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,
#151
Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann
#36572
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann FRSC was a Polish-Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Alberta, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Geometric Analysis. Contributions Her research is in geometric functional analysis, and is unusual in combining asymptotic analysis with the theory of Banach spaces and infinite-dimensional convex bodies. It formed a key component of Fields medalist Timothy Gowers' solution to Stefan Banach's homogeneous space problem, posed in 1932. Her 1989 monograph on Banach–Mazur distances is also highly cited.
Go to Profile#152
Lucia Caporaso
#37106
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lucia Caporaso is an Italian mathematician, holding a professorship in mathematics at Roma Tre University. She was born in Rome, Italy, on May 22,1965. Her research includes work in algebraic geometry, arithmetic geometry, tropical geometry and enumerative geometry.
Go to Profile#153
Vera Kublanovskaya
#24585
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya was a Russian mathematician noted for her work on developing computational methods for solving spectral problems of algebra. She proposed the QR algorithm for computing eigenvalues and eigenvectors in 1961, which has been named as one of the ten most important algorithms of the twentieth century. This algorithm was proposed independently by the English computer scientist John G.F. Francis in 1959.
Go to Profile#154
Lam Lay Yong
#27191
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Lam Lay Yong is a retired Professor of Mathematics. Academic career From 1988 to 1996 she was Professor at the Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore . She graduated from the University of Malaya in 1957 and pursued graduate study in Cambridge University, obtaining her Ph.D. degree from University of Singapore in 1966, and becoming a lecturer at the University of Singapore. She was promoted to full professor in 1988, taught in NUS for 35 years, and retired in 1996.
Go to Profile#155
Irena Lasiecka
#27061
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Irena Lasiecka is a Polish-American mathematician, a Distinguished University Professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department at the University of Memphis. She is also co-editor-in-chief of two academic journals, Applied Mathematics & Optimization and Evolution Equations & Control Theory.
Go to Profile#156
Olga Oleinik
#36786
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Olga Arsenievna Oleinik HFRSE was a Soviet mathematician who conducted pioneering work on the theory of partial differential equations, the theory of strongly inhomogeneous elastic media, and the mathematical theory of boundary layers. She was a student of Ivan Petrovsky. She studied and worked at the Moscow State University.
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Susanne Teschl
#30935
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Susanne Teschl is an Austrian biomathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien in Vienna. She is known for her research on the mathematical modeling of breath analysis.
Go to Profile#158
Caterina Consani
#38155
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Caterina Consani is an Italian mathematician specializing in arithmetic geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. Contributions Consani is the namesake of the Consani–Scholten quintic, a quintic threefold that she described with Jasper Scholten in 2001, and of the Connes–Consani plane connection, a relationship between the field with one element and certain group actionss on projective spaces investigated by Consani with Alain Connes. She is also known for her work with Matilde Marcolli on Arakelov theory and noncommutative geometry.
Go to Profile#159
Maryanthe Malliaris
#30558
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Maryanthe Elizabeth Malliaris is a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, a specialist in model theory. Early life and education Malliaris is the daughter of Anastasios G. Malliaris, an economist at Loyola University Chicago, and Mary E. Malliaris, Professor of Information Systems at Loyola.
Go to Profile#160
Neena Gupta
#25054
Overall Influence
Neena Gupta is a professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute , Kolkata. Her primary fields of interest are commutative algebra and affine algebraic geometry.
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Lai-Sang Young
#28175
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lai-Sang Lily Young is a Hong Kong-born American mathematician who holds the Henry & Lucy Moses Professorship of Science and is a professor of mathematics and neural science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Her research interests include dynamical systems, ergodic theory, chaos theory, probability theory, statistical mechanics, and neuroscience. She is particularly known for introducing the method of Markov returns in 1998, which she used to prove exponential correlation delay in Sinai billiards and other hyperbolic dynamical systems.
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Lisa Jeffrey
#38168
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lisa Claire Jeffrey FRSC is a Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. In her research, she uses symplectic geometry to provide rigorous proofs of results in quantum field theory.
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Maria Reiche
#6720
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Maria Reiche Grosse-Neumann was a German-born Peruvian mathematician, archaeologist, and technical translator. She is known for her research into the Nazca Lines, which she first saw in 1941 together with American historian Paul Kosok. Known as the "Lady of the Lines", Reiche made the documentation, preservation and public dissemination of the Nazca Lines her life's work.
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Mei-Chi Shaw
#33868
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mei-Chi Shaw is a professor of mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. Her research concerns partial differential equations. Life and career Shaw was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1955. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1977. Shaw received her PhD from Princeton University four years later in 1981, working with Joseph Kohn. She then took a postdoctoral position at Purdue University During this time, she married her husband, Hsueh-Chia Chang. In 1983, Shaw took a tenure-track position at Texas A&M University, moving to University of H...
Go to Profile#165
Ulrike Tillmann
#34703
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ulrike Luise Tillmann FRS is a mathematician specializing in algebraic topology, who has made important contributions to the study of the moduli space of algebraic curves. She is the president of the London Mathematical Society in the period 2021–2022.
Go to Profile#166
Cornelia Druțu
#17997
Overall Influence
Cornelia Druțu is a Romanian mathematician notable for her contributions in the area of geometric group theory. She is Professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.
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Julia Gog
#27439
Overall Influence
Julia Rose Gog is a British mathematician and professor of mathematical biology in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. She is also a David N. Moore fellow, director of studies in mathematics at Queens' College, Cambridge and a member of both the Cambridge immunology network and the infectious diseases interdisciplinary research centre.
Go to Profile#168
Panagiota Daskalopoulos
#41195
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Panagiota Daskalopoulos is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University whose research involves partial differential equations and differential geometry. At Columbia, she also serves as director of undergraduate studies for mathematics.
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Olga Kharlampovich
#39197
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Olga Kharlampovich is a Russian-Canadian mathematician working in the area of group theory. She is the Mary P. Dolciani Professor of Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College. Contributions Kharlampovich is known for her example of a finitely presented 3-step solvable group with unsolvable word problem and for the solution together with A. Myasnikov of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first-order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups and decidability of this common theory.
Go to Profile#170
Eleny Ionel
#29827
Overall Influence
Eleny-Nicoleta Ionel is a Romanian mathematician whose research concerns symplectic geometry, including the study of the Gromov–Witten invariants and Gopakumar–Vafa invariant. Among her most significant results are the construction of relative Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic manifolds, and the proof of the vanishing in codimension at least g of the tautological ring of the moduli space of genus-g curves.
Go to Profile#171
Daina Taimiņa
#23649
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Daina Taimiņa is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for developing a way of modeling hyperbolic geometry with crocheted objects.
Go to Profile#172
Ayşe Soysal
#13274
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ayşe Soysal is a Turkish mathematician. She was the president of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul during 2004 to 2008. Life and career Born in 1948, she received her high school diploma in 1967 from the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She received her bachelor's degrees with high honors in Mathematics and Physics from Boğaziçi University formerly in 1971.
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Svetlana Jitomirskaya
#26112
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Svetlana Yakovlevna Jitomirskaya is a Soviet-born American mathematician working on dynamical systems and mathematical physics. She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech and UC Irvine. She is best known for solving the ten martini problem along with mathematician Artur Avila.
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Susan P. Holmes
#23136
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Susan P. Holmes is an American statistician and professor at Stanford University. She is noted for her work in applying nonparametric multivariate statistics, bootstrapping methods, and data visualization to biology.
Go to Profile#175
Monique Jeanblanc
#32332
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Monique Jeanblanc-Picqué is a French mathematician known for her work in mathematical finance; other topics in her research have included control theory and probability theory. She is a professor emerita at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne.
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Moon Duchin
#32079
Overall Influence
Moon Duchin is an American mathematician who works as a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Her mathematical research concerns geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory. She has done significant research on the mathematics of redistricting and gerrymandering, and founded a research group, MGGG Redistricting Lab, to advance these mathematical studies and their nonpartisan application in the real world of US politics. She is also interested in the cultural studies, philosophy, and history of science. Duchin is one of the core faculty members and serv...
Go to Profile#177
Gloria Conyers Hewitt
#31930
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gloria Conyers Hewitt is an American mathematician. She was the fourth African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her main research interests were in group theory and abstract algebra. She is the first African American woman to chair a math department in the United States.
Go to Profile#178
Irit Dinur
#18070
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Irit Dinur is an Israeli computer scientist. She is professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research is in foundations of computer science and in combinatorics, and especially in probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation.
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Zvezdelina Stankova
#39970
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Zvezdelina Entcheva Stankova is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at Mills College and a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, and an expert in the combinatorial enumeration of permutations with forbidden patterns.
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Ruth Charney
#42770
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ruth Michele Charney is an American mathematician known for her work in geometric group theory and Artin groups. Other areas of research include K-theory and algebraic topology. She holds the Theodore and Evelyn G. Berenson Chair in Mathematics at Brandeis University. She was in the first group of mathematicians named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. She was in the first group of mathematicians named Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics during 2013–2015, and served as president of the American Mat...
Go to Profile#181
Katalin Marton
#26969
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Katalin Marton was a Hungarian mathematician, born in Budapest. Education and career Marton obtained her PhD from Eötvös Loránd University in 1965 and worked at the Department of Numerical Mathematics, Central Research Institute for Physics, Budapest from 1965 to 1973. Important influences on her early career were her attendance at the combinatorics seminar organised by Alfréd Rényi from 1966, meeting Roland Dobrushin in Debrecen in 1967 , and her collaboration with Imre Csiszár which began in 1972. From 1973 she worked at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of ...
Go to Profile#182
Patricia E. Bauman
#38195
Overall Influence
Patricia E. Bauman is an American mathematician who studies partial differential equations that model the behavior of liquid crystals and superconductors. She is a professor of mathematics at Purdue University.
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Linda Keen
#27354
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Linda Jo Goldway Keen is a mathematician and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Since 1965, she has been a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman College of the City University of New York and a Professor of Mathematics at Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#184
Janet Barnett
#34319
Overall Influence
Janet Heine Barnett is a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University–Pueblo, interested in set theory, mathematical logic, the history of mathematics, women in mathematics, and mathematics education.
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Mina Teicher
#41234
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mina Teicher is an Israeli mathematician at Bar-Ilan University, specializing in algebraic geometry. Teicher earned bachelor's, masters, and doctoral degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1974, 1976, and 1981 respectively. Her dissertation, Birational Transformation Between 4-folds, was supervised by Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro. Since 1999, she has directed the Emmy Noether Research Institute for Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University. In 2001–2002 she was the inaugural Emmy Noether Visiting professor at the University of Göttingen, where she lectured about braid groups.
Go to Profile#186
Katrin Wehrheim
#41908
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Katrin Wehrheim is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Wehrheim's research centers around symplectic topology and gauge theory, and they are known for work on pseudoholomorphic quilts. With Dusa McDuff, they have challenged the foundational rigor of a classic proof in symplectic geometry.
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Helen G. Grundman
#39102
Overall Influence
Helen Giessler Grundman is an American mathematician. She is the Director of Education and Diversity at the American Mathematical Society and Research Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Grundman is noted for her research in number theory and efforts to increase diversity in mathematics.
Go to Profile#188
Mari-Jo P. Ruiz
#32936
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mari-Jo P. Ruiz was a Filipina mathematician and professor of mathematics at Ateneo de Manila University. Ruiz specialized in graph theory and operations research. Education and career Ruiz grew up in Manila, and was educated at College of the Holy Spirit Manila. She graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in New York City in 1963, and soon afterward completed a master's degree at New York University. She joined the Ateneo de Manila faculty in 1965, eight years before the school began accepting women as students. She chose academia over a competing job offer from industry because at the time it paid slightly better.
Go to Profile#189
Mary Celine Fasenmyer
#31515
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Mary Celine Fasenmyer, RSM was an American mathematician and Catholic religious sister. She is most noted for her work on hypergeometric functions and linear algebra. Biography Fasenmyer grew up in Pennsylvania's oil country, and displayed mathematical talent in high school. For ten years after her graduation she taught and studied at Mercyhurst College in Erie, where she joined the Sisters of Mercy. She pursued her mathematical studies in Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, obtaining her doctorate in 1946 under the direction of Earl Rainville, with a dissertation entitled Some General...
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Isabelle Gallagher
#38689
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Isabelle Gallagher is a French mathematician. Her research concerns partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations, the wave equation, and the Schrödinger equation, as well as harmonic analysis of the Heisenberg group.
Go to Profile#191
Mary W. Gray
#15921
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Mary Lee Wheat Gray is an American mathematician, statistician, and lawyer. She is the author of books and papers in the fields of mathematics, mathematics education, computer science, applied statistics, economic equity, discrimination law, and academic freedom. She is currently on the Board of Advisers for POMED and is the chair of the Board of Directors of AMIDEAST .
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Christina Eubanks-Turner
#40754
Overall Influence
Christina Eubanks-Turner is a professor of mathematics in the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University . Her academic areas of interest include graph theory, commutative algebra, mathematics education, and mathematical sciences diversification. She is also the Director of the Master's Program in Teaching Mathematics at LMU.
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Sherry Gong
#35002
Overall Influence
Sherry Gong is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology and known as one of the most successful female competitors at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#194
Hari Mohan Srivastava
#48130
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#195
Alice Guionnet
#35922
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Alice Guionnet is a French mathematician known for her work in probability theory, in particular on large random matrices. Biography Guionnet entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1989. She earned her PhD in 1995 under the supervision of Gérard Ben Arous at University of Paris-Sud. Focuses of her academic research can be viewed in her thesis, Dynamique de Langevin d'un verre de spins .
Go to Profile#196
Mary Lee Woods
#8389
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.
Go to Profile#197
Alexandra Bellow
#16779
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Alexandra Bellow is a Romanian-American mathematician, who has made contributions to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis. Biography Bellow was born in Bucharest, Romania, on August 30, 1935, as Alexandra Bagdasar. Her parents were both physicians. Her mother, Florica Bagdasar , was a child psychiatrist. Her father, , was a neurosurgeon. She received her M.S. in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1957, where she met and married her first husband, mathematician Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea. She accompanied her husband to the United States in 1957 and received her Ph.D.
Go to Profile#198
Sylvia Wiegand
#33556
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sylvia Margaret Wiegand is an American mathematician. Early life and education Wiegand was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of mathematician Laurence Chisholm Young and through him the grand-daughter of mathematicians Grace Chisholm Young and William Henry Young. Her family moved to Wisconsin in 1949, and she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1966 after three years of study. In 1971 Wiegand earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation was titled Galois Theory of Essential Expansions of Modules and Vanishing Tensor Powers.
Go to Profile#199
Vera Pless
#34021
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Vera Pless was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory. She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Biography Vera Stepen was born on Chicago's west side to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a teenager, she was more interested in playing the cello than in mathematics, but she left high school two years early to go to the University of Chicago, and finished her studies there in three years.
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Yael Karshon
#40227
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Yael Karshon is an Israeli and Canadian mathematician who has been described as "one of Canada's leading experts in symplectic geometry". She works as a professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Tel Aviv University .
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