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,
#951
Betz Halloran
#66210
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mary Elizabeth Halloran is an American biostatistician who works as a professor of biostatistics, professor of epidemiology, and adjunct professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#952
Susanna Terracini
#52864
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Susanna Terracini is an Italian mathematician known for her research on chaos in Hamiltonian dynamical systemss, including the n-body problem, reaction–diffusion systems, and the Schrödinger equation.
Go to Profile#953
Lillian Pierce
#71876
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Lillian Beatrix Pierce is a mathematician whose research connects number theory with harmonic analysis. She is a professor of mathematics at Duke University. Early life and education Pierce was home-schooled in Fallbrook, California and began playing the violin at age four. By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist. As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission. She entered Princeton University majoring in mathematics but inten...
Go to Profile#954
Erna Schneider Hoover
#7480
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Erna Schneider Hoover is an American mathematician notable for inventing a computerized telephone switching method which "revolutionized modern communication". It prevented system overloads by monitoring call center traffic and prioritizing tasks on phone switching systems to enable more robust service during peak calling times. At Bell Laboratories where she worked for over 32 years, Hoover was described as an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology.
Go to Profile#955
Henda Swart
#54046
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Hendrika Cornelia Scott Swart FRSSAf was a South African mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a professor at the University of Cape Town Personal life Born Hendrika Cornelia Scott she married John Henry Swart. They had three children Christine, Sandra and Gustav.
Go to Profile#956
Rosa M. Morris
#71929
Overall Influence
1914 - 2011 (97 years)
Rosa Margaret Morris was a Welsh applied mathematician, working in potential theory and aerodynamics. When she was 23, her research and examination results made national news. In her later career, she taught at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire , where she co-authored a successful textbook on Mathematical Methods of Physics and became one of the first female Heads of School of Mathematics in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#957
Edith Hirsch Luchins
#67676
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Edith Hirsch Luchins was a Polish-American mathematician. Her work focused on applying mathematical principles to problems in the philosophy of science and psychology, most notably in the field of Gestalt psychology. The Luchins and Luchins' Water Jar Experiment is named after her and psychologist Abraham S. Luchins.
Go to Profile#958
Rosana Rodríguez-López
#82106
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Rosana Rodríguez-López is a Spanish mathematician known for her well-cited research publications applying fixed-point theorems to differential equations. She is a professor in the Department of Statistics, Mathematical Analysis and Optimisation at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2005 with the doctoral thesis "Periodic solutions for nonlinear differential equations" under the supervision of Juan José Nieto Roig.
Go to Profile#959
Georgia Perakis
#59737
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Georgia Perakis is a Greek-American operations researcher and the William F. Pounds Professor of Operations Research and Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management, Associate Dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and Codirector of the MIT Operations Research Center Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research is primarily in the areas of dynamic pricing, revenue management and inventory control. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Manag...
Go to Profile#960
Pauline Barrieu
#75213
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Pauline Barrieu is a French financial statistician, probability theorist, and expert on financial risk assessment, risk transfer, and uncertainty quantification. She is a professor of statistics in the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#961
Ellen Baake
#77948
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ellen Baake is a German mathematical biologist who works as a professor of biomathematics and theoretical bioinformatics at Bielefeld University. Her research uses probability theory and differential equations to study biological evolution; she has also studied mathematical immunobiology and the mathematical modeling of photosynthesis.
Go to Profile#962
Regina S. Burachik
#82547
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Regina Sandra Burachik is an Argentine mathematician who works on optimization and analysis . Currently, she is a professor at the University of South Australia. She earned her Ph.D. from the IMPA in 1995 under the supervision of Alfredo Noel Iusem . In her thesis, she "introduced and analyzed solution methods for variational inequalities, the latter being a generalization of the convex constrained optimization problem."
Go to Profile#963
Mariya Shcherbina
#60128
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mariya Vladimirovna Shcherbina is a Ukrainian mathematician and mathematical physicist who studies the theory of random matrices. She is a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the 2009 winner of the Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky Prize.
Go to Profile#964
Elizabeth Cuthill
#77897
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Elizabeth Hahnemann Cuthill was an American applied mathematician and numerical analyst known for her work on sparse matrix algorithms, on block iterative methods for the numerical approximation of differential equations, and on the development of computer simulations of nuclear reactors. She was a researcher for the United States Navy at the David Taylor Model Basin. The Cuthill–McKee algorithm and reverse Cuthill–McKee algorithm are heuristics for permuting matrices into forms with small bandwidth and for associated problems in graph bandwidth, named for the work of Cuthill with James McKee...
Go to Profile#965
Pilar Ribeiro
#84094
Overall Influence
1911 - 2011 (100 years)
Pilar Ribeiro was a mathematician who was a founder of the Portuguese Mathematical Society and also of the Gazeta de Matemática . Early life Maria do Pilar Baptista Ribeiro was born in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, on 5 October 1911, the daughter of Joaquim Rodrigues Carreira and Luísa Loureiro Peres. She graduated in Mathematics from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon in 1933, at a time when it was still unusual for women to study such a subject. A year later, she married mathematician Hugo Baptista Ribeiro , who she had met during the course. The couple shared an oppos...
Go to Profile#966
Andrée Ehresmann
#71952
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Andrée Ehresmann is a French mathematician specialising in category theory. Education and career Ehresmann was a researcher at CNRS from 1957 to 1963. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 1962 at University of Paris under the supervision of Gustave Choquet. Her thesis was entitled Différentiabilité dans les espaces localement convexes. Distructures [Differentiability in locally convex spaces. Distructures].
Go to Profile#967
Ranee Brylinski
#77835
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ranee Kathryn Brylinski is an American mathematician known for her research in representation theory and quantum logic gates. Formerly a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, she left academia in 2003 to found the mathematical consulting company Brylinski Research with her husband, Jean-Luc Brylinski.
Go to Profile#968
Lucy Campbell
#81994
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lucy Jean Campbell is an applied mathematician and numerical analyst from Barbados, Jamaica, Ghana, and Canada, specializing in the applications of fluid dynamics to modeling the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. Beyond fluid dynamics, she has also investigated methods for tracing the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. She is an associate professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University.
Go to Profile#969
Herta Freitag
#68907
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Herta Freitag was an Austrian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Hollins College, known for her work on the Fibonacci numbers. Life She was born as Herta Taussig in Vienna, earning a master's degree from the University of Vienna in 1934. She took a teaching position at the university. However, her father had publicly opposed the Nazis. Herta and her parents decided to move to a summer cottage in the mountains outside Vienna, to give themselves some time to make plans for the future. Herta's brother, Walter Taussig, a musician, was touring the United States and decided to remain in the U.S.
Go to Profile#970
Isabella Bashmakova
#72349
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Isabella Grigoryevna Bashmakova was a Russian historian of mathematics. In 2001, she was a recipient of the Alexander Koyré́ Medal of the International Academy of the History of Science. Education and career Bashmakova was born on January 3, 1921, in Rostov-on-Don, to a family of Armenian descent. Her father, Grigory Georgiyevich Bashmakov, was a lawyer. Her family moved to Moscow in 1932. She began studies in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1938, but was evacuated from Moscow during World War II, during which she served as a nurse in Samarkand. She completed a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#971
Lillian K. Bradley
#79346
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Lillian Katie Bradley was an American mathematician and mathematics educator who in 1960 became the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in any subject at the University of Texas at Austin. She accomplished this ten years after African-Americans were first admitted to the school, and despite the dominance of the mathematics department at Austin by R. L. Moore, known for his segregationist views and for his snubs of African-American students.
Go to Profile#972
Deborah Hughes Hallett
#78665
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Deborah J. Hughes Hallett is a mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona. Her expertise is in the undergraduate teaching of mathematics. She has also taught as Professor of the Practice in the Teaching of Mathematics at Harvard University, and continues to hold an affiliation with Harvard as Adjunct Professor of Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Go to Profile#973
Efstratia Kalfagianni
#90299
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Efstratia Kalfagianni is a Greek American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology. Early life Kalfagianni was born in 1965 in Greece. She lived on a small Greek island most of her early life. She started getting into math as a sophomore in high school because of classes in euclidean geometry and elementary number theory. Her teachers encouraged her to pursue math in college as well.
Go to Profile#974
Leah Berman
#81506
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Leah Wrenn Berman Williams is a mathematician at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, specializing in discrete geometry. At the University of Alaska, she is a professor of mathematics, the head of the department of mathematics and statistics, and was the interim dean of the College of Natural Science and Mathematics. She was also a member of the borough assembly of Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska from 2018-2021.
Go to Profile#975
Britta Nestler
#38485
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Britta Nestler is a German materials scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Her research involves the development of software to simulate the formation of microstructures in advanced materials for which experimental studies would be too expensive or difficult.
Go to Profile#976
Elizabeth McHarg
#79558
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Elizabeth Adam McHarg was a Scottish mathematician who in 1965 became the first female president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. Education McHarg studied at the Glasgow High School for Girls and then the University of Glasgow, earning a master's degree with first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy in 1943. The university awarded her the Thomas Logan Medal and a George A Clark scholarship, funding her as a researcher at Girton College, Cambridge. At Girton, she studied nonlinear partial differential equationss with Mary Cartwright, and completed her Ph.D. in 1948.
Go to Profile#977
Olga Gil Medrano
#79949
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Olga Gil Medrano is a Spanish mathematician who was president of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society from 2006 to 2009. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Valencia, where she is also Vice-Rector for International Relations and Cooperation. Her mathematical research concerns differential geometry and geometric analysis; since 2000, she has also been interested in the dissemination of mathematics to the general public.
Go to Profile#978
Gabriele Kaiser
#83876
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gabriele Kaiser is a German mathematics educator. She is a professor of mathematics education at the University of Hamburg. Kaiser completed a doctorate in 1986 and a habilitation in 1997 at the University of Kassel. Her doctoral dissertation, Anwendungen im Mathematikunterricht - Konzeptionen und Untersuchungen zur unterrichtlichen Realisierung, was supervised by Werner Blum. She became a professor at Hamburg in 1998, and served as vice dean of education from 2010 to 2016. Since 2005 she has been editor-in-chief of the journal ZDM Mathematics Education, and she is the editor or co-editor of 2...
Go to Profile#979
Rachel Kuske
#92925
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Rachel Ann Kuske is an American-Canadian applied mathematician and Professor and Chair of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Professional career Kuske received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1992. Her dissertation, Asymptotic Analysis of Random Wave Equations, was supervised by Bernard J. Matkowsky. From 1997 to 2002, she was Assistant Professor and then associate professor at the University of Minnesota. She is an expert on stochastic and nonlinear dynamics, mathematical modeling, asymptotic methods, and industrial mathematics. She served on t...
Go to Profile#980
Anna Stafford
#84200
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Anna Adelaide Stafford Henriques was an American mathematician known for her pioneering role as a female researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study. Education Anna Adelaide Stafford was born on August 20, 1905, in Chicago, the first of five children in her family. Her father was a factory manager, and both her parents were children of immigrants. The family moved from Chicago to Wisconsin and Minnesota; her parents died in 1919 and the children moved again to a relative's home in Missouri.
Go to Profile#981
Marie A. Vitulli
#81963
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Marie A. Vitulli is an American mathematician and professor emerita at the University of Oregon. Mathematics Vitulli's research is in commutative algebra and applications to algebraic geometry. More specific topics in her research include deformations of monomial curves, seminormal rings, the weak normality of commutative rings and algebraic varieties, weak subintegrality, and the theory of valuations for commutative rings. Along with her colleague David K. Harrison, she developed a unified valuation theory for rings with zero divisors that generalized both Krull and Archimedean valuations.
Go to Profile#982
Reidun Twarock
#83657
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Reidun Twarock is a German-born mathematical biologist at the University of York. She is known for developing mathematical models of viruses based on higher-dimensional lattices. Education Twarock originally studied mathematical physics at the universities of Cologne and Bath. During her PhD at Technische Universität Clausthal she experimented with quantum mechanical models confined to the surface of a sphere.
Go to Profile#983
Mabel Gweneth Humphreys
#53254
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
Mabel Gweneth Humphreys was a Canadian-American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. The M. Gweneth Humphreys Award of the Association for Women in Mathematics was established in her honor.
Go to Profile#984
Ilona Palásti
#81389
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Ilona Palásti was a Hungarian mathematician who worked at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. She is known for her research in discrete geometry, geometric probability, and the theory of random graphs. With Alfréd Rényi and others, she was considered to be one of the members of the Hungarian School of Probability.
Go to Profile#985
Vera Serganova
#83945
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Vera Vladimirovna Serganova is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who researches superalgebras and their representations. Serganova graduated from Moscow State University. She defended her Ph.D. in 1988 at Saint Petersburg State University under the joint supervision of Dimitry Leites and Arkady Onishchik. She was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 and a plenary speaker at the ICM in 2014. In 2017, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#986
Catherine Meusburger
#88838
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Catherine Meusburger is an Austrian mathematician and physicist. She works at the interface between mathematical physics, algebra and geometry. Since 2011 she has served as professor of mathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Go to Profile#987
Jennifer Rexford
#19977
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jennifer Rexford is an American computer scientist who is currently the Provost, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and formerly the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research focuses on analysis of computer networks, and in particular network routing, performance measurement, and network management.
Go to Profile#988
Monika Ludwig
#81890
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Monika Ludwig is an Austrian mathematician, University Professor of Convex and Discrete Geometry at the Vienna University of Technology. Academic career Ludwig earned a Dipl.-Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology in 1990, and a doctorate in 1994 under the supervision of Peter M. Gruber. She remained at the same university as an assistant and associate professor from 1994 until 2007, when she moved to the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She returned to the Vienna University of Technology as a full professor in 2010.
Go to Profile#989
Christine Bachoc
#81413
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Christine Bachoc is a French mathematician known for her work in coding theory, kissing numbers, lattice theory, and semidefinite programming. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bordeaux.
Go to Profile#990
Kumiko Nishioka
#92069
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kumiko Nishioka is a Japanese mathematician at Keio University. She specializes in transcendental numbers, and is known for her research related to the theory of Mahler functions and Painlevé transcendents. In 1996 she published the first comprehensive text on transcendence of Mahler functions, Mahler Functions and Transcendence, extending and generalizing Mahler's method. Her husband Keiji Nishioka is also a mathematician, and a coauthor.
Go to Profile#991
Anne Penfold Street
#83660
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Anne Penfold Street was one of Australia's leading mathematicians, specialising in combinatorics. She was the third woman to become a mathematics professor in Australia, following Hanna Neumann and Cheryl Praeger. She was the author of several textbooks, and her work on sum-free sets became a standard reference for its subject matter. She helped found several important organizations in combinatorics, developed a researcher network, and supported young students with interest in mathematics.
Go to Profile#992
Mary Bradburn
#84027
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Mary Bradburn was a British mathematics educator who became president of the Mathematical Association for the 1994–1995 term. Education and career Bradburn was born on 17 March 1918 in Normanby in North Yorkshire, the daughter of a marine engineer and a Scotswoman. She attended a school that didn't approve of girls studying mathematics, but allowed her to progress through the mathematics curriculum at her own rate, several years ahead of the other students.
Go to Profile#993
Laura Martignon
#71249
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Laura Martignon is a Colombian and Italian professor and scientist. From 2003 until 2020 she served as a Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Education at the Ludwigsburg University of Education. Until 2017 she was an Adjunct Scientist of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where she previously worked as Senior Researcher. She also worked for ten years as a Mathematics Professor at the University of Brasilia and spent a period of one and a half years, as visiting scholar, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#994
Ana Bela Cruzeiro
#87774
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ana Bela Cruzeiro is a Portuguese and Swiss mathematician whose research concerns stochastic analysis and the Malliavin calculus, as well as the differential equations used to model fluid dynamics and quantum mechanics. She is a professor of mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico, part of the University of Lisbon.
Go to Profile#995
Sara Billey
#91423
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sara Cosette Billey is an American mathematician working in algebraic combinatorics. She is known for her contributions on Schubert polynomials, singular loci of Schubert varieties, Kostant polynomials, and Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomials often using computer verified proofs. She is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#996
Simone Gutt
#90505
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Simone Gutt is a Belgian mathematician specializing in differential geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Education and career Gutt was born on 13 July 1956 in Uccle, near Brussels. She completed her doctorate in 1980 at the Université libre de Bruxelles; her dissertation, Déformations formelles de l'algèbre des fonctions différentiables sur une variété symplectique, was jointly supervised by Michel Cahen and .
Go to Profile#997
Rina Foygel Barber
#42273
Overall Influence
Rina Foygel Barber is an American statistician whose research includes works on the Bayesian statistics of graphical models, false discovery rates, and regularization. She is the Louis Block Professor of statistics at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#998
Anne Boutet de Monvel
#81627
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Anne-Marie Boutet de Monvel is a French applied mathematician and mathematical physicist, and a professor emerita in the University of Paris, affiliated with the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris Rive Gauche.
Go to Profile#999
Gillian Thornley
#87683
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Gillian Thornley is a retired New Zealand mathematician. Gillian Thornley was born in 1940 in Murchison, New Zealand. Living on the family dairy farm, she won a scholarship to board at Nelson College for Girls and in 1958 enrolled at Canterbury University where she graduated with a masters with first class honours in mathematics in 1963. At Canterbury she was a contemporary of Beatrice Tinsley.
Go to Profile#1000
Rinat Kedem
#53282
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Rinat Kedem is an American mathematician and mathematical physicist. Kedem graduated in 1988 with BA in physics from Macalester College. She received her PhD in physics in 1993 from Stony Brook University with thesis advisor Barry M. McCoy. She was a postdoc from 1993 to 1995 at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences , from 1995 to 1996 at the University of Melbourne, and from 1996 to 1997 at the University of California, Berkeley. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was an assistant professor of mathematics from 1997 to 2001. In the mathematics departmen...
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