Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,

#1201

Marcia P. Sward

#86615

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

Marcia Peterson Sward was an American mathematician and nonprofit organization administrator. She had a varied career as a teacher and an administrator of mathematical organizations, culminating in the position of Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America. After retirement she started a new career in environmental education, specializing in children's programs such as GreenKids.

#1202

Giulia Di Nunno

#96835

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Giulia Di Nunno is an Italian mathematician specializing in stochastic analysis and financial mathematics who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Oslo, with an adjunct appointment at the Norwegian School of Economics.

#1203

Ann E. Bailie

#93831

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Dorothy Ann Eckels Bailie is an American mathematician who worked at Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1950s and 1960s. She was one of the three authors of the 1959 report establishing Earth's shape as asymmetrical and "pear-shaped", based on data from Vanguard 1.

#1204

Isabelle Bloch

#113929

Overall Influence

#1205

Lisa Lorentzen

#100206

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Lisa Lorentzen is a Norwegian mathematician known for her work on continued fractions. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology .

#1206

Gisela Engeln-Müllges

#93463

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Gisela Engeln-Müllges is a German mathematician and artist. She is a professor of numerical mathematics at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences, where she is also a former vice rector for research, development, and technology.

#1207

Věra Kůrková

#60573

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Věra Kůrková is a Czech mathematician and computer scientist, affiliated with the Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include neural networks, computational learning theory, and nonlinear approximation theory. She formulated the abstract concept of a variational norm in 1997 which puts ideas of Maurey, Jones, and Barron into the context of functional analysis. See V. Kůrková, Dimension-independent rates of approximation by neural networks. In: Warwick, K., Karny, M. Computer-Intensive Methods in Control and Signal Processing. The Curse of Dimensionality, Birkhauser, Boston, MA, pp. 261–270 .

#1208

Lone Simonsen

#82716

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Lone Simonsen is a Danish epidemiologist and professor of population health sciences. Since the beginning of 2020, she has been the director of PandemiX, an interdisciplinary pandemic research center at Roskilde University. In 2023 PandemiX was established as a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.

#1209

Tianxi Cai

#75378

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Tianxi Cai is a Chinese biostatistician. She is the John Rock Professor of Population and Translational Data Sciences in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Topics in her research include biomarkers, personalized medicine, survival analysis, and health informatics.

#1210

Joanne Katz

#96595

Overall Influence

Joanne Katz is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Ophthalmology . Her expertise is in maternal, neonatal, and child health. She has contributed to the design, conduct and analysis of data from large community based intervention trials on nutritional and other interventions in Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal and other countries.

#1211

Ulla Pursiheimo

#102087

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ulla Irmeli Pursiheimo is a Finnish mathematician who became the first female mathematics professor in Finland. Her areas of interest in mathematics include mathematical optimization, control theory, search games, and later in her career mathematics education.

#1212

Maria Hoffmann-Ostenhof

#103723

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Maria Hoffmann-Ostenhof is an Austrian mathematician known for her work on the behavior of the Schrödinger equation, and particularly on its asymptotic analysis, nodal lines, and behavior near its singularities.

#1213

Lynne Billard

#70941

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Lynne Billard is an Australian statistician and professor at the University of Georgia, known for her statistics research, leadership, and advocacy for women in science. She has served as president of the American Statistical Association, and the International Biometric Society, one of a handful of people to have led both organizations.

#1214

Annie Marie Watkins Garraway

#81799

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Annie Marie Watkins Garraway is an American mathematician who worked in telecommunications and electronic data transmission. She is also a philanthropist. Biography Garraway was born Annie Marie Watkins in Parsons, Kansas, the oldest daughter of Levi Watkins and Lillian Bernice Varnado who met when they were both high school teachers.

#1215

Vilma Mesa

#99953

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Vilma María Mesa Narváez is a Colombian-American mathematics educator whose research topics have included secondary-school curriculum development, college-level calculus instruction, mathematics in community colleges, international perspectives in mathematics education, and inquiry-based learning. She is a professor of education and mathematics at the University of Michigan, where she is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-secondary Education.

#1216

Cicely Ridley

#84461

Overall Influence

1927 - 2008 (81 years)

Elizabeth Cicely Ridley was a British-American applied mathematician known for her work in numerical quantum chemistry and in climate modeling. The Roble–Dickinson–Ridley code that she and her collaborators created at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was the first general circulation model of the thermosphere.

#1217

Maria Korovina

#99530

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Maria Korovina is a Russian mathematician, Professor, Dr. Sc., a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Moscow State University. She defended the thesis «Elliptic problems in spaces with asymptotics and their applications to the construction of self-adjoint extensions of the Laplace operator» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences .

#1218

Chawne Kimber

#57260

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Chawne Monique Kimber is an African-American mathematician and quilter, known for expressing her political activism in her quilts. She was a professor at Lafayette College, where she headed the department of mathematics. Kimber is now the Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University.

#1219

Janet D. Elashoff

#86515

Overall Influence

Janet Dixon Elashoff is a retired American statistician, formerly the director of biostatistics for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and professor of biomathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#1220

Gerlind Plonka

#108904

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Gerlind Plonka-Hoch is a German applied mathematician specializing in signal processing and image processing, and known for her work on refinable functions and curvelets. She is a professor at the University of Göttingen, in the Institute for Numerical and Applied Mathematics.

#1221

Sonia Petrone

#105016

Overall Influence

Sonia Petrone is an Italian mathematical statistician, known for her work in Bayesian statistics, including use of Bernstein polynomials for nonparametric methods in Bayesian statistics. With Patrizia Campagnoli and Giovanni Petris she is the author of the book Dynamic Linear Models with R .

#1222

Melanie Wall

#106880

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Melanie Marie Wall is an American psychiatric biostatistician, psychometrician, and mental health data scientist who works at Columbia University as a professor in the departments of biostatistics and psychiatry, and as director of Mental Health Data Science, a joint project of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, and New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research has included topics such as grief and depression, eating disorders, marijuana use and abuse, and correlations between school performance and athletic activity, studied using latent variable models, spatial analysis, and longitudinal data.

#1223

Kieka Mynhardt

#100914

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Christina Magdalena Mynhardt is a South African born Canadian mathematician known for her work on dominating sets in graph theory, including domination versions of the eight queens puzzle. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Victoria in Canada.

#1224

Geneviève Gauthier

#98606

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Geneviève Gauthier is a Canadian mathematician, statistician, and decision scientist, known for her work in mathematical finance including the valuation of options and financial risk management. She is a professor of statistics in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal.

#1225

Inge Henningsen

Inge Henningsen

#95662

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Inge Biehl Henningsen is a Danish statistician, academic and writer. A former researcher and lecturer at the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, she has also been active in politics and women's rights, most recently in connection with the PISA approach to student assessment. As editor of the socialist journal Naturkampen in the 1980s, she covered subjects as varied as the management of cancer research and the European Union's approach to agriculture in the third world.

#1226

Sara Negri

#65755

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sara Negri is a mathematical logician who studies proof theory. She is Italian, worked in Finland for several years, where she was a professor of theoretical philosophy in the University of Helsinki, and currently holds a position as professor of mathematical logic at the University of Genoa.

#1227

Judith Curry

#19797

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, climate models, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She was a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works. Curry retired from academia in 2017 at age 63, coinciding with her public climate change ...

#1228

Martina Zähle

#105941

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Martina Zähle is a German mathematician specializing in geometric measure theory and stochastic geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Jena, where she holds the chair for geometry.

#1229

Karine Beauchard

#60053

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Karine Beauchard is a French mathematician known for her research in control theory. She is a University Professor at the École normale supérieure de Rennes, and was the Peccot Lecturer of the Collège de France for 2007–2008.

#1230

Donna Testerman

#104603

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Donna Marie Testerman is a mathematician specializing in the representation theory of algebraic groups. She is a professor of mathematics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

#1231

Sarah Glaz

#101202

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sarah Glaz is a mathematician and mathematical poet. Her research specialty is commutative algebra; she is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. Education and career Glaz was born in Bucharest, Romania, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1972 at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She came to the US for her graduate education in mathematics, completing a Ph.D. in 1977 at Rutgers University. Her dissertation, Finiteness and Differential Properties of Ideals, was supervised by Wolmer Vasconcelos.

#1232

Lilya Budaghyan

#107545

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Lilya Budaghyan is a Norwegian-Armenian cryptographer, computer scientist, and discrete mathematician known for her work on cryptographic Boolean functions. She is a professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Bergen in Norway, where she directs the Selmer Center in Secure Communication and leads Boolean functions team.

#1233

Patricia Hersh

#101364

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Patricia Lynn Hersh is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon. Her research concerns algebraic combinatorics, topological combinatorics, and the connections between combinatorics and other fields of mathematics.

#1234

Loredana Lanzani

#106002

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Loredana Lanzani is an Italian-American mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and complex analysis. She is a professor of mathematics at Syracuse University.

#1235

Anne M. Leggett

#102347

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Anne Marie Leggett is an American mathematical logician. She is an associate professor emerita of mathematics at Loyola University Chicago. Leggett is the editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly newsletter of the Association for Women in Mathematics , a position she has held continuously since 1977. She has served on the Executive Committee of the AWM since 1977 and the AWM Policy and Advocacy Committee . With Bettye Anne Case, she is the editor of the book Complexities: Women in Mathematics . Leggett received an Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for Complexities in 2006.

#1236

Renata Mansini

#50065

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Renata Mansini is an Italian applied mathematician, economist, and operations researcher known for her research on problems in mathematical optimization including portfolio optimization and vehicle routing. She is a professor of operations research at the University of Brescia.

#1237

Erica N. Walker

#101138

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Erica Nicole Walker is an American mathematician and the Clifford Brewster Upton Professor of Mathematics Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she also serves as the Chairperson of the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology and as the Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education. Walker’s research focuses on the "social and cultural factors as well as educational policies and practices that facilitate mathematics engagement, learning and performance, especially for underserved students".

#1238

Erika Tatiana Camacho

#95908

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Erika Tatiana Camacho is a Mexican-born American mathematical biologist and professor of applied mathematics at Arizona State University. She is a 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring awardee. She was taught and mentored in high school by Jaime Escalante, who was the subject of the movie Stand and Deliver.

#1239

Susan Brown

#83483

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Susan North Brown was a professor of mathematics at University College London and a leading researcher in the field of fluid mechanics. Background and employment An exact timeline for Susan Brown's career has been difficult to pin down, but a newsletter published by Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at UCL shortly after her death offers a framework for her career achievements and highlights the esteem in which she was held by colleagues and students. Her undergraduate degree in mathematics was from St Hilda's College, Oxford. For about two years more years she continued studi...

#1240

Sally C. Morton

#52686

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sally C. Morton is an American statistician specializing in comparative effectiveness research. In 2021, Morton joined Arizona State University as executive vice president of Knowledge Enterprise, the administrative subdivision of Arizona State involving university research. Morton is also a professor in the College of Health Solutions and the School of Mathematical Statistical Sciences and holds the Florence Ely Nelson Chair at Arizona State.

#1241

Mila Nikolova

#102348

Overall Influence

1962 - 2018 (56 years)

Mila Nikolova was a Bulgarian applied mathematician, known for her research in image processing, inverse problems, and compressed sensing. Education and career After working as a science journalist and engineer in Bulgaria, Nikolova completed a Ph.D. in 1995 in signal and image processing at the University of Paris-Sud. In 2006, she earned a habilitation in mathematics at Pierre and Marie Curie University.

#1242

Jacquelien Scherpen

#107845

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Jacquelien Maria Aleida Scherpen is a Dutch applied mathematician specializing in nonlinear control theory. She is a professor in the faculty of science and engineering at the University of Groningen, director of the Groningen Engineering Center, and former scientific director of the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen .

#1243

Yewande Olubummo

#42097

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Yewande Olubummo is a Nigerian-American mathematician whose research interests include functional analysis and dynamical systems. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Spelman College, where she served as chair of the mathematics department from 2006 to 2010. She is a member of the National Association of Mathematicians, as well as the Mathematical Association of America.

#1244

Natashia Boland

#88555

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Natashia Lesley Boland is a professor of mathematics at Georgia Institute of Technology. Boland completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia in 1992, and afterwards she pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo in Canada, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA. She spent 13 years at the University of Melbourne and then from 2008 to 2014 worked at the University of Newcastle. She has made contributions to transportation scheduling, modeling of infrastructure networks, planning pricing strategies for demand, and optimization for environmental modeling.

#1245

Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi

#101978

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi is an American mathematician and computer scientist, known for her research in graph theory and algorithms on graphs. She is a professor of computer science at Clemson University.

#1246

Rebecca Betensky

#70414

Overall Influence

Rebecca A. Betensky is a professor of biostatistics and chair of the department of biostatistics at New York University's School of Global Public Health. Previously, she was a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she directed the biostatistics program for the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center. She was also a biostatistician for Massachusetts General Hospital, where she directed the biostatistics core of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

#1247

Ruth Pfeiffer

#109699

Overall Influence

Ruth Maria Pfeiffer is a biostatistician who researches risk prediction, molecular and genetic epidemiology, and electronic medical records. She is a senior investigator in the biostatistics branch at the National Cancer Institute. Pfeiffer is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and the American Statistical Association.

#1248

Irene Sabadini

#109274

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Irene Maria Sabadini is an Italian mathematician specializing in complex analysis, hypercomplex analysis and the analysis of superoscillations. She is a professor of mathematics at the Polytechnic University of Milan, and head of the department of mathematics there.

#1249

Camille McKayle

#82085

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Camille Althea McKayle is an Afro-Jamaican-American mathematician and is the current Provost of the University of the Virgin Islands . She holds a PhD in mathematics from Lehigh University and taught undergraduates at Lafayette College and UVI from 1993 to 2008.

#1250

Mai Gehrke

#81338

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Mai Gehrke is a Danish mathematician who studies the theory of lattices and their applications to mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. She is a director of research for the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique , affiliated with the Laboratoire J. A. Dieudonné at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis.

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