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,
#2151
Olive Wheeler
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Dame Olive Annie Wheeler, DBE was a Welsh educationist and psychologist, and Professor of Education at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, now Cardiff University. Early life Born at the High Street in Brecon, Olive Wheeler was the younger daughter of Annie Wheeler, Poole, and her husband, Henry Burford Wheeler. Henry Wheeler was a master printer and publisher. She attended Brecon County School for Girls. She received an Honours Central Welsh Board Certificate in 1904. She attended University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and graduated with a BSc in Chemistry in 1907, and a MSc in 1911.
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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.
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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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Helene Stähelin
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Helene Stähelin was a Swiss mathematician, teacher, and peace activist. Between 1948 and 1967, she was president of the Swiss section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and its representative in the Swiss Peace Council.
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Lillian Rosanoff Lieber
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Lillian Rosanoff Lieber was a Russian-American mathematician and popular author. She often teamed up with her illustrator husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, to produce works. Life and career Early life and education Lieber was one of four children of Abraham H. and Clara Rosanoff. Her brothers were Denver publisher Joseph Rosenberg, psychiatrist Aaron Rosanoff, and chemist Martin André Rosanoff. Aaron and Martin changed their names to sound more Russian, less Jewish. Lieber moved to the US with her family in 1891. She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1908, her M.A. from Columbia University in 1911, and her Ph.D.
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Ida Rhodes
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ida Rhodes was an American mathematician who became a member of the clique of influential women at the heart of early computer development in the United States. Childhood Hadassah Itzkowitz was born in a Jewish village Kamianets-Podilskyi between Nemyriv and Tulchyn in Ukraine on May 15, 1900.
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Edna Kramer
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Edna Ernestine Kramer Lassar , born Edna Ernestine Kramer, was an American mathematician and author of mathematics books. Kramer was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants. She earned her B.A. summa cum laude in mathematics from Hunter College in 1922. While teaching at local high schools, she earned her M.A. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1930 in mathematics from Columbia University with Edward Kasner as her advisor.
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Erika Pannwitz
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Erika Pannwitz was a German mathematician who worked in the area of geometric topology. During World War II, Pannwitz worked as a cryptanalyst in the Department of Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office colloquially known as Pers Z S. After the war, she became editor-in-chief of Zentralblatt MATH.
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Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
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Pauline Sperry
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Pauline Sperry was an American mathematician. Early life and education Born in Peabody, Massachusetts, Sperry was the daughter of two schoolteachers; her father, William Gardner Sperry, was also a Congregational minister and later became president of Olivet College. Perry began her own undergraduate studies at Olivet College, but then moved to Smith College. She graduated from Smith in 1906 at age 21 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After teaching at a private school, she returned to Smith in 1907 to do graduate work in mathematics and music, and earned a master's degree in music in 1908. ...
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Giuseppina Masotti Biggiogero
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Giuseppina Masotti Biggiogero was an Italian mathematician and historian. Known for her work in algebraic geometry, she also wrote noted histories of mathematicians, like Maria Gaetana Agnesi and Luca Pacioli. She was a member of the and won both the Bordoni Prize and Torelli Prize for her work.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Mileva Marić
1875 - 1948 (73 years)
Mileva Marić , sometimes called Mileva Marić-Einstein , was a Serbian physicist and mathematician and the first wife of Albert Einstein from 1903 to 1919. She was the only woman among Einstein's fellow students at Zürich Polytechnic and was the second woman to finish a full program of study at the Department of Mathematics and Physics. Marić and Einstein were collaborators and lovers and had a daughter Lieserl in 1902, who likely died of scarlet fever at one and a half years old. They later had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard.
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Grete Hermann
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Grete Hermann was a German mathematician and philosopher noted for her work in mathematics, physics, philosophy and education. She is noted for her early philosophical work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and is now known most of all for an early, but long-ignored critique of a "no hidden-variables theorem" by John von Neumann. It has been suggested that, had her critique not remained nearly unknown for decades, the historical development of quantum mechanics might have been very different.
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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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Sofya Kovalevskaya
1850 - 1891 (41 years)
Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya , born Korvin-Krukovskaya , was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor. According to historian of science Ann Hibner Koblitz, Kovalevskaya was "the greatest known woman scientist before the twentieth century".
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Nina Bari
1901 - 1961 (60 years)
Nina Karlovna Bari was a Soviet mathematician known for her work on trigonometric series. She is also well-known for two textbooks, Higher Algebra and The Theory of Series. Early life and education Nina Bari was born in Russia on 19 November 1901, the daughter of Olga and Karl Adolfovich Bari, a physician. In 1918, she became one of the first women to be accepted to the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the prestigious Moscow State University. She graduated in 1921—just three years after entering the university. After graduation, Bari began her teaching career. She lectured at the Moscow Forestry Institute, the Moscow Polytechnic Institute, and the Sverdlov Communist Institute.
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Cecilia Krieger
1894 - 1974 (80 years)
Cypra Cecilia Krieger-Dunaij was an Austro-Hungarian -born mathematician of Jewish ancestry who lived and worked in Canada. Krieger was the third person to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from a university in Canada, in 1930, as well as the third woman to have been awarded a doctorate in any discipline in Canada. Krieger is well known for having translated two works of Wacław Sierpiński in general topology. The Krieger–Nelson Prize, awarded annually by the Canadian Mathematical Society since 1995 for outstanding research by a female mathematician, is named in honour of Krieger and Evelyn Nelson.
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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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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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Sophie Bryant
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Sophie Willock Bryant was an Anglo-Irish mathematician, educator, feminist and activist. She was the first woman to receive a DSc in England; one of the first to serve on a Royal Commission and on the Senate of the University of London.
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Sylvia Skan
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sylvia Winifred Skan was an English applied mathematician. She is known for her work on aerodynamics, and in particular for the Falkner–Skan boundary layer in the fluid mechanics of airflow past a wedge-shaped obstacle, which she wrote about with V. M. Falkner in 1930, and for the associated Falkner–Skan equation.
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Frances Cope
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Frances Cope, also known as Frances Thorndike , was an American mathematician who published on irregular differential equations. The Thorndike nomogram, a two-dimensional diagram of the Poisson distribution, is named for her.
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Evelyn Fix
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Evelyn Fix was a statistician. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and earned her A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924. One year later she earned at M.S. in education and became a high school teacher. She earned an M.A. in mathematics, also from the University of Minnesota in 1933. She obtained a Ph.D. in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the statistics faculty there. She was appointed as an assistant professor in 1951 and in 1963 she was promoted to professor of statistics. She died of a heart attack on December 30, 1965.
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Marília Chaves Peixoto
1921 - 1961 (40 years)
Marília Chaves Peixoto was a Brazilian mathematician and engineer who worked in dynamical systems. Peixoto was the first Brazilian woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first Brazilian woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
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Claribel Kendall
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Claribel Kendall was an American mathematician. Education Born in Denver, Colorado, Kendall received her Bachelor and Bachelor of Education from the University of Colorado in 1912. Kendall also went on to receive her master's degree in 1914 with a focus in mathematics. She studied mathematics in an era when women were increasingly seeking a college education and slowly beginning to move into math and science, fields that had traditionally been exclusively male. Her master's thesis was on “Pre Associative Syzygies in Linear Algebra."
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Olga Tsuberbiller
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Olga Tsuberbiller was a Russian mathematician noted for her creation of the textbook Problems and Exercises in Analytic Geometry. The book has been used as a standard text for high schools since its creation in 1927. Sophia Parnok, noted Russian poet dedicated her verses in the Half-voiced cycle to Tsuberbiller, and the educator cared for Parnok during her final illness, later becoming her literary executor. She later became the partner of the noted opera singer, Concordia Antarova. Tsuberbiller was designated as an Honored Scientist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1955...
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Maria Pastori
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Maria Pastori was an Italian mathematician. Life Pastori was born in Milan on 10 March 1895, to a family of eight children. The family was of limited means and could not afford education for the children beyond what was provided by the public school system. Pastori excelled in mathematics, which was encouraged by one of her teachers, who aided her in getting a scholarship to Maria Agnesi School, a magisterial school . After completing her studies at the magisterial school, Pastori then went on to teach elementary school near Milan. While teaching, Pastori studied further with her sister Giuseppina .
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Vera Myller
1880 - 1970 (90 years)
Vera Myller-Lebedev was a Russian Empire-born mathematician who earned her doctorate in Germany with David Hilbert and became the first female university professor in Romania. Education Vera Lebedev was born in Saint Petersburg and educated in Novgorod. From 1897 through 1902 she participated in the Bestuzhev Courses in Saint Petersburg. She then traveled to the University of Göttingen, where she completed a doctorate in 1906 under the supervision of David Hilbert. Her dissertation was Die Theorie der Integralgleichungen in Anwendungen auf einige Reihenentwickelungen, and concerned integral e...
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Constanze Mozart
1762 - 1842 (80 years)
Maria Constanze Cäcilia Josepha Johanna Aloysia Mozart was a trained Austrian singer. She was married twice, first to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; then to Georg Nikolaus von Nissen. She and Mozart had six children: Karl Thomas Mozart, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, and four others who died in infancy. She became Mozart's biographer jointly with her second husband.
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Huldah Bancroft
Huldah Bancroft was an American biostatistician at Tulane University, known for her textbook on biostatistics and for her research on tropical infectious diseases including typhoid fever and leprosy.
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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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Lupe Vélez
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez , known professionally as Lupe Vélez, was a Mexican actress, singer, and dancer during the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Vélez began her career as a performer in Mexican vaudeville in the early 1920s. After moving to the United States, she made her first film appearance in a short in 1927. By the end of the decade, she was acting in full-length silent films and had progressed to leading roles in The Gaucho , Lady of the Pavements and Wolf Song , among others. Vélez made the transition to sound films without difficulty. She was one of the first successful Mexican actresses in Hollywood.
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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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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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Dorothy Maud Wrinch
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Dorothy Maud Wrinch was a mathematician and biochemical theorist best known for her attempt to deduce protein structure using mathematical principles. She was a champion of the controversial 'cyclol' hypothesis for the structure of proteins.
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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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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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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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