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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#201
Hu Hesheng
#25503
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Hu Hesheng is a Chinese mathematician. She served as vice-president of Chinese Mathematical Society, president of the Shanghai Mathematical Society, and is an academician of Chinese Academy of Science. She held the Noether Lecture in 2002.
Go to Profile#202
Linda J. S. Allen
#39569
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Linda Joy Svoboda Allen is an American mathematician and mathematical biologist, the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. Education and career Allen earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1975 from the College of St. Scholastica, and a master's degree in 1978 and doctorate in 1978 from the University of Tennessee. Her dissertation, Applications of Differential Inequalities to Persistence and Extinction Problems for Reaction-Diffusion Systems, was supervised by Thomas G. Hallam.
Go to Profile#203
Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach
#42430
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach is a French mathematician and professor. Education and career Kosmann-Schwarzbach obtained her doctoral degree in 1970 at the University of Paris under supervision of André Lichnerowicz on a dissertation titled Dérivées de Lie des spineurs .
Go to Profile#204
Natalia Berloff
#24252
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Natalia G. Berloff is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Her research includes the use of polaritons to simulate structures such as the classical XY model. Early life and education Berloff grew up in Russia. She earned her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1996, under the supervision of Louis Norberg Howard.
Go to Profile#205
Emily Riehl
#37709
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Emily Riehl is an American mathematician who has contributed to higher category theory and homotopy theory. Much of her work, including her PhD thesis, concerns model structures and more recently the foundations of infinity-categories. She is the author of two textbooks and serves on the editorial boards of three journals.
Go to Profile#206
Verena Huber-Dyson
#20507
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Verena Esther Huber-Dyson was a Swiss-American mathematician, known for her work on group theory and formal logic. She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician", who did research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory. At the time of her death, she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.
Go to Profile#207
Annette Werner
#44572
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Annette Werner is a German mathematician. Her research interests include diophantine geometry and the algebraic geometry of non-Archimedean ordered fields, including the study of buildings, Berkovich spaces, and tropical geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Go to Profile#208
Alice T. Schafer
#30976
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Alice Turner Schafer was an American mathematician. She was one of the founding members of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971. Early life Alice Elizabeth Turner was born on June 18, 1915, in Richmond, Virginia. She received a full scholarship to study at the University of Richmond. She was the only female mathematics major. At the time, women were not allowed in the campus library. She was a brilliant student and won the department's James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year. She completed her B.A. degree in mathematics in 1936.
Go to Profile#209
Ann S. Almgren
#36701
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ann S. Almgren is an American applied mathematician who works as a senior scientist and group leader of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her primary research interests are in computational algorithms for solving PDE's for fluid dynamics in a variety of application areas. Her current projects include the development and implementation of new multiphysics algorithms in high-resolution adaptive mesh codes that are designed for the latest multicore architectures.
Go to Profile#210
Nina Uraltseva
#43588
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Nina Nikolaevna Uraltseva is a Russian mathematician, a professor of mathematics and head of the department of mathematical physics at Saint Petersburg State University, and the editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the St. Petersburg Mathematical Society. Her specialty is the study of nonlinear partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#211
Domina Eberle Spencer
#36323
Overall Influence
1920 - 2022 (102 years)
Domina Eberle Spencer was an American mathematician who was Professor at the University of Connecticut. Spencer was born on September 26, 1920, and earned her Ph.D. in 1942 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Dirk Jan Struik. She worked on electrodynamics and field theory.
Go to Profile#212
Mary L. Boas
#27521
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Mary Layne Boas was an American mathematician and physics professor best known as the author of Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences , an undergraduate textbook that was still widely used in college classrooms as of 1999.
Go to Profile#213
Eva Viehmann
#49246
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Eva Viehmann is a German mathematician who holds a professorial chair in the arithmetic geometry and representation theory research group at the University of Münster. Before that she was a professor working on arithmetic geometry at the Technical University of Munich.
Go to Profile#214
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger
#37095
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger is a Hungarian and Swiss mathematician. She is an Emmy Noether Professor Emeritus at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She has worked on several topics in topology, algebra and number theory, e.g. on the theory of knots, on lattices, on quadratic forms and on Galois cohomology. Along with Raman Parimala, she proved Serre's conjecture II regarding the Galois cohomology of a simply-connected semisimple algebraic group when such a group is of classical type.
Go to Profile#215
Miranda Cheng
#29542
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Miranda Chih-Ning Cheng is a Taiwanese-born and Dutch-educated mathematician and theoretical physicist who works as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is known for formulating the umbral moonshine conjectures and for her work on the connections between K3 surfaces and string theory.
Go to Profile#216
Esther Szekeres
#26004
Overall Influence
1910 - 2005 (95 years)
Esther Szekeres was a Hungarian–Australian mathematician. Biography Esther Klein was born to Ignaz Klein in a Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary in 1910. As a young physics student in Budapest, Klein was a member of a group of Hungarians including Paul Erdős, George Szekeres and Pál Turán that convened over interesting mathematical problems.
Go to Profile#217
Anneli Cahn Lax
#36320
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
Anneli Cahn Lax was an American mathematician, who was known for being an editor of the Mathematics Association of America's New Mathematical Library Series, and for her work in reforming mathematics education with the inclusion of language skills. Anneli Lax received a bachelor's degree in 1942 from Adelphi University and her doctorate in 1956. She was a professor of mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute. She was married to the mathematician Peter Lax.
Go to Profile#218
Cristina Pereyra
#45913
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
María Cristina Pereyra is a Venezuelan mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of New Mexico, and the author of several books on wavelets and harmonic analysis. Pereyra was an American Mathematical Society Council member at large from 2019 - 2021.
Go to Profile#219
June Barrow-Green
#39420
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
June Barrow-Green is a professor of History of Mathematics at the Open University and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Education Barrow-Green obtained a BSc Hons in Mathematics in 1986 and an MSc in Mathematical Physics in 1989, both from King's College London. In 1993 she gained a PhD in mathematics from the Open University, under supervision of Jeremy Gray, on Poincaré and the Three Body Problem.
Go to Profile#220
Talithia Williams
#31612
Overall Influence
Talithia D. Williams is an American statistician and mathematician at Harvey Mudd College who researches the spatiotemporal structure of data. She was the first black woman to achieve tenure at Harvey Mudd College. Williams is an advocate for engaging more African Americans in engineering and science.
Go to Profile#221
Reiko Miyaoka
#48436
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Reiko Miyaoka is a Japanese mathematician and professor at Tohoku University, known for her research on hypersurfaces. In 2001 she won the Geometry prize of the Mathematical Society of Japan. She received her Ph.D. in 1983 from Tokyo Institute of Technology. Her husband Yoichi Miyaoka is also a mathematician.
Go to Profile#222
Karen D. King
#49520
Overall Influence
1971 - 2019 (48 years)
Karen Denise King was an African-American mathematics educator, a program director at National Science Foundation, and a 2012 AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer. Early life Karen Denise King was born on July 6, 1971, in Washington, D.C. She was selected for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Women in Science and Engineering Scholars Program at Spelman College as an undergraduate and finished her degree in mathematics magna cum laude in 3 years. King next attended University of Maryland with a National Science Foundation fellowship and earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education in 1997. Her dissertation advisor was Patricia F.
Go to Profile#223
Tanya Khovanova
#38943
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Tanya Khovanova is a Soviet-American mathematician who became the second female gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiads. She is a lecturer in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#224
Ursula K. Le Guin
#300
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American ...
Go to Profile#225
Nancy K. Stanton
#48725
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Nancy Kahn Stanton is a professor emeritus of mathematics at University of Notre Dame. She is known for her research in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. Career Stanton received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 under Isadore Singer. Stanton now works at University of Notre Dame.
Go to Profile#226
Julia Wolf
#26431
Overall Influence
Julia Wolf is a British mathematician specialising in arithmetic combinatorics who was the 2016 winner of the Anne Bennett Prize of the London Mathematical Society. She is currently a professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#227
Kim Plofker
#27179
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Kim Leslie Plofker is an American historian of mathematics, specializing in Indian mathematics. Education and career Born in Chennai, India, Plofker received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Haverford College. She received her Ph.D. in 1995 while studying with adviser David Pingree from Brown University, where she conducted research and later joined as a guest professor.
Go to Profile#228
Antonella Grassi
#42167
Overall Influence
Antonella Grassi is an Italian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and string theory. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Education Grassi received her Ph.D. from Duke University under the supervision of David R. Morrison. Her dissertation was entitled "Minimal Models of Elliptic Threefolds."
Go to Profile#229
Phyllis Fox
#18066
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Phyllis Ann Fox was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Early life and education Fox was born on March 13, 1923, and raised in Colorado. She did her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, earning a B.A. in mathematics in 1944.
Go to Profile#230
Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu
#49310
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu is a Taiwanese mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. Her research interests include algebraic geometry and symplectic geometry. Education Liu graduated from National Taiwan University in 1996, and earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from Harvard University under the supervision of Shing-Tung Yau.
Go to Profile#231
Yael Dowker
#47044
Overall Influence
1919 - 2016 (97 years)
Yael Naim Dowker was an Israeli-born english mathematician, prominent especially due to her work in the fields of measure theory, ergodic theory and topological dynamics. Biography Yael Naim was born in Tel Aviv. She left for the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1941, as a graduate student, she met Clifford Hugh Dowker, a Canadian topologist working as an instructor there. The couple married in 1944. From 1943 to 1946 they worked together at the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clifford also worked as a civilian advi...
Go to Profile#232
Barbara Keyfitz
#34456
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Barbara Lee Keyfitz is a Canadian-American mathematician, the Dr. Charles Saltzer Professor of Mathematics at Ohio State University. In her research, she studies nonlinear partial differential equations and associated conservation laws.
Go to Profile#233
Bhama Srinivasan
#34844
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Bhama Srinivasan is a mathematician known for her work in the representation theory of finite groups. Her contributions were honored with the 1990 Noether Lecture. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1981 to 1983.
Go to Profile#234
Wendy Myrvold
#33177
Overall Influence
Wendy Joanne Myrvold is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on graph algorithms, planarity testing, and algorithms in enumerative combinatorics. She is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Victoria.
Go to Profile#235
Pamela Cook
#39367
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Leslie Pamela Cook-Ioannidis is an American mathematician, the Unidel Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. She was the president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for 2015–2016. Her research concerns fluid dynamics.
Go to Profile#236
Ortrud Oellermann
#21615
Overall Influence
Ortrud R. Oellermann is a South African mathematician specializing in graph theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Winnipeg. Education and career Oellermann was born in Vryheid. She earned a bachelor's degree, cum laude honours, and a master's degree at the University of Natal in 1981, 1982, and 1983 respectively, as a student of Henda Swart. She completed her Ph.D. in 1986 at Western Michigan University. Her dissertation was Generalized Connectivity in Graphs and was supervised by Gary Chartrand.
Go to Profile#237
Lotte Hollands
#34842
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Lotte Hollands is a Dutch mathematician and mathematical physicist who studies quantum field theory, supersymmetric gauge theory, and string theory. She is an associate professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University.
Go to Profile#238
Alison Miller
#39976
Overall Influence
Alison Beth Miller is an American mathematician who was the first American female gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She also holds the distinction of placing in the top 16 of the Putnam Competition four times, the last three of which were recognized by the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam award for outstanding performance by a woman on the contest.
Go to Profile#239
Barbara Kaltenbacher
#47032
Overall Influence
Barbara Kaltenbacher is an Austrian mathematician whose research concerns inverse problems, regularization, and PDE-constrained optimization, with applications including the mathematical modeling of piezoelectricity and nonlinear acoustics. She is a Professor of Applied Analysis at the University of Klagenfurt, a member of the Executive Committee of the European Mathematical Society and editor in chief of the Journal of the European Mathematical Society.. Barbara Kaltenbacher has published more than 130 scientific papers and is author of four monographs.
Go to Profile#240
Carolyn Mahoney
#46583
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Carolyn Ray Boone Mahoney is an American mathematician who served as president of Lincoln University of Missouri. Her research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, and matroids. Early life and education Carolyn Mahoney was born the sixth of thirteen children in 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee to Stephen and Myrtle Boone. Her grandmother cared for the children while her mother worked. Mahoney attended Catholic schools, where she was encouraged in her interest in mathematics by the nuns. As a teenager, Mahoney's parents separated due to her father's drinking and gambling and the family was...
Go to Profile#241
Tatiana Toro
#40575
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Tatiana Toro is a Colombian-American mathematician at the University of Washington. Her research is "at the interface of geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis and partial differential equations". Toro was appointed director of the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute for 2022–2027.
Go to Profile#242
Shoshana Kamin
#17622
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Shoshana Kamin , born Susanna L'vovna Kamenomostskaya , is a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician, working on the theory of parabolic partial differential equations and related mathematical physics problems.
Go to Profile#243
Brooke Shipley
#42855
Overall Influence
Brooke Elizabeth Shipley is an American mathematician. She works as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was head of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science from 2014 to 2022. Her research concerns homotopy theory and homological algebra.
Go to Profile#244
Heather Harrington
#39860
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Heather A. Harrington is an applied mathematician interested in applied algebra and geometry, dynamical systems, chemical reaction network theory, topological data analysis, and systems biology. Since 2020, she is professor of mathematics and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, where she heads the Algebraic Systems Biology group. In 2023, she became a director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, where she is also leading the interinstitutional Center for Systems Biology Dresden together with partners fr...
Go to Profile#245
Chelsea Walton
#46241
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Chelsea Walton is a mathematician whose research interests include noncommutative algebra, noncommutative algebraic geometry, symmetry in quantum mechanics, Hopf algebras, and quantum groups. She is an associate professor at Rice University and a Sloan Research Fellow.
Go to Profile#246
Julia Gordon
#40165
Overall Influence
Julia Gordon is a mathematician at the University of British Columbia whose research concerns algebraic geometry, including representation theory, -adic groups, motivic integration, and the Langlands program.
Go to Profile#247
Sema Salur
#28513
Overall Influence
Sema Salur is a Turkish-American mathematician, currently serving as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rochester. She was awarded the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize for 2014–2015, a prize intended to give a recently promoted associate professor a year-long fellowship at Cornell University; and has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation Research Award beginning in 2017. She specialises in the "geometry and topology of the moduli spaces of calibrated submanifolds inside Calabi–Yau, G2 and Spin manifolds", which are important to certain aspects of string theory and M-th...
Go to Profile#248
Idun Reiten
#38946
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Idun Reiten is a Norwegian professor of mathematics. She is considered to be one of Norway's greatest mathematicians today. Career She took her PhD degree at the University of Illinois in 1971. She was appointed as a professor at the University of Trondheim in 1982, now named the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#249
Agata Smoktunowicz
#45275
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Agata Smoktunowicz FRSE is a Polish mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is in abstract algebra. Contributions Smoktunowicz's contributions to mathematics include constructing noncommutative nil rings, solving a "famous problem" formulated in 1970 by Irving Kaplansky. She proved the Artin–Stafford gap conjecture according to which the Gelfand–Kirillov dimension of a graded domain cannot fall within the open interval . She also found an example of a nil ideal of a ring R that does not lift to a nil ideal of the polynomial ring R[X], disproving a c...
Go to Profile#250
Catherine Goldstein
#39410
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Catherine Goldstein is a French number theorist and historian of mathematics who works as a director of research at the . She was president of L'association femmes et mathématiques in 1991. Education and career Goldstein studied at the Ecole normale supérieure from 1976 to 1980, earning an agrégation in mathematics in 1978. She completed a doctorate of the third cycle in 1981, with a dissertation on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory supervised by John H. Coates.
Go to Profile