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,
#101
Ioana Dumitriu
#18422
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ioana Dumitriu is a Romanian-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include the theory of random matrices, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and game theory.
Go to Profile#102
Mary Lou Zeeman
#28893
Overall Influence
Mary Lou Zeeman is a British mathematician at Bowdoin College in the US, where she is R. Wells Johnson Professor of Mathematics. She specializes in dynamical systems and their application to mathematical biology; she helped found the SIAM Activity Group on the Mathematics of Planet Earth, and co-directs the Mathematics and Climate Research Network.
Go to Profile#103
Jane Piore Gilman
#30967
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jane Piore Gilman is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Her research concerns topology and group theory. Education and career Gilman is one of three children of physicist Emanuel R. Piore. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1965, and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. Her thesis, supervised by Lipman Bers, was entitled Relative Modular Groups in Teichmüller Spaces. She worked for a year as an instructor at Stony Brook University before joining Rutgers in 1972.
Go to Profile#104
Anne Schilling
#24647
Overall Influence
Anne Schilling is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic combinatorics, representation theory, and mathematical physics. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#105
Urmila Mahadev
#23930
Overall Influence
Urmila Mahadev is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Education and career Mahadev is originally from Los Angeles, where her parents are physicians. She became interested in quantum computing through a course with Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, where she graduated in 2010.
Go to Profile#106
Caroline Series
#25509
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Caroline Mary Series is an English mathematician known for her work in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and dynamical systems. Early life and education Series was born on March 24, 1951, in Oxford to Annette and George Series. She attended Oxford High School for Girls and from 1969 studied at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was interviewed for admission by Anne Cobbe. She obtained a B.A. in Mathematics in 1972 and was awarded the university Mathematical Prize. She was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship and studied at Harvard University from 1972, obtaining her Ph.D. in 1976 supervised ...
Go to Profile#107
Mangala Narlikar
#14452
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Mangala Narlikar was an Indian mathematician who did research in pure mathematics as well as writing for a lay audience. After her degrees in mathematics, she initially worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and later worked as a lecturer in the University of Bombay and Pune.
Go to Profile#108
Gladys West
#4442
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Gladys Mae West is an American mathematician. She is known for her contributions to mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of satellite geodesy models, that were later incorporated into the Global Positioning System . West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018. West was awarded the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of satellite geodesy models.
Go to Profile#109
Karma Dajani
#27319
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Karma Dajani is a Lebanese-Dutch mathematician whose research interests include ergodic theory, probability theory, and their applications in number theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#110
Frances Kirwan
#23257
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry. Education Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge. She took a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.
Go to Profile#111
Linda Preiss Rothschild
#31574
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Linda Preiss Rothschild is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Her thesis research concerned Lie groups, but subsequently her interests broadened to include also polynomial factorization, partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and the theory of several complex variables.
Go to Profile#112
Grace Wahba
#20428
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Grace Goldsmith Wahba is an American statistician and retired I. J. Schoenberg-Hilldale Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a pioneer in methods for smoothing noisy data. Best known for the development of generalized cross-validation and "Wahba's problem", she has developed methods with applications in demographic studies, machine learning, DNA microarrays, risk modeling, medical imaging, and climate prediction.
Go to Profile#113
Emma Previato
#31178
Overall Influence
1952 - 2022 (70 years)
Emma Previato was a professor of mathematics at Boston University. Her research concerned algebraic geometry and partial differential equations. Career Previato received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1983 under David Mumford. She was a faculty member at Boston University. She was the author or co-author of nearly 100 research articles. She served as editor or co-editor of 6 books, including Dictionary of Applied Math for Engineers and Scientists .
Go to Profile#114
Susan Montgomery
#29216
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
M. Susan Montgomery is a distinguished American mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras: in particular, Hopf algebras, their structure and representations, and their actions on other algebras. Her early research was on group actionss on rings.
Go to Profile#115
Lisa Sauermann
#26513
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (32 years)
Lisa Sauermann is a mathematician from Germany known for her performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where in 2011 she had the single highest score. She won four gold medals and one silver medal at the olympiad, representing Germany.
Go to Profile#116
Cathy O'Neil
#10969
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Catherine Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.
Go to Profile#117
Kavita Ramanan
#25047
Overall Influence
Kavita Ramanan is a probability theorist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. Education and career Ramanan was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India to Anuradha Ramanan and algebraic geometer S. Ramanan. Ramanan earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1992. She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1996. Her dissertation, supervised by Paul Dupuis, was Construction and Large Deviation Analysis of Constrained Processes, with Applications to Communication Networks.
Go to Profile#118
Sujatha Ramdorai
#11541
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sujatha Ramdorai is an algebraic number theorist known for her work on Iwasawa theory. She is a professor of mathematics and Canada Research Chair at University of British Columbia, Canada. She was previously a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
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Florence Nightingale David
#18107
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David was an English statistician. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside between 1970 – 77 and her research interests included the history of probability and statistical ideas.
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Bonnie Berger
#8181
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Go to Profile#121
Rekha R. Thomas
#27325
Overall Influence
Rekha Rachel Thomas is a mathematician and operations researcher. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, and was the Robert R. and Elaine F. Phelps Professor there from 2008 until 2012. Her research interests include mathematical optimization and computational algebra.
Go to Profile#122
Izabella Łaba
#37254
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Izabella Łaba is a Polish-Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Her main research specialties are harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, and additive combinatorics.
Go to Profile#123
Carolyn Eisele
#13485
Overall Influence
1902 - 2000 (98 years)
Carolyn Eisele was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics known as an expert on the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. Education and career Eisele was born on June 13, 1902, in The Bronx, New York City. She studied at Hunter College High School and then Hunter College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1923. She earned a master's degree in mathematics and education from Columbia University in 1925. At that time, Columbia did not offer Ph.D.s in mathematics to women, but Eisele continued her graduate studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California before returning home to New York, without a doctorate, to care for her injured father.
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Sophie Morel
#28132
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Sophie Morel is a French mathematician, specializing in number theory. She is a CNRS directrice de recherches in mathematics at École normale supérieure de Lyon. In 2012 she received one of the ten prizes of the European Mathematical Society.
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Ilka Agricola
#26337
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Ilka Agricola is a German mathematician who deals with differential geometry and its applications in mathematical physics. She is dean of mathematics and computer science at the University of Marburg, where she has also been responsible for making public the university's collection of mathematical models.
Go to Profile#126
Nalini Joshi
#20614
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Nalini Joshi is an Australian mathematician. She is a professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney, the first woman in the School to hold this position, and is a past-president of the Australian Mathematical Society. Joshi is a member of the School's Applied Mathematics Research Group. Her research concerns integrable systems. She was awarded the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2012. Joshi is also the Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union, and is the first Australian to hold this position.
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Nina Holden
#36007
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Nina Holden is a Norwegian mathematician interested in probability theory and stochastic processes, including graphons, random planar maps, the Schramm–Loewner evolution, and their applications to quantum gravity. She is a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich, and has accepted a position as an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University beginning in 2021.
Go to Profile#128
Charlotte Froese Fischer
#8503
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Charlotte Froese Fischer is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist noted for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock approach to atomic-structure calculations and its application to the description of atomic structure and spectra.
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Etta Zuber Falconer
#20620
Overall Influence
1933 - 2002 (69 years)
Etta Zuber Falconer was an American educator and mathematician the bulk of whose career was spent at Spelman College, where she eventually served as department head and associate provost. She was one of the earlier African-American women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
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Laura DeMarco
#35200
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Laura Grace DeMarco is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, whose research concerns dynamical systems and complex analysis. Career DeMarco received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2002 under the supervision of Curtis T. McMullen. She held an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship and was an L. E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago from September 2002 to August 2005. She was also an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and then she moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was tenured and promoted to professor. She moved to Northwestern University in 2014, and was promoted to Henry S.
Go to Profile#131
Gerd Grubb
#34214
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Gerd Grubb is a Danish mathematician known for her research on pseudo-differential operators. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, where she was the first female professor of mathematics.
Go to Profile#132
Marie-Françoise Roy
#30874
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Marie-Françoise Roy is a French mathematician noted for her work in real algebraic geometry. She has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rennes 1 since 1985 and in 2009 was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. In 2004, she received an Irène Joliot-Curie Prize.
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Joan Birman
#26585
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
Go to Profile#134
Karen Yeats
#35997
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Karen Amanda Yeats is a Canadian mathematician and mathematical physicist whose research connects combinatorics to quantum field theory. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Combinatorics in Quantum Field Theory at the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#135
Barbara MacCluer
#35887
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Barbara Diane MacCluer is an American mathematician, formerly a professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and now a professor emeritus there. Her research specialty is in operator theory and composition operators; she is known for the books she has written on this subject and related areas of functional analysis.
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Marie-Hélène Schwartz
#19414
Overall Influence
1913 - 2013 (100 years)
Marie-Hélène Schwartz was a French mathematician, known for her work on characteristic numbers of spaces with singularities. Education and career Born Marie-Hélène Lévy, she was the daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy and the great-granddaughter of philologist Henri Weil. After studying at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, she began studies at the École Normale Supérieure in 1934, but contracted tuberculosis which forced her to drop out. She married another Jewish mathematician, Laurent Schwartz, in 1938, and soon went into hiding while the Nazis occupied France. After the war, she taught at the Un...
Go to Profile#137
Carolyn S. Gordon
#31817
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carolyn S. Gordon is a mathematician and Benjamin Cheney Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. She is most well known for giving a negative answer to the question "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" in her work with David Webb and Scott A. Wolpert. She is a Chauvenet Prize winner and a 2010 Noether Lecturer.
Go to Profile#138
Daniela Kühn
#26924
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Daniela Kühn is a German mathematician and the Mason Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England. She is known for her research in combinatorics, and particularly in extremal combinatorics and graph theory.
Go to Profile#139
Maggie Miller
#36422
Overall Influence
Maggie Miller is a mathematician, Visiting Clay Fellow, and Stanford Science Fellow at Stanford University in the Mathematics Department. Her primary research area is low-dimensional topology. Professional career Miller earned her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University, where she was advised by mathematician David Gabai and wrote her dissertation on extending fibrations of knot complements to ribbon disk complements. Prior to graduate school, she completed her undergraduate studies at University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#140
Christine Darden
#14479
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christine Darden is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who devoted much of her 40-year career in aerodynamics at NASA to researching supersonic flight and sonic booms. She had an M.S. in mathematics and had been teaching at Virginia State University before starting to work at the Langley Research Center in 1967. She earned a Ph.D. in engineering at George Washington University in 1983 and has published numerous articles in her field. She was the first African-American woman at NASA's Langley Research Center to be promoted to the Senior Executive Service, the to...
Go to Profile#141
Élisabeth Lutz
#27653
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
Élisabeth Lutz was a French mathematician. The Nagell–Lutz theorem in Diophantine geometry describes the torsion points of elliptic curves; it is named after Lutz and Trygve Nagell, who both published it in the 1930s.
Go to Profile#142
Susan Friedlander
#29233
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Susan Jean Friedlander is an American mathematician. Her research concerns mathematical fluid dynamics, the Euler equations and the Navier-Stokes equations. Education Friedlander graduated from University College, London with a BS in Mathematics in 1967. She was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to study at MIT, where she earned an MS in 1970. She completed her doctorate in 1972 from Princeton University under the supervision of Louis Norberg Howard.
Go to Profile#143
Noriko Yui
#21685
Overall Influence
Noriko Yui is a professor of mathematics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Career A native of Japan, Yui obtained her B.S. from Tsuda College, and her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rutgers University in 1974 under the supervision of Richard Bumby.
Go to Profile#144
Mary Wheeler
#30156
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Mary Fanett Wheeler is an American mathematician. She is known for her work on numerical methods for partial differential equations, including domain decomposition methods. In 1998, Wheeler was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for "the computer simulation of subsurface flow and the underlying mathematical algorithms".
Go to Profile#145
Cheryl Praeger
#25456
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is an Australian mathematician. Praeger received BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Queensland , and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1973 under direction of Peter M. Neumann. She has published widely and has advised 27 PhD students . She is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She is best known for her works in group theory, algebraic graph theory and combinatorial designs.
Go to Profile#146
Paola Loreti
#34480
Overall Influence
Paola Loreti is an Italian mathematician, and a professor of mathematical analysis at Sapienza University of Rome. She is known for her research on Fourier analysis, control theory, and non-integer representations. The Komornik–Loreti constant, the smallest non-integer base for which the representation of 1 is unique, is named after her and Vilmos Komornik.
Go to Profile#147
Audrey Terras
#34751
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Audrey Anne Terras is an American mathematician who works primarily in number theory. Her research has focused on quantum chaos and on various types of zeta functions. Early life and education Audrey Terras was born September 10, 1942, in Washington, D.C. She received a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1964, and MA and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1966 and 1970 respectively. She was married to fellow UMD alumnus Riho Terras. She stated in a 2008 interview that she chose to study mathematics because "The U.S. government paid me! And not much! It...
Go to Profile#148
Krystyna Kuperberg
#32997
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Krystyna M. Kuperberg is a Polish-American mathematician who currently works as a professor of mathematics at Auburn University, where she was formerly an Alumni Professor of Mathematics. Early life and family Her parents, Jan W. and Barbara H. Trybulec, were pharmacists and owned a pharmacy in Tarnów. Her older brother is Andrzej Trybulec. Her husband Włodzimierz Kuperberg and her son Greg Kuperberg are also mathematicians, while her daughter Anna Kuperberg is a photographer.
Go to Profile#149
Jessica Fridrich
#10402
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jessica Fridrich is a professor at Binghamton University, who specializes in data hiding applications in digital imagery. She is also known for documenting and popularizing the CFOP method , one of the most commonly used methods for speedsolving the Rubik's Cube, also known as speedcubing. She is considered one of the pioneers of speedcubing, along with Lars Petrus. Nearly all of the fastest speedcubers have based their methods on Fridrich's, usually referred to as CFOP, that is, .
Go to Profile#150
Jennifer Morse
#30553
Overall Influence
Jennifer Leigh Morse is a mathematician specializing in algebraic combinatorics. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia. Research Morse's interests in algebraic combinatorics include representation theory and applications to statistical physics, symmetric functions, Young tableaux-Schur functions, which are a generalization of Schur polynomials.
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