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.
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List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#2001
Nora Calderwood
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Nora Isobel Calderwood was a Scottish professor and mathematician. Early life and education Calderwood was born in 1896 in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, in Scotland. Her father Daniel Scott Calderwood was the headmaster of the Blairgowrie Public School. Her family then moved to Edinburgh when she was still young, after her father was appointed as the headmaster of the Church of Scotland Normal School.
Go to Profile#2002
Mary Clem
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Mary A. Clem was an American mathematician, and a human computer. She was a staff member at Iowa State University, and was recognized for inventing the “zero check” technique for detecting errors.
Go to Profile#2003
Louise Hay
1935 - 1989 (54 years)
Louise Hay was a French-born American mathematician. Her work focused on recursively enumerable sets and computational complexity theory, which was influential with both Soviet and US mathematicians in the 1970s. When she was appointed head of the mathematics department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was the only woman to head a math department at a major research university in her era.
Go to Profile#2004
Grace Marie Bareis
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Grace Marie Bareis was an American mathematician and educator who became the first person to receive a doctorate degree in mathematics from Ohio State University. Bareis was an assistant professor at Ohio State University where she taught for 40 years until her eventual retirement in 1946.
Go to Profile#2005
Frances Harshbarger
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Frances Harshbarger was an American mathematician. Education She obtained her B.A. with honors in 1923 at Grinnell College, and went to West Virginia University to serve as a half-time teacher and simultaneously work on her mathematics graduation; in 1925 she finished her M.A. After that she became head of the mathematics department of Potomac State College in Keyser, West Virginia. In 1927 to 1929, she was an assistant, in 1929 to 1930 a fellow, at the University of Illinois. In 1930, she obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics with a thesis in algebraic geometry, advised by A. B. Coble. She was one of the first American women who obtained a mathematics Ph.D.
Go to Profile#2006
Roxana Vivian
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Roxana Hayward Vivian was an American mathematics professor. She was the first female recipient of a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. Early life and education Roxana Hayward Vivian was born to Roxana Nott and Robert Hayward Vivian on December 9, 1871, in Hyde Park, Boston, Massachusetts. She went to Hyde Park High School and then, from 1890 to 1894, to Wellesley College where she graduated in Greek and mathematics.
Go to Profile#2007
Carol Karp
1926 - 1972 (46 years)
Carol Karp, born Carol Ruth Vander Velde , was an American mathematician of Dutch ancestry, best known for her work on infinitary logic. She also played viola in an all-women orchestra. Life Born in Michigan to a farming supply store manager and a housewife, Carol and her siblings graduated from high school in Ohio. After that, she graduated from Manchester University, Indiana and went back to Michigan to study at Michigan State University , where she earned a master's degree in 1950.
Go to Profile#2008
Mabel Minerva Young
1872 - 1963 (91 years)
Mabel Minerva Young was an American mathematician active at Wellesley College. Life Young was born July 18, 1872, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She began study at Wellesley College in 1894. Going to graduate study at Columbia University, she graduated with a master's degree in 1899. First she taught English at Northfield Seminary. In 1904 she began her long service at Wellesley College, beginning as an assistant in mathematics and becoming a full professor.
Go to Profile#2009
Ida Martha Metcalf
1857 - 1952 (95 years)
Ida Martha Metcalf was the second American woman to receive a PhD in mathematics. Early life Ida Metcalf was born in Texas to Charles A. and Martha C. Metcalf. During her youth, her family moved about the south. After her father’s death, she moved to New England with her mother and siblings. By 1870, she was living in Massachusetts, where she taught school for many years.
Go to Profile#2010
Winifred Sargent
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Winifred Lydia Caunden Sargent was an English mathematician. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge and carried out research into Lebesgue integration, fractional integration and differentiation and the properties of BK-spaces.
Go to Profile#2011
Ruth Gentry
1862 - 1917 (55 years)
Ruth Gentry was a pioneering American woman mathematician during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. She was the first Indiana-born woman to acquire a PhD degree in mathematics, and most likely the first woman born in Indiana to receive a doctoral degree in any scientific discipline.
Go to Profile#2012
Susan Jane Cunningham
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Susan Jane Cunningham was an American mathematician instrumental in the founding and development of Swarthmore College. She was born in Maryland, and studied mathematics and astronomy with Maria Mitchell at Vassar College as a special student during 1866–67. She also studied those subjects during several summers at Harvard University, Princeton University, Newnham College, Cambridge, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and Williams College.
Go to Profile#2013
Sarada Devi
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Sri Sarada Devi , born Kshemankari / Thakurmani / Saradamani Mukhopadhyay, was the wife and spiritual consort of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a nineteenth-century Hindu mystic. Sarada Devi is also reverentially addressed as the Holy Mother by the followers of the Sri Ramakrishna monastic order. The Sri Sarada Math and Ramakrishna Sarada Mission situated at Dakshineshwar is based on the ideals and life of Sarada Devi. She played an important role in the growth of the Ramakrishna Movement.
Go to Profile#2014
Christine Hamill
1923 - 1956 (33 years)
Christine Mary Hamill was an English mathematician who specialised in group theory and finite geometry. Education Hamill was one of the four children of English physiologist Philip Hamill. She attended St Paul's Girls' School and the Perse School for Girls. In 1942, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, becoming a wrangler in 1945.
Go to Profile#2015
Suzan Rose Benedict
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Suzan Rose Benedict was the first woman awarded a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and had a long teaching career at Smith College. Early life and education Suzan Benedict was born in Norwalk, Ohio, the youngest of seven children of David DeForrest Benedict, MD and Harriott Melvina Benedict . Dr. Benedict had been a Union Surgeon in the American Civil War. She was a niece of oil magnate and philanthropist, Louis Severance.
Go to Profile#2016
Ellen Burrell
1850 - 1938 (88 years)
Ellen Louisa Burrell was an American mathematics professor, head of the Department of Pure Mathematics at Wellesley College from 1897 to 1916. Early life Burrell was born in Lockport, New York, the daughter of Myron Louis Burrell and Mary Jones Burrell. She earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1880, in the same class as her future colleagues Katharine Lee Bates and Charlotte Fitch Roberts. She went to Germany for further studies at Göttingen in 1896 and 1897.
Go to Profile#2017
Helen Almira Shafer
1839 - 1894 (55 years)
Helen Almira Shafer was an American educator and president of Wellesley College. Life Helen Almira Shafer was born Newark, New Jersey on the 23 September 1839. Her father was a clergyman of the Congregational Church. She was educated in a seminary in Albion, New York, afterwards attending Oberlin College.
Go to Profile#2018
Hildegard Rothe-Ille
1899 - 1942 (43 years)
Hildegard Rothe-Ille, born Hildegard Ille, , was a German mathematician. Career She was one of Issai Schur’s doctoral students. According to Alexander Soifer, “Van der Waerden walked away from Ramseyan prehistory. Issai Schur, on the other hand, continued to produce Ramseyan mathematics, and moreover directed and inspired his PhD students Richard Rado, Hildegard Ille and Alfred Brauer to do the same.”
Go to Profile#2019
Anna Irwin Young
1873 - 1920 (47 years)
Anna Irwin Young was an American professor of mathematics, physics and astronomy and in 1916 was a charter member of the Mathematical Association of America. Biography Young was born in what is now Chicago Heights, Illinois on November 25, 1873. Her father was Rev. Samuel Young of Ireland, and her mother was Eliza Caskey Young.
Go to Profile#2020
Lili Bleeker
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Caroline Emilie "Lili" Bleeker was a Dutch entrepreneur and physicist from Middelburg known for her designs and the manufacturing of optical instruments. In the era she grew up, it was the norm for women to become housewives whose chief roles were to perform domestic duties, but Bleeker did not want to conform to these standards. She wanted to pursue an education, and never married her life-long partner, Gerard Willemse, which was quite anomalous at the time. She would later emerge as one of the first women in the Netherlands to become a doctor in physics and mathematics. After earning her Ph...
Go to Profile#2021
Maikki Friberg
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Maria Elisabeth Friberg was a Finnish educator, journal editor, suffragist and peace activist. She is remembered for her involvement in the Finnish women's movement, especially as chair of the Finnish women's rights organisation Suomen Naisyhdistys and as the founder and editor of the women's journal Naisten Ääni . She travelled widely, promoting understanding of Finland abroad while participating in international conferences and contributing to the foreign press.
Go to Profile#2022
Rita Hayworth
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Rita Hayworth was an American actress. She achieved fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars, appearing in 61 films over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
Go to Profile#2023
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
Go to Profile#2024
Adele Astaire
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Adele Astaire Douglass , was an American dancer, stage actress, and singer. After beginning work as a dancer and vaudeville performer at the age of nine, Astaire built a successful performance career with her younger brother, Fred Astaire.
Go to Profile#2025
Gladys L. Palmer
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Gladys Louise Palmer was an American social statistician who "gained worldwide attention for her research on manpower problems and labor mobility" and for her work on the standardization of labor statistics.
Go to Profile#2026
Eileen Brooke
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Eileen Minnie Brooke was a British statistician and health policy professional. Education Eileen Minnie Brooke attended East London College, earning a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1926, and an M.Sc. in mathematics in 1929. She completed doctoral studies in 1952.
Go to Profile#2027
Lila Knudsen Randolph
1908 - 1965 (57 years)
Lila Knudsen Randolph was the chief statistician at the Food and Drug Administration and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. At the FDA, her work involved statistical sampling of food and drugs, and "she was instrumental in developing practical applications of statistics in the validation of analytical methods". She also did early work in computational statistics, writing in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1942 about the use of punched cards to construct orthogonal polynomials.
Go to Profile#2028
Ruth Moufang
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Ruth Moufang was a German mathematician. Biography She was born to German chemist Eduard Moufang and Else Fecht Moufang. Eduard Moufang was the son of Friedrich Carl Moufang from Mainz, and Elisabeth von Moers from Mainz. Ruth Moufang's mother was Else Fecht, who was the daughter of Alexander Fecht from Kehl and Ella Scholtz . Ruth was the younger of her parents' two daughters, having an elder sister named Erica.
Go to Profile#2029
Gertrude Blanch
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Gertrude Blanch was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation. She was a leader of the Mathematical Tables Project in New York from its beginning. She worked later as the assistant director and leader of the Numerical Analysis at UCLA computing division and was head of mathematical research for the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
Go to Profile#2030
Phyllis Nicolson
1917 - 1968 (51 years)
Phyllis Nicolson was a British mathematician and physicist best known for her work on the Crank–Nicolson method together with John Crank. Early life and education Nicolson was born Phyllis Lockett in Macclesfield and went to Stockport High School for Girls. She graduated from Manchester University with a B.Sc. in 1938, M.Sc. in 1939 and a Ph.D. on Three Problems in Theoretical Physics in 1946. Her Ph.D. thesis began with cosmic ray research conducted under Lajos Jánossy during 1939 and 1940.
Go to Profile#2031
Jane Worcester
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Jane Worcester was a biostatistician and epidemiologist who became the second tenured female professor, after Martha May Eliot, and the first female chair of biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#2032
Ruth Lyttle Satter
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Ruth Lyttle Satter was an American botanist best known for her work on circadian leaf movement. Biography Ruth Lyttle Satter was born March 8, 1923, in New York City as Ruth Lyttle. Satter received a B.A. in mathematics and physics from Barnard College in 1944. After graduating, she worked at Bell Laboratories and Maxson Company. In 1946 she married Robert Satter and in 1947 she became a homemaker, devoting herself to raising her and Robert's four children, Mimi, Shoshana, Jane and Dick. While raising her children, her love of plants led her to complete the New York Botanical Garden's horticu...
Go to Profile#2033
Elizabeth Scott
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Elizabeth Leonard Scott was an American mathematician specializing in statistics. Scott was born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Her family moved to Berkeley, California when she was 4 years old. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she studied astronomy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1949 in astronomy, and received a permanent position in the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley in 1951.
Go to Profile#2034
Marie Davidian
Marie Davidian is an American biostatistician known for her work in longitudinal data analysis and precision medicine. She is the J. Stuart Hunter Distinguished Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was president of the American Statistical Association for 2013.
Go to Profile#2035
Wanda Szmielew
1918 - 1976 (58 years)
Wanda Szmielew née Montlak was a Polish mathematical logician who first proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups. Life Wanda Montlak was born on 5 April 1918 in Warsaw. She completed high school in 1935 and married, taking the name Szmielew. In the same year she entered the University of Warsaw, where she studied logic under Adolf Lindenbaum, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Alfred Tarski. Her research at this time included work on the axiom of choice, but it was interrupted by the 1939 Invasion of Poland.
Go to Profile#2036
Gertrude Mary Cox
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Gertrude Mary Cox was an American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research Division of North Carolina State University. Her most important and influential research dealt with experimental design; In 1950 she published the book Experimental Designs, on the subject with W. G. Cochran, which became the major reference work on the design of experiments for statisticians for years afterwards.
Go to Profile#2037
Paola Sebastiani
Paola Sebastiani is a biostatistician and a professor at Boston University working in the field of genetic epidemiology, building prognostic models that can be used for the dissection of complex traits. Her research interests include Bayesian modeling of biomedical data, particularly genetic and genomic data.
Go to Profile#2038
Emmy Noether
1882 - 1935 (53 years)
Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
Go to Profile#2039
Pia Nalli
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Pia Maria Nalli was an Italian mathematician known for her work on the summability of Fourier series, on Morera's theorem for analytic functions of several variables and for finding the solution to the Fredholm integral equation of the third kind for the first time. Her research interests ranged from algebraic geometry to functional analysis and tensor analysis; she was a speaker at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Go to Profile#2040
Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina
1899 - 1999 (100 years)
Pelageya Yakovlevna Polubarinova-Kochina was a Soviet and Russian applied mathematician, known for her work on fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, particularly, the application of Fuchsian equations, as well in the history of mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1946 and full member in 1958.
Go to Profile#2041
Julia Robinson
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
Julia Hall Bowman Robinson was an American mathematician noted for her contributions to the fields of computability theory and computational complexity theory—most notably in decision problems. Her work on Hilbert's tenth problem played a crucial role in its ultimate resolution. Robinson was a 1983 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#2042
Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
Go to Profile#2043
Marion Cameron Gray
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Marion Gray was a Scottish mathematician who discovered a graph with 54 vertices and 81 edges while working at American Telephone & Telegraph. The graph is commonly known as the Gray graph. Early life and education Marion Gray was born in Ayr, Scotland on 26 March 1902 to Marion and James Gray. She attended Ayr Grammar School and Ayr Academy . In 1919 she entered the University of Edinburgh where she graduated in 1922 with a first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. She continued on at the University for a further two years as a post doctoral student in mathematics where she was supervised by E.T.
Go to Profile#2044
Violet B. Haas
1926 - 1986 (60 years)
Violet Bushwick Haas was an American applied mathematician specializing in control theory and optimal estimation who became a professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University College of Engineering.
Go to Profile#2045
Beatrice Worsley
1921 - 1972 (51 years)
Beatrice Helen Worsley was the first female Canadian computer scientist. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as computer science. She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.
Go to Profile#2046
Adele Goldstine
1920 - 1964 (44 years)
Adele Goldstine was an American mathematician and computer programmer. She wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her work programming the computer, she was also an instrumental player in converting the ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions.
Go to Profile#2047
Rózsa Péter
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Rózsa Péter, born Rózsa Politzer, was a Hungarian mathematician and logician. She is best known as the "founding mother of recursion theory". Early life and education Péter was born in Budapest, Hungary, as Rózsa Politzer . She attended Pázmány Péter University , originally studying chemistry but later switching to mathematics. She attended lectures by Lipót Fejér and József Kürschák. While at university, she met László Kalmár; they would collaborate in future years and Kalmár encouraged her to pursue her love of mathematics.
Go to Profile#2048
Anne C. Morel
Anne C. Morel was an American mathematician known for her work in logic, order theory, and algebra. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Education and career Morel graduated in 1941 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She began graduate study in mathematics in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley, but left her studies to serve in the WAVES during World War II. She returned to her studies in Berkeley in 1946, and completed her Ph.D. in 1953. Her dissertation, A Study in the Arithmetic of Order Types, was supervised by Al...
Go to Profile#2049
Helen M. Walker
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Helen Mary Walker was a statistician and prominent educational researcher, and the first female president of the American Statistical Association when she was elected in 1944. From 1949 to 1950, she was also president of the American Educational Research Association and served on the Young Women's Christian Association from 1936 to 1950.
Go to Profile#2050
Mary Cartwright
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright was a British mathematician. She was one of the pioneers of what would later become known as chaos theory. Along with J. E. Littlewood, Cartwright saw many solutions to a problem which would later be seen as an example of the butterfly effect.
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