonian mathematician and statistician who became the founding president of the Estonian Statistical Society. Early life and education Tiit is the daughter of mathematician and was born in Tartu on 22 April 1934. She went to a high school in Tallinn and completed her undergraduate studies in 1957 at the University of Tartu, then called Tartu State University. She remained at the same university for her doctoral work, defending a dissertation on Ridade ümberjärjestamisest in 1963 with Gunnar Kangro as her doctoral supervisor.
Go to Profile#916
Pamela E. Harris
#55917
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Pamela Estephania Harris is a Mexican-American mathematician, educator and advocate for immigrants. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was formerly an associate professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts and is co-founder of the online platform Lathisms. She is also an editor of the e-mentoring blog of the American Mathematical Society .
Go to Profile#917
Michèle Raynaud
#79664
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michèle Raynaud is a French mathematician, who works on algebraic geometry and who worked with Alexandre Grothendieck in Paris in the 1960s at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques . Biography Raynaud was a member of the séminaire de géométrie algébrique du Bois Marie 1 and 2 and obtained her doctorate in 1972, supervised by Grothendieck at Paris Diderot University. Her thesis was entitled Théorèmes de Lefschetz en cohomologie cohérente et en cohomologie étale. Grothendieck wrote about her doctoral thesis in Récoltes et Semailles describing it as original, entirely independent, an...
Go to Profile#918
Claudia Neuhauser
#31661
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Claudia Maria Neuhauser is a mathematician whose research focuses on mathematical biology and spatial ecology. She also investigates computational biology and bioinformatics. Neuhauser is currently Interim Vice Chancellor/Vice President for Research at the University of Houston, where she has been employed since 2018.
Go to Profile#919
Dörte Haftendorn
#81372
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Dörte Haftendorn is a German mathematician, mathematics educator, and textbook author who works as a professor at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Education and career Haftendorn earned her PhD in 1975 from the Clausthal University of Technology. Her dissertation, Additiv kommutative und idempotente Halbringe mit Faktorbedingung [Additive, commutative, and idempotent semirings with the factor condition], concerned the theory of semirings and was supervised by Hanns J. Weinert.
Go to Profile#920
Denise Lievesley
#47604
Overall Influence
Denise Anne Lievesley is a British social statistician. She has formerly been Chief Executive of the English Information Centre for Health and Social Care, Director of Statistics at UNESCO, in which capacity she founded the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Director of what is now the UK Data Archive .
Go to Profile#921
Vanaja Iyengar
#62384
Overall Influence
1901 - 2001 (100 years)
Vanaja Iyengar was an Indian mathematician, educationist and the founder vice-chancellor of Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam, Tirupati, in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. She was one of the founders of the Andhra Mahila Sabha School of Informatics. The Government of India awarded her the fourth highest civilian honour of Padma Shri in 1987.
Go to Profile#922
Alina Carmen Cojocaru
#79542
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Alina Carmen Cojocaru is a Romanian mathematician who works in number theory and is known for her research on elliptic curves, arithmetic geometry, and sieve theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a researcher in the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy.
Go to Profile#923
Josephine Chanler
#80186
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Josephine Hughes Chanler was an American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. Early life and education She was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the only child of Louisa Castle and James Chanler. Her parents separated soon after her birth, and she grew up with her mother, who lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky and worked as a schoolteacher. As a girl she became ill with polio, and had to undergo treatment for it at intervals later in her life. When she was a high school student, she and her mother moved to Jacksonville, Florida, but they moved back to Bowling Green so that Chanler could attend the Western Kentucky State Normal School and Teacher's College.
Go to Profile#924
Astrid an Huef
#78031
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Astrid an Huef is a German-born New Zealand mathematician who holds a professorship at Victoria University of Wellington. Until 2017, she held the Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Otago. Her research interests include functional analysis, operator algebras, and dynamical systems. She was the president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society for the 2016–2017 term.
Go to Profile#925
Ekaterina Kostina
#76631
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ekaterina Arkad'evna Kostina is a Belarusian-German mathematician specializing in numerical methods for nonlinear programming, robust optimization, and optimal control theory, and in the applications of these methods to the sciences. She is professor of numerical mathematics in the faculty of mathematics and computer science and institute for applied mathematics at Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile#926
Betül Tanbay
#24680
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Betül Tanbay is a Turkish mathematician, scientist and professor of mathematics at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey and the first woman president of the Turkish Mathematical Society between 2010 and 2016.
Go to Profile#927
Sarah Zerbes
#72750
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Sarah Livia Zerbes is a German algebraic number theorist at ETH Zurich. Her research interests include L-functions, modular forms, p-adic Hodge theory, and Iwasawa theory, and her work has led to new insights towards the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, which predicts the number of rational points on an elliptic curve by the behavior of an associated L-function.
Go to Profile#928
Guacolda Antoine Lazzerini
#69370
Overall Influence
1908 - 2015 (107 years)
Guacolda Antoine Lazzerini was a Chilean mathematician and teacher of mathematics. Education and career Antoine's father died when Antoine was a teenager, and she began helping to support the family by teaching mathematics. She entered the teaching school of the University of Chile in 1924, and finished her studies there in 1928, earning the title of professor of mathematics and physics with a thesis on differential equations and their application in pedagogy and engineering. She became a high school mathematics teacher at the Liceo José Victorino Lastarria , and continued to teach there for ...
Go to Profile#929
Angela Spalsbury
#89069
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Angela Sue Spalsbury is an American mathematician specializing in functional analysis. She is a former president of Pi Mu Epsilon, the dean and chief administrator of the Geauga campus of Kent State University, and the co-author of a book on Haar measure, The Joys of Haar Measure, with Joe Diestel.
Go to Profile#930
Bernadette Perrin-Riou
#30551
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Bernadette Perrin-Riou is a French number theorist. Early life Perrin-Riou was born on 1 August 1955 in Les Vans, Ardèche, France. Her parents had both had a scientific education; her mother and father were a physicist and chemist, respectively. She was brought up, along with her sisters, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Go to Profile#931
Antonia J. Jones
#50278
Overall Influence
1943 - 2010 (67 years)
Antonia Jane Jones was a British mathematician and computer scientist. Her research considered number theory and computer science. Early life and education Jones was born in 1943 in Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital. She was the first member of her family to attend university. Jones contracted polio as a child and lost both of her legs at the age of ten. Jones attended the University of Reading, where she studied mathematics and physics and graduated both with first class honours. She was a doctoral student in number theory at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 1969.
Go to Profile#932
Carol Wood
#59750
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Carol Saunders Wood is a retired American mathematician, the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, Emerita, at Wesleyan University. Her research concerns mathematical logic and model-theoretic algebra, and in particular the theory of differentially closed fields.
Go to Profile#933
Gail Wolkowicz
#80185
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gail Susan Kohl Wolkowicz is a Canadian researcher in differential equations, dynamical systems, and mathematical biology who works as a professor of mathematics and statistics at McMaster University. She is known, among other contributions, for her proof that the competitive exclusion principle holds for inter-species competition in the chemostat.
Go to Profile#934
Mara Neusel
#78613
Overall Influence
1964 - 2014 (50 years)
Mara Dicle Neusel was a mathematician, author, teacher and an advocate for women in mathematics. The focus of her mathematical work was on invariant theory, which can be briefly described as the study of group actionss and their fixed pointss.
Go to Profile#935
Adriana Garroni
#53179
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Adriana Garroni is an Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis, including the calculus of variations, geometric measure theory, potential theory, and applications to the mathematical modeling of materials including plasticity and fracture. She is a professor in mathematics at Sapienza University of Rome.
Go to Profile#936
Judith R. Goodstein
#45602
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Judith Ronnie Goodstein is an American historian of science, historian of mathematics, archivist, and book author. She worked for many years at the California Institute of Technology , where she is University Archivist Emeritus.
Go to Profile#937
Catherine Sulem
#86135
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Catherine Sulem is a mathematician and violinist at the University of Toronto. She has completed a monograph "Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation: Self-Focusing Instability and Wave Collapse" together with her brother Pierre-Louis Sulem, which appears in applied Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#938
Marta Bunge
#69941
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Marta Cavallo Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian mathematician specializing in category theory, and known for her work on synthetic calculus of variations and synthetic differential topology. She was a professor emeritus at McGill University.
Go to Profile#939
Véronique Cortier
#68565
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Véronique Cortier is a French mathematician and computer scientist specializing in cryptography. Her research has applied mathematical logic in the formal verification of cryptographic protocols, and has included the development of secure electronic voting systems. She has also contributed to the public dissemination of knowledge about cryptography through a sequence of posts on the binaire blog of Le Monde. She is a director of research with CNRS, associated with the Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications at the University of Lorraine in Nancy.
Go to Profile#940
Jacqueline Meulman
#57858
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jacqueline Meulman is a Dutch statistician and professor emerita of Applied Statistics at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. Biography Born in The Hague, Meulman received her master's degree in mathematical psychology and data theory at Leiden University in 1981, and obtained her PhD in data theory in 1986 with the thesis entitled "A distance approach to nonlinear multivariate analysis" advised by Jan de Leeuw and John P. van de Geer. She was a consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, from 1982 to 1983.
Go to Profile#941
Haya Freedman
#79578
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Haya Freedman was a Polish-born Israeli mathematician known for her research on the Tamari lattice and on ring theory, and as "an exceptionally gifted teacher" of mathematics at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#942
Galina Matvievskaya
#82926
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Galina Pavlovna Matviyevskaya is a Soviet-Russian historian of mathematics, and university teacher. In 1974, she won the Biruni State Prize. Life Matviyevskaya attended school in Kharkov and in Chkalov. She graduated in 1948 with a gold medal. She graduated from the University of Leningrad, in 1954, and the Leningrad Department of the Moscow Institute of History of Science and Technology, in 1959. She studied unpublished manuscripts by Leonhard Euler on number theory.
Go to Profile#943
Ana Maria Cuervo
#47765
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ana Maria Cuervo is a Spanish-American physician, researcher, and cell biologist. She is a professor in developmental and molecular miology, anatomy and structural biology, and medicine and co-director of the Institute for Aging Studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is best known for her research work on autophagy, the process by which cells recycle waste products, and its changes in aging and age-related diseases.
Go to Profile#944
Antonia Ferrín Moreiras
#37692
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Antonia Ferrín Moreiras was a mathematician, professor and the first female Galician astronomer. Her main contributions to astronomy were works on stellar occultations by the moon, measures of double stars and astrometric measurements, as well as the determination of the passage of stars through two verticals. She accomplished all of this while she was working at the Observatory of the University of Santiago de Compostela .
Go to Profile#945
Patricia Clark Kenschaft
#56891
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Patricia Clark Kenschaft was an American mathematician. She was a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University. She is known as a prolific author of books on mathematics, as a founder of PRIMES, the Project for Resourceful Instruction of Mathematics in the Elementary School, and for her work for equity and diversity in mathematics.
Go to Profile#946
Ailsa Land
#37491
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Ailsa Horton Land was a Professor of Operational Research in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and was the first woman professor of Operational Research in Britain. She is most well-known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm along with Alison Doig whilst carrying out research at the London School of Economics in 1960. She was married to Frank Land, who is an Emeritus Professor at the LSE.
Go to Profile#947
Annette Dobson
#72654
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Annette Jane Dobson is a Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Queensland's Australian Women and Girl's Health Research Centre in the School of Public Health. Dobson was Director of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health from 1995 to 2013. She is a highly cited publication author, a book author, and has received an Australia Day award.
Go to Profile#948
Francesca Dominici
#34159
Overall Influence
Francesca Dominici is a Harvard Professor who develops methodology in causal inference and data science and led research projects that combine big data with health policy and climate change. She is a professor of biostatistics, co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and a former senior associate dean for research in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#949
Judy A. Holdener
#90666
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Judy Holdener is an American mathematician and educator. She is a professor of mathematics at Kenyon College. She was born in 1965. Holdener's primary interest is in number theory. She discovered a simpler proof of the theorem of Touchard, which states that every perfect number is of the form 2k, 12k+1, or 36k+9.
Go to Profile#950
Marie-Louise Michelsohn
#82600
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Marie-Louise Michelsohn is a professor of mathematics at State University of New York at Stony Brook. Education Michelsohn attended the Bronx High School of Science. She attended the University of Chicago for her undergraduate and graduate studies, including her PhD.
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