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,
#1001
Ana Cannas da Silva
#87849
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ana M. L. G. Cannas da Silva is a Portuguese mathematician specializing in symplectic geometry and geometric topology. She works in Switzerland as an adjunct professor in mathematics at ETH Zurich. Early life and education Cannas was born in Lisbon. After studying at St. John de Britto College, she earned a licenciatura in mathematics in 1990 from the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon. She then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1994 and completing her Ph.D. in 1996. Her dissertation, Multiplicity Formulas ...
Go to Profile#1002
Allison Henrich
#89559
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Allison Henrich is an American mathematician specializing in knot theory and also interested in undergraduate-level mathematics research mentorship. She is a professor of mathematics at Seattle University.
Go to Profile#1003
Francesca Biagini
#85674
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Francesca Biagini is a German and Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical finance, stochastic calculus, and probability theory. Topics in her research include fractional Brownian motion and portfolio optimization for inside traders. She is a professor of applied mathematics and vice president for international affairs and diversity at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and president of the Bachelier Finance Society.
Go to Profile#1004
Christine Bernardi
#69871
Overall Influence
1955 - 2018 (63 years)
Christine Bernardi was a French mathematician known for her research on numerical analysis of partial differential equations. Life Bernardi was born in Paris, and entered the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1974. She earned a master's degree in 1975, a diplôme d'études approfondies in numerical analysis in 1978, a doctorat de troisième cycle in 1979, and a doctorat d'état in 1986. Her 1986 dissertation, Contribution à l'analyse numérique de problèmes non linéaires, was supervised by Pierre-Arnaud Raviart. She became a researcher for the CNRS in 1979, becoming a director of research in 1992.
Go to Profile#1005
Nina Gantert
#89858
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nina Gantert is a Swiss and German probability theorist, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She holds the chair for probability in the department of mathematics at the Technical University of Munich, a position she has held since 2011 when the chair was established.
Go to Profile#1006
Monique Combescure
#32089
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Monique Combescure , is a French physicist specializing in mathematical physics. In 2001, she became director of research at the Lyon Institute of Nuclear Physics. From 2000 to 2008, she was director of the European Mathematics and Quantum Physics Research Group which aims to promote synergy between theoretical physicists and mathematicians in the field of quantum physics. She received the Irène-Joliot-Curie Prize in 2007 and the rank of Officer of the National Order of Merit in 2011.
Go to Profile#1007
Argelia Velez-Rodriguez
#83497
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Argelia Velez-Rodriguez is a Cuban-American mathematician and educator. She was the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in Cuba. Early life When Argelia Velez-Rodriguez was growing up, her father worked in the government under Cuba's leader, Fulgencio Batista. At the start of Batista's governing, he improved the Cuban educational system. Her family was Catholic, so she was educated in Catholic primary and secondary schools. During her schooling, teachers noticed her interest in mathematics, and she won a mathematic competition at age 9.
Go to Profile#1008
Eva K. Lee
#69720
Overall Influence
Eva K Lee is an American applied mathematiciann and operations researcher who applies combinatorial optimization and systems biology to the study of health care decision making and organizational transformation. She is an analytic member of the Medical and Public Health Information Sharing Environment system. Since July 2021, Lee has been the chief scientific officer for a private technology company, heading the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare and the Center for Operations Research in Homeland Security. Previously she was a professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1009
Sonja Lyttkens
#83213
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Sonja Lyttkens was a Swedish mathematician, the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate in Sweden and the first of these women to obtain a permanent university position in mathematics. She is also known for her work to make academia less hostile to women, and for pointing out that the Swedish taxation system of the time, which provided an income deduction for husbands of non-working wives, pressured women even in low-income families not to work. Her observations helped push Sweden into taxing married people separately from their spouses.
Go to Profile#1010
Lisl Gaal
#74150
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Lisl Novak Gaal is an Austrian-born American mathematician known for her contributions to set theory and Galois theory. She was the first woman to hold a tenure-track position in mathematics at Cornell University, and is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#1011
Thyrsa Frazier Svager
#73575
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Thyrsa Anne Frazier Svager was an American academic who was one of the first African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics. Born in Ohio, she graduated from high school at the age of 16, going to Antioch College in Ohio and then doing her postgraduate degrees at Ohio State University. Frazier Svager was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Central State University in Ohio for decades, ending her academic career as provost and dean for academic affairs. She and her husband, physics professor Aleksandar Svager, invested one of their salaries during their careers to build a legacy for scholarships.
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Cassie Kozyrkov
#14335
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Cassie Kozyrkov is a South African data scientist and statistician. She worked at Google in Developer Relations team and with Decision Intelligence at Google. Early life and education Kozyrkov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. As a child, Kozyrkov became interested in data when she discovered spreadsheet software and later became interested in the relationship between information and decision-making. She began her studies in economics and mathematical statistics at Nelson Mandela University at the age of fifteen, and transferred to the University of Chicago to complete her undergraduate degree.
Go to Profile#1013
Marina Logares
#91741
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Marina Logares Jiménez is a Spanish mathematician and LGBT+ activist. She was named one of the 50 most influential LGBT+ people in Spain in 2019. Career Logares was awarded her PhD in Mathematics in 2006 from the Autonomous University of Madrid. She later worked at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, the University of Oxford, the University of Porto and the University of Plymouth. She is currently a visiting professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. Logares studies within the field of geometry. Her areas of interest in research focus on algebraic and complex geometry and mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#1014
Sunčica Čanić
#88310
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sunčica Čanić is a Croatian-American mathematician, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Center for Mathematical Biosciences at the University of Houston, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in mathematically modeling the human cardiovascular system and medical devices for it.
Go to Profile#1015
María del Carmen Martínez Sancho
#85849
Overall Influence
1901 - 1995 (94 years)
María del Carmen Martínez Sancho was the first woman in Spain to gain a PhD in Mathematics. She was the first Professor of Mathematics to work in secondary school education in Spain, and the first woman to be appointed to the Board of Extension of Studies at the University of Berlin. She was part of Madrid and Seville's Instituto-Escuela.
Go to Profile#1016
Juliette Kennedy
#67254
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Juliette Kennedy is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki. Her main research interests are mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. In the course of her work she has published extensively on the works of Kurt Gödel.
Go to Profile#1017
Shiri Artstein
#91652
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Shiri Artstein-Avidan is an Israelii mathematician who in 2015 won the Erdős Prize. She specializes in convex geometry and asymptotic geometric analysis, and is a professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#1018
Pamela Liebeck
#89617
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Pamela Liebeck was a British mathematician and mathematics educator, the author of two books on mathematics. Life Liebeck was born in Bromley on 11 July 1930, grew up in Surrey, and read mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford beginning in 1949. At Oxford, she also played on the cricket and tennis teams. After additional study at the University of Cambridge, she became a mathematics teacher. Her husband Hans Liebeck was also an Oxford mathematics student; they met through a shared love of playing chamber music, married in 1953, and moved together to Cape Town University in South Africa in 1...
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Kim-Anh Do
#64914
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Kim-Anh Do is an Australian biostatistician of Vietnamese descent. She is the chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the holder of the Electa C. Taylor Chair for Cancer Research at the center. She also holds adjunct professorships at Texas A&M University and Rice University.
Go to Profile#1020
Lauren Williams
#72224
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Lauren Kiyomi Williams is an American mathematician known for her work on cluster algebras, tropical geometry, algebraic combinatorics, amplituhedra, and the positive Grassmannian. She is Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1021
Sandrine Dudoit
#62467
Overall Influence
Sandrine Dudoit is a professor of statistics and public health at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research applies statistics to microarray and genetic data; she is known as one of the founders of the open-source Bioconductor project for the development of bioinformatics software.
Go to Profile#1022
Lucy Joan Slater
#52272
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Lucy Joan Slater was a mathematician who worked on hypergeometric functions, and who found many generalizations of the Rogers–Ramanujan identities. Early life Slater was born in 1922 and homeschooled for much of her early education. Her father passed away when she was nine years old. Slater was interested in jazz music and played the piano as an accompanist in her early years. She attended college at Bedford College and received her first B.A. from London University in 1944. During the war, she worked teaching soldiers trigonometry.
Go to Profile#1023
Polly Sy
#75334
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Polly Wee Sy is a Filipino mathematician specializing in functional analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of the Philippines Diliman, the former head of the mathematics department at the university, and the former president of the Southeast Asia Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#1024
Lyudmyla Nazarova
#91268
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lyudmyla Oleksandrivna Nazarova is a Ukrainian mathematician specializing in linear algebra and representation theory. Research With her husband, Andrei Vladimirovich Roiter, Nazarova founded the theory of representations of and differentiation of partially ordered sets, and solved the second Brauer–Thrall conjecture, proving what became known as the Nazarova–Roiter theorem. Her research has also included pioneering work on representations of quivers, and on the wild problem in matrix classification.
Go to Profile#1025
Muriel Kennett Wales
#52843
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Muriel Kennett Wales was an Irish-Canadian mathematician, and is believed to have been the first Irish-born woman to earn a PhD in pure mathematics. Life She was born Muriel Kennett on 9 June 1913 in Belfast. In 1914, her mother moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, and soon remarried; henceforth Muriel was known by her mother's new last name, Wales.
Go to Profile#1026
Greta Panova
#82350
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Greta Cvetanova Panova is a Bulgarian-American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include combinatorics, probability and theoretical computer science.
Go to Profile#1027
Valérie Berthé
#92066
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Valérie Berthé is a French mathematician who works as a director of research for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale , a joint project between CNRS and Paris Diderot University. Her research involves symbolic dynamics, combinatorics on words, discrete geometry, numeral systems, tessellations, and fractals.
Go to Profile#1028
Charlotte Watts
#56778
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Charlotte Helen Watts, is a British mathematician, epidemiologist, and academic. Since 2006, she has been Professor of Social and Mathematical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was also the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK's Department for International Development from 2015 to 2020. Her research interests include HIV and gender-based violence.
Go to Profile#1029
Mary Deconge
#80378
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Mary Lovenia DeConge-Watson is an American mathematician and former nun as part of the Order of the Sisters of the Holy Family. She was the 15th African-American woman to earn her Ph.D. in mathematics.
Go to Profile#1030
Bodil Branner
#82253
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bodil Branner is a retired Danish mathematician, one of the founders of European Women in Mathematics and a former chair of the Danish Mathematical Society. Her research concerned holomorphic dynamics and the history of mathematics.
Go to Profile#1031
Susan Loepp
#44140
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Susan Renee Loepp is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Williams College. Her research concerns commutative algebra. Professional career Loepp graduated from Bethel College in 1989, and earned her Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of Raymond Heitmann. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Nebraska she took her present faculty position at Williams. She has publications in Journal of Algebra and Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra.
Go to Profile#1032
Catherine A. Roberts
#76913
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Catherine A. Roberts is an American mathematician who serves as the executive director of the American Mathematical Society. She is a professor of mathematics at the College of the Holy Cross. Early life and education Roberts was born in 1965 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her family subsequently moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where her father opened a law practice and her mother became an important civic leader and social advocate in the community. Roberts and her spouse, a chemistry professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, have two sons.
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Mildred Barnard
#83620
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Mildred Macfarlan Barnard was an Australian biometrician, mathematician and statistician. Early life and education Barnard was born in Melbourne on 5 August 1908. Her mother, Jessie Margaret Barnard, helped found the Federal Territory War Food Fund. Her father, Robert James Allman Barnard, became a foundation professor of mathematics at the Royal Military College, Duntroon near Canberra, where the family moved in 1911. They returned to Melbourne in the 1920s, when Barnard's father took a position as senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#1034
Isabel Hubard Escalera
#25690
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Isabel Alicia Hubard Escalera is a Mexican mathematician in the Institute of Mathematics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico . Early life and education As a child, Isabel Alicia Hubard wanted to be a bullfighter. She has said of her family, "My mother is an engineer and my father an accountant. My brother is a mathematician and my sister a physicist. I never thought that I would like math. I simply found it easy and fun, but nothing more. However, my mathematics teacher in junior high and high school, Óscar Chávez, inspired me."
Go to Profile#1035
Rodica Simion
#82321
Overall Influence
1955 - 2000 (45 years)
Rodica Eugenia Simion was a Romanian-American mathematician. She was the Columbian School Professor of Mathematics at George Washington University. Her research concerned combinatorics: she was a pioneer in the study of permutation patterns, and an expert on noncrossing partitions.
Go to Profile#1036
Harriet Pollatsek
#85152
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Harriet Suzanne Katcher Pollatsek is an American mathematician and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College. Education and career Born to a Jewish family in Detroit, Michigan, Pollatsek entered the honors program at University of Michigan in 1959, the first person in her family to attend college. She earned a BA in mathematics in 1963 and her PhD in 1967 under the direction of Jack E. McLaughlin. After graduating she held short-term teaching positions at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, the University of Toledo, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#1037
Rosa M. Miró-Roig
#96586
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Rosa M. Miró-Roig is a professor of mathematics at the University of Barcelona, specializing in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. She did her graduate studies at the University of Barcelona, earning a Ph.D. in 1985 under the supervision of Sebastià Xambó-Descamps with a thesis entitled Haces reflexivos sobre espacios proyectivos.
Go to Profile#1038
Sylvie Paycha
#88409
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sylvie Paycha is a French mathematician and mathematical physicist working in operator theory as a professor at the University of Potsdam. She has chaired both European Women in Mathematics and L'association femmes et mathématiques.
Go to Profile#1039
Anuška Ferligoj
#50783
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Anuška Ferligoj is a Slovenian mathematician, born August 19, 1947, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, whose specialty is statistics and network analysis. Her specific interests include multivariate analysis , cluster analysis , social network analysis , methodological research of public opinion, analysis of scientific networks. She is Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.
Go to Profile#1040
Kristina Reiss
#81016
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kristina Reiss is a German mathematics educator. She is professor of mathematics education and dean of education at the Technical University of Munich, where she holds the Heinz Nixdorf Chair of Mathematics Education.
Go to Profile#1041
Josephine M. Mitchell
#85737
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Josephine Margaret Mitchell was a Canadian-American mathematician specializing in the mathematical analysis of functions of several complex variables. She was the victim of a notorious case of discrimination against women in academia when, after she married another more junior faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the university used its anti-nepotism rules to revoke her tenured position while allowing her husband to keep his untenured one.
Go to Profile#1042
Margaret Cheney
#81291
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Margaret Cheney is an American mathematician whose research involves inverse problems. She is Yates Chair and Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University. Education and career Cheney graduated from Oberlin College in 1976, with a double major in mathematics and physics. She completed her Ph.D. in 1982 at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation, Quantum Mechanical Scattering and Inverse Scattering in Two Dimensions, was supervised by Roger G. Newton.
Go to Profile#1043
Michelle Manes
#72606
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Michelle Ann Manes is an American mathematician whose research interests span the fields of number theory, algebraic geometry, and dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has been a program director for algebra and number theory at the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#1044
Ushadevi Bhosle
#87995
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dr. Ushadevi Narendra Bhosle is an Indian mathematician, educator and researcher. She specialises in Algebraic Geometry. She worked on the moduli spaces of bundles. Early life and education She got a B.Sc. degree in 1969 and an M.Sc. degree in 1971 from University of Pune, Shivaji University, respectively. She commenced her post-graduate studies in 1971 from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and got her doctorate degree of philosophy under the guidance of her mentor S.Ramanan in 1980.
Go to Profile#1045
Leone Burton
#89382
Overall Influence
1936 - 2007 (71 years)
Leone Minna Burton was a professor of education in mathematics and science, working in London teacher education colleges in the 1970s, the Open University in the 1980s and, from 1992, the University of Birmingham. At the South Bank Polytechnic ;she helped establish the first MSc in Mathematics Education in the UK. After retiring in 2001 she became Honorary Professor at King's College London, and Visiting Fellow in the Cambridge University Faculty of Education. She was noted for her influence as a researcher and doctoral supervisor, setting up national and international research networks in ...
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Karen Kafadar
#78348
Overall Influence
Karen Kafadar is an American statistician. She is Commonwealth Professor of Statistics at the University of Virginia, and chair of the statistics department there. She was editor-in-chief of Technometrics from 1999 to 2001, and was president of the International Association for Statistical Computing for 2011–2013. In 2017 she was elected president of the American Statistical Association for the 2019 term.
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Heike Hofmann
#53856
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Heike Hofmann is a statistician and Professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. Education She earned an MSc in Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science, and a PhD in Statistics, from the University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany in 1998 and 2000, respectively.
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Jeanne LaDuke
#87613
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alice Jeanne LaDuke is an American mathematician who specialized in mathematical analysis and the history of mathematics. She was also a child actress who appeared in one film . Early life and film career LaDuke was raised on a farm in Posey County, in southwest Indiana. Her parents were college-educated and an aunt who taught mathematics in Chicago frequently visited, bringing mathematics puzzles for LaDuke.
Go to Profile#1049
Julena Steinheider Duncombe
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#88044
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Julena Steinheider Duncombe was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was known for her work as a teacher at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and as an astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, where she made pioneering observations with the 6-inch transit circle, introduced the use of punched cards in cataloging stars and constructing tables of positions of celestial bodies, and led the production of eclipse predictions for almanacs.
Go to Profile#1050
Anna Lysyanskaya
#29382
Overall Influence
Anna A. Lysyanskaya is an American cryptographer known for her research on digital signatures and anonymous digital credentials. She is a professor of computer science at Brown University. Early life and education Lysyanskaya grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to the US in 1993 to attend Smith College, where she graduated in 1997. She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1999 and completing her Ph.D. in 2002. Her dissertation, Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design, was supervised by Ron Rivest.
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