The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#1101
Sophia Rabe-Hesketh
#78329
Overall Influence
Sophia Rabe-Hesketh is a statistician who works as a professor in the Department of Educational Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research involves the development of generalized linear mixed models of data that incorporate latent variables to handle hidden data.
Go to Profile#1102
Elaine Cohen
#79904
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Elaine Cohen is an American researcher in geometric modeling and computer graphics, known for her pioneering research on B-splines. She is a professor in the school of computing at the University of Utah.
Go to Profile#1103
Naomi Wray
#72565
Overall Influence
Naomi Ruth Wray is an Australian statistical geneticist at the University of Queensland, where she is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an Affiliate Professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. She is also a National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow and, along with Peter Visscher and Jian Yang, is one of the three executive team members of the NHMRC-funded Program in Complex Trait Genomics. Naomi pioneered the use of polygenic scores in human genetics, and has made significant contributions to both the development of met...
Go to Profile#1104
Carina Curto
#86016
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Carina Curto is an American mathematician, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a Sloan Research Fellow. She is known for her work on mathematical neuroscience, including the applications of mathematics in both theoretical and computational neuroscience. Her recent work is funded by the BRAIN Initiative. She is an associate editor at SIAGA, a SIAM journal on applied algebra and geometry and on the editorial board at Physical Review Research.
Go to Profile#1105
Rebecca Walo Omana
#91636
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Rebecca Walo Omana is a Congolese mathematician, professor, and reverend sister. Omana became the first female mathematics professor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1982. She is the director of the mathematics and informatics doctoral program at the University of Kinshasa and is a vice-president of the African Women in Mathematics Association. Her mathematical interests lie in differential equations, nonlinear analysis, and modeling.
Go to Profile#1106
Laurette Tuckerman
#92390
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Laurette Stephanie Tuckerman is a mathematical physicist working in the areas of hydrodynamic instability, bifurcation theory, and computational fluid dynamics. She is currently a director of research for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, at the Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media Laboratory of ESPCI Paris.
Go to Profile#1107
Amandine Aftalion
#83664
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Amandine Aftalion is a French applied mathematician, known for her research on Bose–Einstein condensates and on the mathematics of footracing. She is a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique .
Go to Profile#1108
Evelyn Buckwar
#98617
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Evelyn Buckwar is a German mathematician specializing in stochastic differential equations. She is Professor for Stochastics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria. Education Buckwar earned a diploma in mathematics in 1992 from the Free University of Berlin, and completed her doctorate there in 1997. Her dissertation, Iterative Approximation of the Positive Solutions of a Class of Nonlinear Volterra-type Integral Equations, was supervised by Rudolf Gorenflo.
Go to Profile#1109
Nathalie Sinclair
#92308
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nathalie Michelle Sinclair is a Canadian researcher in mathematics education who holds the Canada Research Chair in Tangible Mathematics Learning at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Early life and education Sinclair was born in Grenoble, the daughter of Canadian academics who were on sabbatical there; she grew up in Calgary. She began her undergraduate studies at McGill University in business, but quickly switched to mathematics, and then earned a master's degree with Len Berggren at Simon Fraser on the history of mathematics and mathematics in medieval Islam.
Go to Profile#1110
Carole Lacampagne
#92666
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Carole Baker Lacampagne is a retired mathematician formerly of George Washington University. She is known for her work in mathematics education and gender equality. Career Lacampagne received her Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1964. She then worked at Northern Illinois University and the National Science Foundation before moving to the Department of Education in 1991, becoming Director of the National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning . She then became Director of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Academies of Sc...
Go to Profile#1111
Lynne McClure
#89488
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Catherine Lynne McClure is a British mathematics educator. In 2014 she was appointed as director of Cambridge Mathematics, a program at the University of Cambridge that spans the university's mathematics and education faculties, Cambridge Assessment, and the Cambridge University Press, and is aimed at developing a flexible tool to inform new mathematics curricula for primary and secondary mathematics education.
Go to Profile#1112
Clara Deser
#71208
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Clara Deser is an American climate scientist. She is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research where she leads the Climate Analysis Section. Deser was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
Go to Profile#1113
Mary-Elizabeth Hamstrom
#93797
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Mary-Elizabeth Hamstrom was an American mathematician known for her contributions to topology, and particularly to point-set topology and the theory of homeomorphism groups of manifolds. She was for many years a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#1114
Helena Chmura Kraemer
#38358
Overall Influence
Helena Chmura Kraemer is an American professor emerita of biostatistics at Stanford University. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Education Helena Chmura Kraemer completed a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Smith College in 1957. In 1958, Kraemer attended University of Manchester as a Fulbright fellow. Kraemer earned a Doctor of Philosophy in statistics from Stanford University in 1963. Her dissertation was titled Point Estimation in Learning Models. Her doctoral advisor was Patrick Suppes.
Go to Profile#1115
Laila Soueif
#36702
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Laila Soueif is an Egyptian human and women's rights activist, a mathematician and professor at Cairo University. Al Jazeera has called her "an Egyptian revolutionary". She is the widow of fellow activist Ahmed Seif El-Islam, and all three of their children are noted activists: Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Sanaa Seif, and Mona Seif. Her sister is the novelist Ahdaf Soueif.
Go to Profile#1116
Christina Pagel
#70541
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Christina Pagel is a German-British mathematician and professor of operational research at University College London within UCL's Clinical Operational Research Unit , which applies operational research, data analysis and mathematical modelling to topics in healthcare. She was Director of UCL CORU from 2017 to 2022 and is currently Vice President of the UK Operational Research Society. She also co-leads, alongside Rebecca Shipley, UCL's CHIMERA research hub which analyses data from critically ill hospital patients.
Go to Profile#1117
Rebecca A. Herb
#95570
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Rebecca A. Herb is an American mathematician, a professor emerita at the University of Maryland. Her research involves abstract algebra and Lie groups. In 2012, Herb became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. In 2013, she was one of ten recipients of the first Service Awards of the Association for Women in Mathematics “for her service as AWM Treasurer , and her help during AWM’s transition from its headquarters at the University of Maryland to the management company STAT.”
Go to Profile#1118
María Teresa Lozano Imízcoz
#96702
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
María Teresa Lozano Imízcoz is a Spanish emeritus professor and mathematician. She studies topology principally in three dimensions. She has been given a Real Sociedad Matemática Española medal for her career and as a trailblazer for women to be involved in mathematical research.
Go to Profile#1119
Gloria Olive
#85004
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Gloria Olive was a New Zealand academic mathematician. Academic career Olive began her mathematics career in the United States. She graduated with a BA from Brooklyn College in 1944 followed by an MA from the University of Wisconsin in 1946 and a PhD from the University of Oregon in 1950, with the dissertation Generalised Powers.
Go to Profile#1120
Carmen Batanero
#96225
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Carmen Batanero is a Spanish statistics educator, and a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics Department at the University of Granada, Spain. She is known as an advocate for statistics education. Batanero is a lifetime member of the International Association for Statistical Education, and served as the association's president from 2001 to 2003. She has co-authored many scholarly articles in the fields of mathematics and statistics education over the past two decades, and is credited on two statistics textbooks. Her contributions rank her as one of the most influential researchers at her institution.
Go to Profile#1121
Agnès Sulem
#71490
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Agnès Sulem is a French applied mathematician whose research topics include stochastic control, jump diffusion, and mathematical finance. Education Sulem earned a Ph.D. in 1983 at Paris Dauphine University, with the dissertation Résolution explicite d'Inéquations Quasi-Variationnelles associées à des problèmes de gestion de stock supervised by Alain Bensoussan.
Go to Profile#1122
Kathryn Leonard
#68358
Overall Influence
Kathryn Leonard is an American mathematician and computer scientist. Leonard received a Henry L. Alder Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 2012. She received the AWM Service Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2015. She served as the AWM Meetings Coordinator from 2015 - 2018. She was President of the AWM and is now AWM Past-President. She is also director of the NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. She is currently on the American Mathematical Society Nominating Committee.
Go to Profile#1123
Tatyana Shaposhnikova
#94995
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Tatyana Olegovna Shaposhnikova is a Russian-born Swedish mathematician. She is best known for her work in the theory of multiplierss in function spaces, partial differential operators and history of mathematics, some of which was partly done jointly with Vladimir Maz'ya. She is also a translator of both scientific and literary texts.
Go to Profile#1124
Monique Teillaud
#72579
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Monique Teillaud is a French researcher in computational geometry at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Nancy, France. She moved to Nancy in 2014 from a different INRIA center in Sophia Antipolis, where she was one of the developers of CGAL, a software library of computational geometry algorithms.
Go to Profile#1125
Maria Gordina
#99845
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Maria Gordina is a Russian-American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. Her research is at the interface between stochastic analysis, differential geometry, and functional analysis, including the study of heat kernels on infinite-dimensional groups.
Go to Profile#1126
Caroline Finch
#75465
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Caroline Finch AO is an Australian sports injury epidemiologist and sports injury prevention researcher. Her research has been adopted and used to directly inform safety policy by Government Departments of Sport and Health, health promotion and injury prevention agencies, and peak sports bodies both within Australia and internationally. Her injury prevention research has been applied to falls in older people, road safety, workplace safety and injuries in children.
Go to Profile#1127
Odile Favaron
#82723
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Odile Zink-Favaron is a French mathematician known for her research in graph theory, including work on well-covered graphs, factor-critical graphs, spectral graph theory, Hamiltonian decomposition, and dominating sets. She is retired from the Laboratory for Computer Science at the University of Paris-Sud.
Go to Profile#1128
Jane Cullum
#93577
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jane Grace Kehoe Cullum is an American applied mathematician known for her work in numerical algorithms and control theory, who became president of the IEEE Control Systems Society. Education and career Cullum studied chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, graduating in 1960. She continued at Virginia Tech for a master's degree in mathematics in 1962, with the master's thesis Applications of the analog computer to mathematical problems. She completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. Her dissertation, Continuous Optimal Control Problems with Ph...
Go to Profile#1129
Ionica Smeets
#91092
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Ionica Smeets is a Dutch mathematician, science journalist, columnist, television presenter and professor in science communication at Leiden University. Biography Ionica Smeets was born in Delft, where she completed her propedeuse in computer science at the Delft University of Technology. She switched studies and graduated in applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#1130
Genevieve M. Knight
#89138
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Genevieve Madeline Knight was an American mathematics educator. Education and career Knight was the youngest of three sisters who all became mathematics and science educators, daughters of a seamstress and a civil service radar specialist. As a freshman at Fort Valley State College in 1957, Knight was studying home economics when the Sputnik launch created a big push for more American students to become educated in mathematics and the sciences. Knight transferred to mathematics, "because it had fewer labs than any of the sciences", and graduated in 1961.
Go to Profile#1131
Kerrie Mengersen
#97756
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kerrie Mengersen is an Australian statistician. Since 2016, she has been Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Queensland University of Technology in the Science and Engineering Faculty. She earned BA and PhD degrees in Mathematics, majoring in Statistics and Computing, from the University of New England in 1985 and 1989, respectively. She is the Director of the Bayesian Research and Applications Group . This group is part of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers of Big Data, Big Models, New Insights.
Go to Profile#1132
Tilla Weinstein
#97727
Overall Influence
1934 - 2002 (68 years)
Tilla Weinstein was an American mathematician known for her mentorship of younger women in mathematics. Her research concerned differential geometry, including conformal structures, harmonic maps, and Lorentz surfaces. She taught for many years at Rutgers University, where she headed the mathematics department in the Douglass Residential College.
Go to Profile#1133
Eléna Wexler-Kreindler
#85852
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Eléna Wexler-Kreindler was a Romanian mathematician. She spent most of her professional career in France, where she specialized in modern algebra and studied the Ore extensions, the theory of the filtration of rings, or algebraic microlocalisation.
Go to Profile#1134
Nancy Geller
#89800
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marilyn Nancy Lorch Geller is an American biostatistician, the director of biostatistics research at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and a former president of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#1135
Rachel Justine Pries
#91150
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Rachel Justine Pries is an American mathematician whose research focuses on arithmetic geometry and number theory. She is a professor at Colorado State University and both a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1136
Małgorzata Klimek
#73254
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Małgorzata Klimek is a Polish mathematical analyst and mathematical physicist known for her research on the fractional calculus and fractional differential equations. She is a professor in the Institute of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at Częstochowa University of Technology in Poland.
Go to Profile#1137
Claudia Czado
#73453
Overall Influence
Claudia Czado is a mathematical statistician at the Technical University of Munich, known for her research on copulas, vines, and their applications in statistical finance. Early life and education Czado grew up in a family with five children in Borken, Hesse, a small town in central Germany. She earned a diploma in 1984 from the University of Göttingen, specializing in probability and statistics. Inspired by a high school fascination with Native American culture, Czado enrolled in an master's-level exchange program between University of Göttingen and Cornell University. At Cornell, she worked with Murad Taqqu in their department of operations research and industrial engineering.
Go to Profile#1138
Sylvia Chin-Pi Lu
#96200
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Sylvia Chin-Pi Lu was a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra who was an invited speaker at the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto. Less than 5% of ICM speakers in algebra and number theory have been women, placing Lu in a rarefied group in this "hall of fame for mathematics". Lu's most highly cited papers are on the properties of prime submodules.
Go to Profile#1139
Aparna V. Huzurbazar
#60840
Overall Influence
Aparna V. Huzurbazar is an American statistician known for her work using graphical models to understand time-to-event data. She is the author of a book on this subject, Flowgraph Models for Multistate Time-to-Event Data .
Go to Profile#1140
Marilyn Breen
#98612
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marilyn Janet Breen is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oklahoma. Her research involves geometry, including visibility and orthogonal polygons. Life and work Breen graduated in 1966 from Agnes Scott College, and received her Ph.D. from Clemson University in 1970 under the supervision of William Ray Hare Jr. She joined the Oklahoma faculty in 1971 and was promoted to full professor in 1982.
Go to Profile#1141
Lia Bronsard
#99167
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Lia Bronsard is a Canadian mathematician and the former president of the Canadian Mathematical Society. She is a professor of mathematics at McMaster University. Contributions In her research, she has used geometric flows to model the interface dynamics of reaction–diffusion systems. Other topics in her research include pattern formation, grain boundaries, and vortices in superfluids.
Go to Profile#1142
Carol Walker
#89885
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Carol Lee Walker is a retired American mathematician and mathematics textbook author. Walker's early mathematical research, in the 1960s and 1970s, concerned the theory of abelian groups. In the 1990s, her interests shifted to fuzzy logic and fuzzy control systems.
Go to Profile#1143
Sarah Flannery
#34990
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Sarah Flannery was, at sixteen years old, the winner of the 1999 Esat Young Scientist Exhibition for her development of the Cayley–Purser algorithm, based on work she had done with researchers at Baltimore Technologies during a brief internship there. The project, entitled "Cryptography – A new algorithm versus the RSA", also won her the EU Young Scientist of the Year Award in 1999.
Go to Profile#1144
Siobhán Vernon
#94851
Overall Influence
1932 - 2002 (70 years)
Siobhán Vernon was the first Irish-born woman to get a PhD in pure mathematics in Ireland, in 1964. Early life and education Siobhán O'Shea was born in Macroom, County Cork, in 1932 and was the daughter of Joseph J. O'Shea and his wife M. O'Shea.
Go to Profile#1145
Eva Vedel Jensen
#89084
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Eva Bjørn Vedel Jensen is a Danish mathematician and statistician known for her work in spatial statistics, stereology, stochastic geometry, and medical imaging. She is a professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Aarhus University.
Go to Profile#1146
Marian Pour-El
#84581
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Marian Boykan Pour-El was an American mathematical logician who did pioneering work in computable analysis. Early life and education Marian Boykan was born in 1928 in New York City; her parents were dentist Joseph Boykan and his wife Matilda , a former laboratory technician and housewife. As a young girl, she performed ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, and this influenced her later life where she was often more comfortable speaking before large audiences than in small groups. Although she wanted to attend the Bronx High School of Science, it was at that time only for boys; instead, she ...
Go to Profile#1147
Eleanor Krawitz Kolchin
#95190
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Eleanor Krawitz Kolchin was an American mathematician, computer programmer, author, and teacher. She worked at Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University to calculate the orbit of planets, phases of the moon, and trajectories of asteroids using IBM tabulating machines. Her calculations were used in the Apollo program.
Go to Profile#1148
Sharon-Lise Normand
#75242
Overall Influence
Sharon-Lise Teresa Normand is a Canadian biostatistician whose research centers on the evaluation of the quality of care provided by physicians and hospitals, and on the health outcomes for medical devices and medical procedures. She is a professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#1149
Kate Tilling
#97054
Overall Influence
Kate Tilling is a British statistician who specialises in developing and applying statistical methods to overcome problems encountered in epidemiological research. Tilling has been a professor in medical statistics. in population health sciences within Bristol Medical School , University of Bristol, since 2011. She joined the University of Bristol in 2002 as a Senior Lecturer, following nine years as a lecturer at King's College London.
Go to Profile#1150
Diane Souvaine
#71909
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Diane L. Souvaine is a professor of computer science and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Tufts University. Contributions Souvaine's research is in computational geometry and its applications, including robust non-parametric statistics and molecular modeling. She has also encouraged women and minorities to study and pursue careers in mathematics and the sciences and advocated gender neutrality in science teaching.
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