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,
#1501
Dianne Cook
#87130
Overall Influence
Dianne Helen Cook is an Australian statistician, the editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and an expert on the visualization of high-dimensional data. She is Professor of Business Analytics in the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University and professor emeritus of statistics at Iowa State University. The emeritus status was chosen so that she could continue to supervise graduate students at Iowa State after moving to Australia.
Go to Profile#1502
Victoria Stodden
#62751
Overall Influence
Victoria Stodden is a statistician, associate professor of information sciences, and affiliate professor of statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Ottawa, an MS in economics from the University of British Columbia, and both her law degree and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#1503
Milly Koss
#39005
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Adele Mildred Koss, known as Milly Koss, was an American pioneering computer programmer. The Association for Women in Computing awarded her an Ada Lovelace Award in 2000. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania in 1950. Following her first job interview with an insurance company, Koss, who was engaged at the time, was rejected for the reason that married women would have children and leave.
Go to Profile#1504
Amy Braverman
#81110
Overall Influence
Amy J. Braverman is an American statistician who analyzes remote sensing data and climate models as a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has also served as co-chair of the Climate Change Policy Advisory Committee of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#1505
Kaye Basford
#115718
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kaye Enid Basford is an Australian statistician and biometrician who applies statistical methods to plant genetics. She is a professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland, and head of the school. She was president of the Statistical Society of Australia from 2005 to 2007, and president of the International Biometric Society from 2010 to 2011. Before moving to Biomedical Sciences, she was the head of the School of Land, Crop and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland from 2001 to 2010.
Go to Profile#1506
Kate Okikiolu
#43393
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Kate Adebola Okikiolu is a British mathematician. She is known for her work with elliptic differential operators as well as her work with inner-city children. Early life and education Okikiolu was born in 1965 in England. Her father was George Olatokunbo Okikiolu, a renowned Nigerian mathematician and the most published black mathematician on record. Her British mother was a high school mathematics teacher. Okikiolu received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1987. In 1991 she earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles, for her thesis The ...
Go to Profile#1507
Dorota Dabrowska
#126790
Overall Influence
Dorota Maria Dabrowska is a Polish statistician known for applying nonparametric statistics and semiparametric models to counting processes and survival analysis. Dabrowska's estimator, from her paper "Kaplan–Meier estimate on the plane" is a widely used tool for bivariate survival under random censoring.
Go to Profile#1508
Caitlin E. Buck
#128860
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Caitlin E. Buck is a British archaeologist and statistician specialising the application of Bayesian statistics to archaeology, and known for her work in radiocarbon dating. She is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#1509
Olga Umnova
#82010
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Olga Umnova is Russian-born British academic, lecturer in theoretical acoustics in the acoustics department at the University of Salford. In recognition of her contribution to the field of acoustics, she was awarded the prestigious Tyndall Medal by the Institute of Acoustics in 2010.
Go to Profile#1510
Sherri Rose
#92847
Overall Influence
Sherri Rose is an American biostatistician. She is an associate professor of health care policy at Stanford University, having formally worked at Harvard University. A fellow of the American Statistical Association, she has served as co-editor of Biostatistics since 2019 and Chair of the American Statistical Association’s Biometrics Section. Her research focuses on statistical machine learning for health care policy.
Go to Profile#1511
Luisa DiPietro
#73500
Overall Influence
Luisa DiPietro is a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry. She is Director of the Center for Wound Repair and Tissue Regeneration and a Professor of Periodontics for the College.
Go to Profile#1512
Dolores Romero Morales
#120840
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
María Dolores Romero Morales is a Spanish operations researcher and professor of operations research at the Copenhagen Business School. Topics in her research include supply chain management, revenue management, and data mining.
Go to Profile#1513
Laure Blanc-Féraud
#126977
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Laure Blanc-Féraud is a French applied mathematician and image processing researcher specializing in three-dimensional medical imaging. She is a senior scientist for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes at Côte d'Azur University.
Go to Profile#1514
Katharina T. Huber
#130234
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Katharina Theresia Huber is a German applied mathematician and mathematical biologist whose research concerns phylogenetic trees, evolutionary analysis, their mathematical foundations, and their mathematical visualization. She is an associate professor in the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia in England, and the school's director of postgraduate research.
Go to Profile#1515
Begoña Vitoriano
#130184
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Begoña Vitoriano Villanueva is a Spanish applied mathematician and operations researcher whose work concerns the logistics of humanitarian aid and disaster relief. She is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics and Operational Research at the Complutense University of Madrid, and the president of the Spanish Statistics and Operations Research Society.
Go to Profile#1516
Dorothy M. Gilford
#96164
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Dorothy Morrow Gilford was an American statistician who headed the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the Office of Naval Research, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. She was the editor of The Aging Population in the Twenty-First Century: Statistics for Health Policy .
Go to Profile#1517
Alicia L. Carriquiry
#103194
Overall Influence
Alicia Laura Carriquiry is a Uruguayan statistician. She is a distinguished professor of statistics at Iowa State University, and was president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2001. Her research applies Bayesian statistics to nutrition, genomics, forensics, and traffic safety.
Go to Profile#1518
Sophie Dabo-Niang
#129661
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Sophie Dabo-Niang is a Senegalese and French mathematician, statistician, and professor who has done outreach to increase the status of African mathematicians. Biography Early life Sophie was encouraged to pursue mathematics by her parents and her teachers. She knew she wanted to study mathematics early in high school.
Go to Profile#1519
Damla Şentürk
#53356
Overall Influence
Damla Şentürk is a Turkish-American biostatistician and professor of biostatistics in the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health whose interests include longitudinal studies, functional data analysis, and applications of biostatistics in the study of autism and of dialysis outcomes.
Go to Profile#1520
Jianwen Cai
#150453
Overall Influence
#1521
Elisabeth Larsson
#129021
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Elisabeth Larsson is a Swedish applied mathematician and numerical analyst. She is a professor in the Department of Information Technology of Uppsala University, and the director of the Uppsala Multidisciplinary Centre for Advanced Computational Science.
Go to Profile#1522
Jennifer Rogers
#80967
Overall Influence
Jennifer Kaye Rogers is a British statistician. She was the Director of Statistical Consultancy Services at the University of Oxford and an associate professor at Oxford before joining contract research organisation PHASTAR in August 2019.
Go to Profile#1523
Wendy L. Martinez
#60309
Overall Influence
Wendy L. Martinez is an American statistician. She directs the Mathematical Statistics Research Center of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is the coordinating editor of the journal Statistics Surveys . In 2018, Martinez was elected president of the American Statistical Association for the 2020 term.
Go to Profile#1524
Liberty Vittert
#93729
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Liberty Vittert is an American statistician, political commentator, and host of Liberty’s Great American Cookbook, a cooking show on Scottish Television. Vittert is a Professor of the Practice of Data Science at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Data Science Initiative and the feature editor of the Harvard Data Science Review. She is the host of MIT's Data Science Podcast, "Data Nation" hosted by the MIT Institute for Data Systems and Society. Vittert is a Senior Data Scientist at Decision Desk HQ and their public facing representative for election calls and analysis.
Go to Profile#1525
Mariza de Andrade
#116995
Overall Influence
Mariza de Andrade is a Brazilian-American biostatistician who works as a professor of biostatistics at the Mayo Clinic, and is known for her work on statistical genetics and precision medicine. Early life De Andrade earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto in São Paulo and a master's degree in statistics at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro. She moved to the University of Washington for additional graduate study, earning a second master's degree and Ph.D. in biostatistics there. Her 1990 ...
Go to Profile#1526
Garnet Anderson
#134076
Overall Influence
Garnet Larae Anderson is an American biostatistician, known for her research on the health risks caused by side effects of postmenopausal hormone therapy, and more generally as one of the leading researchers in the Women's Health Initiative. She is a senior vice president at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she directs the Public Health Sciences Division and holds the Fred Hutch 40th Anniversary Endowed Chair; she is also an affiliate professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#1527
Eva Petkova
#108221
Overall Influence
Eva Petkova is a Bulgarian-American biostatistician interested in the application of statistics to psychiatry, and known for her research on regression model comparison, brain imaging, and mental disorders. She is a professor of population health and of child and adolescent psychology at the New York University School of Medicine, and a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.
Go to Profile#1528
Susmita Datta
#84490
Overall Influence
Susmita Datta is an Indian biostatistician. She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, and is the former president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. She is also a musician who has published three CDs of Bengali folk songs.
Go to Profile#1529
Jana Jurečková
#111739
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jana Jurečková is a Czech statistician, known for her work on rankings, robust statistics, outliers and tails, asymptotic theory, and the behavior of statistical estimates for finite sample sizes.
Go to Profile#1530
Regina Liu
#145937
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Regina Y. Liu is an American statistician. She is a distinguished professor of statistics and chair of the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics at Rutgers University. Her research concerns robust statistics and nonparametric statistics, including the first formulation of simplicial depth.
Go to Profile#1531
Jaana Lindström
#151808
Overall Influence
#1532
Stephanie Shipp
#81978
Overall Influence
Stephanie Slepicka Shipp is an American economist and social statistician. She works at the University of Virginia as a research professor in the Social and Decision Analytics Division of the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative.
Go to Profile#1533
Patricia Grambsch
#96371
Overall Influence
Patricia Louise Meller Grambsch is an American biostatistician known for her work on survival models including proportional hazards models. She is an associate professor emerita of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#1534
Gretchen Matthews
#126218
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Gretchen L. Matthews is a mathematician specializing in algebraic coding theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech. Education and career Matthews graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1995, majoring in mathematics. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at Louisiana State University in 1999. Her dissertation, Weierstrass Pairs and Minimum Distance of Goppa Codes, was supervised by Robert F. Lax.
Go to Profile#1535
Sharon Lohr
#90766
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sharon Lynn Lohr is an American statistician. She is an Emeritus Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Arizona State University, and an independent statistical consultant. Her research interests include survey sampling, design of experiments, and applications of statistics in education and criminology.
Go to Profile#1536
Dianne M. Finkelstein
#152409
Overall Influence
#1537
Babette Brumback
#78243
Overall Influence
Babette Anne Brumback is an American biostatistician known for her work on causal inference. She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida. Education and career Brumback earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Virginia in 1988. She went to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study, originally in electrical engineering and computer science but then switching to statistics; she earned a master's degree in 1992 and completed her Ph.D. in 1996. Her dissertation, Statistical Methods for Hormone Data, was supervised by John A. Rice...
Go to Profile#1538
Elizabeth H. Slate
#113116
Overall Influence
Elizabeth H. Slate is an American statistician, interested in the Bayesian statistics of longitudinal data and applications to health. She is the Duncan McLean and Pearl Levine Fairweather Professor of Statistics at Florida State University. Some of Slate's most heavily cited work concerns the effects of selenium on cancer. Slate's research has also included work on the early detection of osteoarthritis.
Go to Profile#1539
Virginie Bonnaillie-Noël
#131687
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Virginie Bonnaillie-Noël is a French mathematician and research director specializing in numerical analysis. Her research topics concern partial differential equations, asymptotic, spectral and numerical analysis of problems arising from physics or mechanics.
Go to Profile#1540
Alessandra Celletti
#137132
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Alessandra Celletti is an Italian mathematician. She earned a master's degree in mathematics in 1984 at the University of Rome La Sapienza, and a PhD in 1989 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich under the supervision of Jürgen Moser and Jörg Waldvogel. Her research activity concerns dynamical systems, Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theory, and celestial mechanics.
Go to Profile#1541
Jean A. Larson
#98231
Overall Influence
Jean Ann Larson is an American mathematician. She is a set theorist, a historian of mathematical logic, and a professor at the University of Florida. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics from Dartmouth College, and is known for her research in infinitary combinatorics and the theory of linear spaces.
Go to Profile#1542
Nana Klutse
#58080
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Nana Ama Browne Klutse is a Ghanian lecturer and Climatologist. Early life and educational background Nana Ama Browne Klutse was born on 23 May 1981 at Nyanfeku Ekroful. She had her primary education at the Anomabo Methodist Primary and JHS.
Go to Profile#1543
Kasia Rejzner
#136417
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Katarzyna Anna Rejzner is a Polish mathematical physicist specializing in algebraic quantum field theory and the theory of renormalization, including the Batalin–Vilkovisky formalism. She works as a reader in mathematics at the University of York.
Go to Profile#1544
Amy Ellis
#132145
Overall Influence
Amy Burns Ellis is a Full Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Georgia. She was formerly an associate professor in mathematics education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#1545
Aurore Delaigle
#128008
Overall Influence
Aurore Delaigle is a Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include nonparametric statistics, deconvolution and functional data analysis.
Go to Profile#1546
Donna Brogan
#117759
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Donna Jean Brogan is an American statistician and professor emeritus of statistics at Emory University. Brogan has worked in biostatistical research in the areas of women's health, mental health and psychosocial health statistics, statistics on breast cancer, and analysis of complex survey data.
Go to Profile#1547
Paola Antonietti
#135902
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Paola F. Antonietti is an Italian applied mathematician and numerical analyst whose research concerns numerical methods for partial differential equations, and particularly domain decomposition methods, with applications in scientific computing and Applied Sciences such as the computational modelling of neurodegenerative disorders and simulating the propagation of seismic waves. She is Professor of Numerical Analysis at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
Go to Profile#1548
Linda M. Field
#62497
Overall Influence
Linda M. Field FRES FRSB is a British scientist noted for her work on the insecticide mode of action and resistance. Biography Field was awarded a PhD on the molecular basis of insecticide resistance at Rothamsted Research in 1989. She became leader of the Insect Molecular Biology Group at Rothamsted in 2002, and then Head of the Department of Biological Chemistry in 2010 .
Go to Profile#1549
Hélène Pellissier
#154521
Overall Influence
#1550
Connie M. Borror
#115659
Overall Influence
1966 - 2016 (50 years)
Connie M. Borror was an American statistician and industrial engineer interested in quality control and forensic toxicology. She was named the winner of the Shewhart Medal of the American Society for Quality shortly before her death, for "outstanding technical leadership in the field of modern quality control, especially through the development to its theory, principles, and techniques", and became the first woman to win the medal.
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