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,
#2101
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.
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Ella Eaton Kellogg
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Ella Eaton Kellogg was an American dietitian known for her work on home economics and vegetarian cooking. She was educated at Alfred University ; and the American School Household Economics . In 1875, Kellogg visited the Battle Creek Sanitarium, became interested in the subjects of sanitation and hygiene, and a year later enrolled in the Sanitarium School of Hygiene. Later on, she joined the editorial staff of Good Health magazine, and in 1879, married Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
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Lao Genevra Simons
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Lao Genevra Simons also referred to as Lao G. Simons, was an American mathematician, writer, and historian of mathematics known for her influential book Fabre and Mathematics and Other Essays. Simons was head of the mathematics department at Hunter College in New York.
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Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin was a French mathematician, the second woman to obtain a doctorate in pure mathematics in France, the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France, the president of the French Mathematical Society, and an expert on fluid mechanics and abstract algebra.
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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.
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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.
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Evelyn Nelson
1943 - 1987 (44 years)
Evelyn Merle Nelson , born Evelyn Merle Roden, was a Canadian mathematician. Nelson made contributions to the area of universal algebra with applications to theoretical computer science. She, along with Cecilia Krieger, is the namesake of the Krieger–Nelson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Mathematical Society for outstanding research by a female mathematician.
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Irmgard Flügge-Lotz
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Irmgard Flügge-Lotz, née Lotz was a German-American mathematician and aerospace engineer. She was a pioneer in the development of the theory of discontinuous automatic control, which has found wide application in hysteresis control systems; such applications include guidance systems, electronics, fire-control systems, and temperature regulation. She became the first female engineering professor at Stanford University in 1961 and the first female engineer elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Beryl May Dent
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Beryl May Dent was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from the University of Bristol with First Class Honours in applied mathematics. She was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student a...
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Alicia Boole Stott
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
Alicia Boole Stott was a British mathematician. She made a number of contributions to the field and earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen. She grasped four-dimensional geometry from an early age, and introduced the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four or more dimensions.
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Pandrosion
400 - Present (1626 years)
Pandrosion of Alexandria was a mathematician in fourth-century-AD Alexandria, discussed in the Mathematical Collection of Pappus of Alexandria and known for developing an approximate method for doubling the cube. Although there is disagreement on the subject, Pandrosion is believed by many current scholars to have been female. If so, she would be an earlier female contributor to mathematics than Hypatia.
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Sofya Yanovskaya
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Sofya Aleksandrovna Yanovskaya was a Soviet mathematician and historian, specializing in the history of mathematics, mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. She is best known for her efforts in restoring the research of mathematical logic in the Soviet Union and publishing and editing the mathematical works of Karl Marx.
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Lyudmila Keldysh
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology. Biography Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was born on 12 March 1904 in Orenburg, Russia to Mariya Aleksandrovna and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh. Her family was descended from Russian nobility and though they were well-to-do before the Russian Revolution, they would later face difficulty because of their heritage. Because her father was a construction expert for the military, they moved frequently and she lived in Helsinki between 1905 and 1907, then in Saint Petersburg until 1909, and then moved to Riga, Latvia.
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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
1718 - 1799 (81 years)
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.
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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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Elizaveta Litvinova
1845 - 1919 (74 years)
Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova was a Russian mathematician and pedagogue. She is the author of over 70 articles about mathematics education. Early life and education Born in 1845 in czarist Russia as Elizaveta Fedorovna Ivashkina, she completed her early education at a women's high school in Saint Petersburg. In 1866 Elizaveta married Viktor Litvinov, which, unlike Vladimir Kovalevsky , would not allow her to travel to Europe to study at the universities there. Thus, Litvinova started to study with Strannoliubskii, who had also privately tutored Kovalevskaya.
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Charlotte Barnum
1860 - 1934 (74 years)
Charlotte Cynthia Barnum , mathematician and social activist, was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University. Early life and education Charlotte Barnum was born in Phillipston, Massachusetts, the third of four children of the Reverend Samuel Weed Barnum and Charlotte Betts . Education was important in her family: two uncles had received medical degrees from Yale and her father had graduated from there with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Divinity. Her brothers Samuel and Thomas would both graduate from Yale, and her sister Clara would attend Yale graduate scho...
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Emilie Martin
1869 - 1936 (67 years)
Emilie Norton Martin was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Mount Holyoke College. Life Martin earned her bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1894 majoring in mathematics and Latin. She continued her graduate studies at Bryn Mawr under the supervision of Charlotte Scott. In 1897-1898 she used a Mary E. Garrett Fellowship from Bryn Mawr to study at the University of Göttingen. In Göttingen, Martin and Virginia Ragsdale attended lectures by Felix Klein and David Hilbert. Although her name and dissertation title were printed in the 1899 commencement program, her Ph.D.
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Charlotte Wedell
1862 - 1953 (91 years)
Charlotte Bolette Sophie, Baroness Wedell-Wedellsborg was one of four women mathematicians to attend the inaugural International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Zurich in 1897. Wedell was originally from Denmark, the daughter of and Louise Marie Sophie, Countess Schulin, and the granddaughter of . At the time of the Congress, in 1897, she had just completed a doctorate at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, with Adolf Hurwitz as an unofficial mentor. The subject of her dissertation was the application of elliptic functions to the construction of the Malfatti circles.
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Louise Duffield Cummings
1870 - 1947 (77 years)
Louise Duffield Cummings was a Canadian-born American mathematician. She was born in Hamilton, Ontario. Education and career As a young child, Louise Duffield Cummings studied at the public schools and Collegiate Institute at Hamilton.
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Vera Šnajder
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Vera Šnajder was a Bosnian mathematician known for being the first Bosnian to publish a mathematical research paper and the first female dean in Yugoslavia. Šnajder was born on 2 February 1904, in Reljevo, one of the neighborhoods of Sarajevo; her father directed an Orthodox seminary. She began her university studies at the University of Belgrade in 1922, and graduated in 1928. She took a position as a schoolteacher at a girl's gymnasium in Sarajevo, and married , a Jewish philosopher who at that time was working at the same school.
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Carlotta Longo
1895 - Present (131 years)
Carlotta Longo born Carlotta Bresolin, was an Italian mathematical physicist who wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1918 related to general relativity, and then became a high school teacher in Rome. Longo's thesis, advised by Tullio Levi-Civita, presented what Ludwik Silberstein called a "geometrically elegant investigation" of electrostatics in general relativity.
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Mary Graustein
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Mary Graustein was a mathematician and university professor, and was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at Radcliffe College. Life and research Mary Florence Curtis was the oldest of five children born to Jennie Esther and Frank Abbott Curtis in Westminster, Massachusetts. She attended Fitchburg High School in Massachusetts and in 1902 she began her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College. She was a Wellesley Honors Scholar throughout her college years and received her Bachelor of Art's degree in 1906.
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Susan Miller Rambo
1883 - 1977 (94 years)
Susan Miller Rambo was the second woman awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and had a long teaching career at Smith College. Biography Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, Susan Rambo was the eldest child of George and Annie Rambo. Her father was a wholesale grocer. She graduated high school in Easton, then entered Smith College, located in Northampton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Smith, she taught high school mathematics in Hoosick Falls, New York until 1908.
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Elizabeth Williams
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Elizabeth Williams was a British mathematician and educationist. Life Williams was born on 29 January 1895 in Pimlico, London. She studied in Chelsea and Forest Gate during her childhood, and at the age of 16 began attending Bedford College, University of London for a college degree. At Bedford, one of her mentors was Alfred North Whitehead. She became a grammar school teacher, but had to stop teaching when she became married in 1922. Because of this situation, she founded her own school in North London with her husband, and then in 1930 she took a position in education at King's College Lo...
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Laura Guggenbühl
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Laura Guggenbühl was an American mathematician, one of the earliest women in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, known for her work in triangle geometry and the history of mathematics. Life Guggenbühl was born in New York City, to a family of Swiss immigrants; her father, a butcher and baker, died by 1920. She graduated from Hunter College in 1922 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, after also taking some classes at Columbia University and New York University. She became an instructor at Hunter College while earning a master's degree and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1924 and 1926 respectively.
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Marion Elizabeth Stark
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Marion Elizabeth Stark was an American mathematician. She was one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Education and career She got her A.B. in 1916, and her A.M. in 1917, both from Brown University. In 1917, she became the professor of mathematics Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. In autumn 1919, she started teaching in Wellesley College as a part-time instructor, while attending courses of Helen Abbot Merrill and Mabel M. Young. In the 1923 summer quarter, and, supported by a fellowship, in autumn 1924 through summer 1925, she studied at the University of Chicago where she received her Ph.D.
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Alice Roth
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Alice Roth was a Swiss mathematician who invented the Swiss cheese set and made significant contributions to approximation theory. She was born, lived and died in Bern, Switzerland. Life Alice attended the Höhere Töchterschule of Zürich, a municipal school for higher education for girls. After graduation in 1924 she studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at ETH Zurich under George Pólya. She graduated with a diploma in 1930. Her Master's thesis was titled "Extension of Weierstrass's Approximation Theorem to the complex plane and to an infinite interval". After that, she was a teacher at multiple high schools for girls in the Zurich area while continuing working with Pólya at ETH.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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