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,

#1551

Kathleen Lamborn

#68268
Overall Influence
Kathleen Rundle Lamborn is an American biostatistician, known for her highly-cited publications on glioma. She is an Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Neurological Surgery and former Director of the Cancer Center Biostatistics Core at the University of California, San Francisco, and Senior Scientific Consultant at Quintiles Pacific.
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#1552

Fanny Kassel

Fanny Kassel
#100758
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Fanny Kassel is a French mathematician, specializing in the theory of Lie groups. Career Kassel received her PhD under the direction of Yves Benoist at the University of Paris-Sud in 2009. Her thesis was on "Compact quotients of real or p-adic homogeneous spaces". She then entered the CNRS and worked at the Paul-Painlevé Laboratory of the University of Lille I until 2016, when she joined the IHÉS as detached CNRS researcher.
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#1553

Josée Dupuis

#78257
Overall Influence
Josée Dupuis is a Canadian biostatistician. She is a professor in the Boston University School of Public Health, where she chairs the department of biostatistics. Her research interests include genome-wide association studies, gene–environment interaction, and applications to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
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#1554

Alexandra Carpentier

#107996
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Alexandra Carpentier is a French mathematical statistician and machine learning researcher known for her work in stochastic optimization, compressed sensing, and multi-armed bandit problems. She works in Germany as a professor at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and head of the Mathematical Statistics & Machine Learning research group.
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#1555

Ruth Etzioni

#134810
Overall Influence
Ruth D. Etzioni is a biostatistician who develops statistical computer models to research cancer progression. She is the Rosalie and Harold Rea Brown endowed chair at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
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#1556

Susan Horn

#43539
Overall Influence
Susan Helen Dadakis Horn is an American biostatistician. She is the senior scientist at the Institute for Clinical Outcomes Research, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine in the Health Services Innovation and Research Program, and an affiliate faculty member at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She is known for her work in developing computational statistical models for clinicians to use in-practice to improve therapy results.
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#1557

Mary C. Meyer

#34743
Overall Influence
Mary C. Meyer is an American statistician. She is known for both theoretical and computational research in nonparametric statistics and density estimation, especially for densities with shape constraints such as convexity or monotonicity. She is a professor of statistics at Colorado State University.
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#1558

Judith D. Singer

Judith D. Singer
#92887
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Judith D. Singer is an American academic - statistician and social scientist. She is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University.
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#1559

Mary Ellen Bock

#124023
Overall Influence
Mary Ellen Johnston Bock is a retired American statistician, now a professor emeritus at Purdue University after becoming the first female full professor of statistics and the first female chair of the department there. She was president of the American Statistical Association in 2007.
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#1560

Deborah J. Rumsey

#135497
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Deborah Jean Rumsey-Johnson is an American statistician and statistics educator. She is an associated professor and program specialist in statistics at the Ohio State University. Education and career Rumsey earned her Ph.D. at Ohio State in 1993. Her dissertation, Nonresponse in Social Network Analysis, was supervised by Elizabeth Stasny. In 2002 she became founding director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education. She directed the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center at Ohio State from 2000 to 2004, and became a faculty member in the Ohio State Depa...
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#1561

Nancy Gordon

#80475
Overall Influence
Nancy May Gordon is an American economist and statistician who works for the United States Census Bureau. Education and career Gordon majored in economics and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a doctorate in economics from Stanford University. Her dissertation, Ex ante and Ex post Substitutability in Economic Growth, was supervised by Kenneth Arrow.
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#1562

Ami Radunskaya

Ami Radunskaya
#134048
Overall Influence
Ami Elizabeth Radunskaya is an American mathematician and musician. She is a professor of mathematics at Pomona College, where she specializes in dynamical systems and the applications of mathematics to medicine, such as the use of cellular automata to model drug delivery. In 2016 she was elected as the president of the Association for Women in Mathematics .
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#1563

Nancy E. Heckman

#86984
Overall Influence
Nancy E. Heckman is a Canadian statistician, interested in nonparametric regression, smoothing, functional data analysis, and applications of statistics in evolutionary biology. From 2008 to 2018, she served as head of the statistics department at the University of British Columbia.
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#1564

Angela Mariotto

#79207
Overall Influence
Angela Bacelar Mariotto is a statistician who researches the development and improvement of cancer progress measures. She is chief of the data analytics branch at the National Cancer Institute. Mariotto was a researcher at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità.
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#1565

Maria Antònia Canals

#101997
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Maria Antònia Canals was a Spanish mathematician. Her work in recreational mathematics served as the basis for the eponymous Canals Project. Among other honors, she has been awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi and the .
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#1566

Marianna Pensky

#147410
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marianna Pensky is a professor at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests lie in the areas of theoretical and applied statistics. She is author of The Stress-strength Model and Its Generalizations: Theory and Applications .
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#1567

Margaret J. Wright

#156458
Overall Influence
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#1568

Montserrat García-Closas

#148765
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Montserrat García-Closas, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.P.H., is a Spanish researcher and academic who is best known for her works on identifying cancer biomarkers and genetic susceptibility to cancer. Dr. García-Closas serves as the deputy director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics of the National Cancer Institute, as well as the Acting Chief of the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch of the DCEG.
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#1569

Marina Vannucci

#126567
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Marina Vannucci is an Italian statistician, the Noah Harding Professor and Chair of Statistics at Rice University, the past president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and the former editor-in-chief of Bayesian Analysis. Topics in her research include wavelets, feature selection, and cluster analysis in Bayesian statistics.
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#1570

Angela Dean

#78216
Overall Influence
Angela Muriel Dean is a British statistician who specializes in the design of experiments. She is a professor emeritus at the Ohio State University, and was the chair of the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences of the American Statistical Association for 2012.
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#1571

Sandra Stinnett

#104971
Overall Influence
Sandra Sue Stinnett is an American statistician specializing in the biostatistics of ophthalmology. She is an associate professor in the departments of biostatistics and bioinformatics and of ophthalmology in the Duke University School of Medicine.
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#1572

Svetlana Selezneva

Svetlana Selezneva
#125262
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Svetlana Selezneva is a Russian mathematician, Dr.Sc., Associate professor, a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Moscow State University. She defended the thesis «Polynomial representations of discrete functions» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences .
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#1573

Jacqueline Dewar

#77206
Overall Influence
Jacqueline M. Dewar is an American mathematician and mathematics educator known for her distinguished teaching and her mentorship of women in mathematics. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University.
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#1574

Simone Benhamou

#157571
Overall Influence
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#1575

Ying Wei

#108453
Overall Influence
Ying Wei is a statistician and a professor of biostatistics in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, working primarily on quantile regression, semiparametric models of longitudinal data, and their applications.
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#1576

Susan Weintraub

#38739
Overall Influence
Susan Weintraub is an American scientist. She is a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio . She received a BS in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, MS in chemistry from Trinity University in 1970 and a PhD in biochemistry from UTHSCSA in 1979. She was the president of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry for the period of 2012-2014. In 2017 she was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . She is an associate editor of the Journal of Proteome Research.
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#1577

Katerina Kechris

#106847
Overall Influence
Katerina Joanna Kechris is an American statistician, a professor of biostatistics and informatics in the Colorado School of Public Health, and a regional president of the International Biometric Society. Her research focuses on the use of omics data to study relations between genetics and disease.
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#1578

Greta M. Ljung

#93193
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Greta Marianne Ljung is a Finnish American statistician. The Ljung–Box test for time series data is named after her and her graduate school advisor, George E. P. Box. She has written textbooks on time series analysis and her work has been published in several top statistical journals, including Biometrika and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.
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#1579

Irène Waldspurger

#122345
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Irène Waldspurger is a French mathematician and a researcher at the Research Centre in Mathematics of Decision where her research focuses on algorithm to solve phase problems, a class of problem relevant for a large number of imaging techniques used in science and medicine. She is also a professor at Paris Sciences et Lettres University.
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#1580

Mary Beth Terry

#159339
Overall Influence
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#1581

Brenda L. Dietrich

#100302
Overall Influence
Brenda Lynn Jorgensen Dietrich is an American operations researcher, the Arthur and Helen Geoffrion Professor of Practice in the School of Operations Research at Cornell University. She has been Vice President of Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences at IBM, and a president of INFORMS.
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#1582

Mathilde Touvier

#159871
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
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#1583

Marcia C. Haigis

#160463
Overall Influence
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#1584

Susan R. Wilson

#127015
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Susan Ruth Wilson was an Australian statistician, known for her research in biostatistics and statistical genetics, and for her work on the understanding of AIDS in Australia. She edited the bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1993 to 1998, and was president of the International Biometric Society from 1998 to 1999.
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#1585

Jenny Bryan

#73916
Overall Influence
Jennifer "Jenny" Bryan is a data scientist and an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia where she developed the Master in Data Science Program. She is a statistician and software engineer at RStudio from Vancouver, Canada and is known for creating open source tools which connect R to Google Sheets and Google Drive.
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#1586

Nadia Ghazzali

#69115
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Nadia Ghazzali is a Canadian statistician, the former president of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, where she continues to work as a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science. As a statistician, she is known for her work on NbClust, a package in the R statistical software system for determining the number of clusters in a data set.
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#1587

Amita Manatunga

#107684
Overall Influence
Amita Kalyanie Manatunga is a Sri Lankan biostatistician who works as a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, where she is also affiliated with the Winship Cancer Institute. Her research interests include survival analysis, inter-rater reliability, environmental epidemiology, and medical imaging of the kidneys.
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#1588

Cristina Butucea

#72524
Overall Influence
Cristina Butucea is a French statistician at ENSAE Paris and at the University of Paris-Est, known for her work on non-parametric statistics, density estimation, and deconvolution. Butucea completed her Ph.D. in 1999 at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Her dissertation, Estimation non-paramétrique adaptative de la densité de probabilité, was supervised by Alexandre Tsybakov.
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#1589

Paula Norwood

#46969
Overall Influence
Paula King Norwood is a retired American biostatistician who worked in the pharmaceutical industry on statistical aspects of drug development and clinical trials. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a former chair of the Biopharmaceutical Section of the American Statistical Association.
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#1590

Lisa Weissfeld

#141371
Overall Influence
Lisa Anderson Weissfeld is an American biostatistician whose publications include work on the risks, prognoses, and treatment outcomes for pneumonia, sepsis, and end-of-life care; she is one of the authors of the pneumonia severity index. She has also published basic research on sparse data in meta-analysis, on multicollinearity, and on the dichotomization of ordinal data, and is one of the namesakes of the Wei–Lin–Weissfeld model in recurrent event analysis. She worked for many years as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
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#1591

Lianne Sheppard

#120106
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Anne Sheppard is an American statistician. She specializes in biostatistics and environmental statistics, and in particular in the effects of air quality on health. She is a Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and a Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Washington School of Public Health. In 2021, Dr. Sheppard was named to the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship of Public Health Sciences.
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#1592

Lindsay Stringer

#101446
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Lindsay C. Stringer is a Professor in Environment and Development at the University of York. Stringer's research is interdisciplinary and uses theories and methods from both the natural and social sciences to understand human-environment relationships, feedbacks and trade-offs, examining the impacts for human wellbeing, equity and the environment
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#1593

Martine Labbé

#94516
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Martine Labbé is a Belgian operations researcher known for her work on mathematical optimization, facility location, and road pricing. She is an honorary professor of graphs and mathematical optimization in the department of computer science at the Université libre de Bruxelles, editor-in-chief of the EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, and a former president of the Association of European Operational Research Societies .
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#1594

Patrizia Pucci

#163054
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
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#1595

Deborah Street

#115820
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Deborah Street is an Australian statistician known for her research in the design of experiments. She is a professor at the University of Technology Sydney, where she is a core member of the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation .
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#1596

Antonietta Mira

#115337
Overall Influence
Antonietta Mira is an Italian computational statistician whose research involves the application of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to Bayesian inference. She is a professor of statistics in the Faculty of Economics and Institute of Computational Science at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, and professor of statistics in the University of Insubria in Italy.
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#1597

Kathryn Chaloner

#133498
Overall Influence
1954 - 2014 (60 years)
Kathryn Mary Chaloner was a British-born American statistician. Chaloner was a statistics researcher who developed methods in Bayesian experimental design, and well known for her work on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, and women's health. She was a board member of the National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences, a group of faculty working towards inclusion and diversity in the doctoral-level mathematical sciences. She led an initiative in statistical sciences to broaden participation in doctoral-level studies in statistics and biostatistics.
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#1598

Nancy Selvin

#81741
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art...
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#1599

Cavell Brownie

#97780
Overall Influence
Cavell Brownie is a Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the North Carolina State University. Her research considered biometric methods and wildlife sampling. Education and career Brownie is African-American, and was born in Jamaica. She earned her doctoral degree at Cornell University in 1973, developing mathematical models to estimate bird populations. Her dissertation, Stochastic Models Allowing Age-Dependent Survival Rates for Banding Experiments on Exploited Bird Populations, was supervised by D. S. Robson.
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#1600

Elaine Chew

#116646
Overall Influence
Elaine Chew is an operations researcher and pianist focused on the study of musical structures as they apply to musical performance, composition and cognition, the analysis of electrocardiographic traces of arrhythmia, and digital therapeutics. She is currently Professor of Engineering at King's College London, where she is jointly appointed in the Department of Engineering and the Department of Cardiovascular Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences .
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