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.
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List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#2051
Ada Lovelace
1815 - 1852 (37 years)
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
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Marjorie Lee Browne
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Marjorie Lee Browne was a mathematics educator. She was one of the first African-American women to receive a PhD in mathematics. Early life and education Marjorie Lee Browne was a prominent mathematician and educator who, in 1949, became only the third African-American woman to earn a doctorate in her field. Browne was born on September 9, 1914, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Mary Taylor Lee and Lawrence Johnson Lee. Her father, a railway postal clerk remarried shortly after his wife's death, when Browne was almost two years old. He and his second wife, Lottie, a school teacher, encouraged their daughter to take her studies seriously as she was a gifted student.
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Grace Chisholm Young
1868 - 1944 (76 years)
Grace Chisholm Young was an English mathematician. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, England and continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, where in 1895 she received a doctorate. Her early writings were published under the name of her husband, William Henry Young, and they collaborated on mathematical work throughout their lives. For her work on calculus , she was awarded the Gamble Prize for Mathematics by Girton College.
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Euphemia Haynes
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was an American mathematician and educator. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, which she earned from the Catholic University of America in 1943.
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Bella Subbotovskaya
1938 - 1982 (44 years)
Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya was a Soviet mathematician who founded the short-lived Jewish People's University in Moscow. The school's purpose was to offer free education to those affected by structured anti-Semitism within the Soviet educational system. Its existence was outside Soviet authority and it was investigated by the KGB. Subbotovskaya herself was interrogated a number of times by the KGB and shortly thereafter was hit by a truck and died, in what has been speculated was an assassination.
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Iris Runge
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Iris Anna Runge was a German applied mathematician and physicist. Life and work Iris Runge was the eldest of six children of mathematician Carl Runge. She started studying physics, mathematics, and geography at the University of Göttingen in 1907, with the aim of becoming a teacher. At that time, she only attended the lectures, since women were not allowed to formally study at Prussian universities until 1908–1909. She attended lectures given by her father and spent a semester at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich working with Arnold Sommerfeld, which led to her first publication, Anwendungen der Vektorrechnung auf die Grundlagen der Geometrischen Optik in Annalen der Physik .
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Émilie du Châtelet
1706 - 1749 (43 years)
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was a French natural philosopher and mathematician from the early 1730s until her death due to complications during childbirth in 1749.
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Hilda Phoebe Hudson
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Hilda Phoebe Hudson was an English mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, in particular on Cremona transformations. Hudson was interested in the link between mathematics and her religious beliefs.
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Ruth Teitelbaum
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Ruth Teitelbaum was one of the first computer programmers in the world. Teitelbaum was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
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Marie Johanna Weiss
1903 - 1952 (49 years)
Marie Johanna Weiss was an American mathematician, university professor and textbook author. In 1927, she became the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Stanford University. Life and work Weiss was born in Eugene, California, the youngest of three surviving children of Alice Hedwig and Frederick Weiss, both German emigrants. She attended public high schools in Stockton, California, before enrolling at Stanford University in 1921. In the summer of 1924, after her junior year, she was an assistant instructor in a mathematics class there. She was accepted into the honorary society Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1925 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics with distinction.
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Hel Braun
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Helene Braun was a German mathematician who specialized in number theory and modular forms. Her autobiography, The Beginning of A Scientific Career, described her experience as a female scientist working in a male-dominated field at the time, in the Third Reich.
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Agnes Meyer Driscoll
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Agnes Meyer Driscoll , known as "Miss Aggie" or "Madame X'", was an American cryptanalyst during both World War I and World War II and was known as "the first lady of naval cryptology." Early years Born Agnes May Meyer in Geneseo, Illinois, in 1889, Driscoll moved with her family to Westerville, Ohio, in 1895 where her father, Gustav Meyer, had taken a job teaching music at Otterbein College. In 1909, he donated the family home to the Anti-Saloon League, which had recently moved its headquarters to Westerville. The home was later donated to the Westerville Public Library and is now home to the...
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Philippa Fawcett
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Philippa Garrett Fawcett was an English mathematician and educationalist. She was the first woman to obtain the top score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams. She taught at Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the normal school in Johannesburg, and she became an administrator for the London County Council.
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Galina Tyurina
1938 - 1970 (32 years)
Galina Nikolaevna Tyurina was a Soviet mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. Despite dying young, she was known for "a series of brilliant papers" on the classification of complex or algebraic structures on topological spaces, on K3 surfaces, on singular points of algebraic varieties, and on the rigidity of complex structures. She was the only woman among a group of "exceptionally brilliant" Soviet mathematicians who became active in the 1960s and "quickly became the leaders and the driving forces of Soviet mathematics".
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Saly Ruth Ramler
1894 - 1993 (99 years)
Saly Ruth Ramler , also known as Saly Ruth Struik, was the first woman to receive a mathematics PhD from the German University in Prague, now known as Charles University. Her 1919 dissertation, on the axioms of affine geometry, was supervised by Gerhard Kowalewski and Georg Alexander Pick. She married the Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics Dirk Jan Struik in 1923. Between 1924 and 1926, the pair traveled Europe and met many prominent mathematicians, using Dirk Struik's Rockefeller fellowship. In 1926, they emigrated to the United States, and Dirk Struik accepted a position at MI...
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Jessie MacWilliams
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Florence Jessie Collinson MacWilliams was an English mathematician who contributed to the field of coding theory, and was one of the first women to publish in the field. MacWilliams' thesis "Combinatorial Problems of Elementary Group Theory" contains one of the most important combinatorial results in coding theory, and is now known as the MacWilliams Identity.
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Cora Ratto de Sadosky
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Corina Eloísa Ratto de Sadosky was an Argentine mathematician, educator and militant activist in support of human and women's rights in Argentina and beyond. She played an important part in the Argentine University Federation supporting republican interests during the Spanish Civil War and helping victims of Falangist oppression. In 1941, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, she established and headed the anti-fascist Junta de la Victoria which stood for democracy and women's suffrage. In 1965, Ratto founded Columna 10, a journal denouncing the conduct of the United States in the Vietnam War.
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Angelina Cabras
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Angelina Cabras was an Italian mathematician and physicist. She earned degrees in mathematics from the University of Turin in 1924 and in physics from the University of Cagliari in 1927. She obtained a position in mathematical physics at Cagliari, later moving to the institute of theoretical mechanics there. Her research concerned higher dimensional rigid body dynamics, the theory of relativity, and inductance.
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Käte Fenchel
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Käte Fenchel née Käte Sperling was a German-born Jewish mathematician, best known for her work on non-abelian groups. Life Käte was born in Berlin to a newspaper reporter and a bookkeeper, Rusza Sperling . As a child, she quickly learned to read and write, faster than most children. She was allowed to skip several grade levels and was awarded scholarships to attend private school. She enrolled at the University of Berlin, but she found that she faced daunting obstacles there in the form of gender discrimination because she was pursuing studies in pure mathematics. She was encouraged to write ...
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Divsha Amirà
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Divsha Amirà was an Israeli mathematician and educator. Biography Amirà was born in Brańsk, Russian Empire to Rivka and Aharon Itin. She immigrated to Israel with her family in 1906. Her father was one of the founders of Ahuzat Bayit , a founder of the Tel Aviv Great Synagogue, and the owner of the first publishing house in Jaffa. She graduated in the second class of the Herzliya Gymnasium in 1914.
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Helen Abbot Merrill
1864 - 1949 (85 years)
Helen Abbot Merrill was an American mathematician, educator and textbook author. Biography Merrill was born on March 30, 1864, in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey; her father was a New Jersey insurance claims adjustor of colonial stock. She moved to Massachusetts as a child. She entered Wellesley College in 1882, intending to major in Greek and Latin, but switching to mathematics after one year, and graduated in 1886. In 1893 she began teaching at Wellesley while also studying and guest lecturing abroad. In 1903 she earned a PhD in mathematics at Yale under the direction of James Pierpont. In 1920 she was appointed vice-president of the Mathematical Association of America.
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Thyra Eibe
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Thyra Eibe was a Danish mathematician and translator, the first woman to earn a mathematics degree from the University of Copenhagen. She is known for her translation of Euclid's Elements into the Danish Language.
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Grace Andrews
1869 - 1951 (82 years)
Grace Andrews was an American mathematician. She, along with Charlotte Angas Scott, was one of only two women listed in the first edition of American Men of Science, which appeared in 1906. Education Andrews was one of five children of Edward Gayer Andrews, a Methodist Episcopal bishop and school administrator; she was born in Brooklyn, and moved frequently as a child, including stays in Ohio, Iowa, Washington DC, and Europe. She was a student at Mount Vernon Seminary and College, and obtained her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1890, taking a five-year program at Wellesley th...
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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.”
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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.
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Margaret Merrell
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Margaret Merrell was an American biostatistician who taught at Johns Hopkins University for many years and became the first female full professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is known for her research with Lowell Reed on the construction of life tables. She also observed that, for longitudinal data on individuals, fitting a curve to each individual and then averaging the parameters describing the curve will typically give different results than averaging the data values of the individuals and fitting a single curve to the averaged data.
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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...
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Sally Elizabeth Carlson
1896 - 2000 (104 years)
Sally Elizabeth Carlson was an American mathematician, the first woman and one of the first two people to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Minnesota. Early life and education Carlson was born in Minneapolis to a large working-class family of Swedish immigrants. She became her high school valedictorian in 1913, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1917, and earned a master's degree there in 1918. After teaching mathematics for two years, she returned to graduate study in 1920, and completed her Ph.D. at Minnesota in 1924. Both students were supervised by Dunham...
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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.
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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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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...
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Vera Faddeeva
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Vera Faddeeva was a Soviet mathematician. Faddeeva published some of the earliest work in the field of numerical linear algebra. Her 1950 work, Computational methods of linear algebra was widely acclaimed and she won a USSR State Prize for it. Between 1962 and 1975, she wrote many research papers with her husband, Dmitry Konstantinovich Faddeev. She is remembered as an important Russian mathematician, specializing in linear algebra, who worked in the 20th century.
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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.
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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.
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Emilie Virginia Haynsworth
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Emilie Virginia Haynsworth was an American mathematician at Auburn University who worked in linear algebra and matrix theory. She gave the name to Schur complements and is the namesake of the Haynsworth inertia additivity formula. She was known for the "absolute originality" of her mathematical formulations, her "strong and independent mind", her "fine sense of mathematical elegance", and her "strong mixture of the traditional and unconventional".
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Hilda Geiringer
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Hilda Geiringer , also known as Hilda von Mises and Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer, was an Austrian mathematician. Life Geiringer was born in 1893 in Vienna, Austria into a Jewish family. Her father, Ludwig Geiringer, was born in Hungary and her mother, Martha Wertheimer, was from Vienna. Her parents had married while her father was working in Vienna as a textile manufacturer.
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Margherita Piazzola Beloch
1879 - 1976 (97 years)
Margherita Beloch Piazzolla was an Italian mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry. Biography Beloch was the daughter of the German historian Karl Julius Beloch, who taught ancient history for 50 years at Sapienza University of Rome, and American Bella Bailey.
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Georgia Caldwell Smith
1909 - 1961 (52 years)
Georgia Caldwell Smith was one of the first African-American women to gain a bachelor's degree in mathematics. When she was 51, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, one of the earliest by an African-American woman, awarded posthumously in 1961. Smith was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Spelman College.
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Frances Hardcastle
1866 - 1941 (75 years)
Frances Hardcastle was an English mathematician, in 1894 one of the founding members of the American Mathematical Society. Her work included contributions to the theory of point groups. Biography Born in Writtle, just outside Chelmsford, Essex, Hardcastle was a daughter of Henry Hardcastle, a barrister, by his marriage in 1865 to Maria Sophia Herschel, daughter of the astronomer, mathematician, and chemist Sir John Herschel.
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Mary Emily Sinclair
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Mary Emily Sinclair was an American mathematician whose research concerned algebraic surfaces and the calculus of variations. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, and became Clark Professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College.
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Marie Gernet
1865 - 1924 (59 years)
Marie Gernet was a German mathematician who in 1895 became the second woman to obtain a doctorate at Heidelberg University. The first was Käthe Windscheid, who earned a doctorate for her work on English pastoral poetry in the previous year. Gernet was also the first native German woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, 13 years earlier than Emmy Noether. She was the only German among the first eight women to earn a mathematics Ph.D. in Germany.
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Anne Cobbe
1920 - 1971 (51 years)
Anne Philippa Cobbe was a mathematician at the University of Oxford. She was an inspirational and supportive pure mathematics tutor at Somerville College which, during her time there, was still a women's college.
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Annie Dale Biddle Andrews
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Annie Dale Biddle Andrews was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and career She was born in Hanford, California, the youngest daughter of Samuel Edward Biddle and Achsah Annie Biddle .
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Nelli Neumann
1886 - 1942 (56 years)
Nelli Neumann was a German mathematician who worked in synthetic geometry. She was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics at a German university. Biography Nelli Neumann was born in Breslau, Prussia, the only child of Jewish parents Max and Sophie Neumann. Her father was a judicial officer, while her mother died when Nelli was two years old. After ten years in the private Höhere Töchterschule in Breslau, Neumann attended grammar courses and graduated from the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium boys' school in 1905. Her father promoted her mathematical talent by arranging private mathematics lessons given by Richard Courant.
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Ruth Goulding Wood
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Ruth Goulding Wood was a professor of mathematics who researched non-Euclidean geometry at Smith College. Wood was also a member of the American Mathematical Society. Life and career Wood was born on January 29, 1875, in the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. After attending primary and secondary school in Pawtucket, Wood pursued and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1898. Wood then decided to further her education by attending Yale University, graduating with a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1901. Her thesis, Non-Euclidean displacements and symmetry transformations, concerned t...
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Leila Bram
1927 - 1979 (52 years)
Leila Ann Dragonette Bram was an American mathematician. She was one of the first to study mock theta functions, and for many years directed the mathematics program at the Office of Naval Research, a position where she set the program for much of mathematics research.
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Cora Barbara Hennel
1886 - 1947 (61 years)
Cora Barbara Hennel was an Indiana mathematician active in the first half of the 20th century. Early life and education Hennel was born in Evansville, Indiana to Joseph H. and Anna Marie Thuman Hennel. After high school graduation Cora and her older sister Cecilia taught in country grade schools to save money for college. In 1903, both Hennels entered Indiana University and shortly thereafter, convinced their parents to move with their younger sister, Edith, to Bloomington. All three sisters attended and graduated from Indiana University. Hennel earned her earned her A.B. in Mathematics in 1907, her Masters in 1908, and in 1912, became the first person to earn a Ph.D.
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Lorna Swain
1891 - 1936 (45 years)
Lorna Mary Swain was a British mathematician and college lecturer, known for being one of few female mathematicians to contribute their talents to the war effort in World War I, and for being one of few early female lecturers at University of Cambridge. Academically, she is known for her work in fluid dynamics as well as her deep desire to see more women pursue higher education and teaching in the field of mathematics.
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Hettie Belle Ege
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Hettie Belle Ege was an American professor of mathematics. From 1914 to 1916, she was the acting president of Mills College. Early life Ege was born in Erie, Illinois on March 31, 1861, the daughter of Joseph Arthur Ege and his second wife, Catherine Rebecca Reisch Ege. Her parents were both from Pennsylvania; her father died the year she was born, and her mother remarried in 1869. She attended Western College in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in 1886; she later graduated from Mills College in 1903, with further studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Munich, and the University of C...
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Margarethe Kahn
1880 - 1942 (62 years)
Margarethe Kahn was a German mathematician and Holocaust victim. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves. Life and work Margarethe Kahn was the daughter of Eschwege merchant and flannel factory owner Albert Kahn and his wife Johanne . She had an older brother Otto . Five years after the untimely death of his wife Johanne, their father married her younger sister Julie , with whom he had a daughter, Margaret's half-sister Martha .
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