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
Sheila Scott Macintyre
1910 - 1960 (50 years)
Sheila Scott Macintyre FRSE was a Scottish mathematician best known for her work on the Whittaker constant. Macintyre is also known for co-authoring a German-English mathematics dictionary with Edith Witte.
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Mary de Lellis Gough
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Sister Mary de Lellis Gough was an Irish nun who spent most of her life in the USA. She is notable for being the earliest known Irish woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Life She was born in Kilmore, County Wexford, Ireland. Her parents were Ellen Dunne and Walter Gough. She attended the local St John of God's primary school. She emigrated to Texas in 1909 with a group of young Irish women, and joined the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, taking vows as Mary de Lellis in 1911.
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Annie Leuch-Reineck
1880 - 1978 (98 years)
Annie Leuch-Reineck was a Swiss mathematician and women's rights activist. She was one of the most influential participants in the Swiss women's movement during the 1920s and 1930s. Life Provenance and early years Annie Reineck was born in Kannawurf, a village in the countryside between Erfurt and Magdeburg in Germany. Erhard Reineck , her father, was a protestant church minister and superintentant originally from Magdeburg. Her mother, born Marie Godet , was from Neuchâtel in francophone western Switzerland. Annie grew up in Kannawurf and then in nearby Heldrungen. She received her early education at the home of her elder sister, Theodora .
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Mary Cordia Karl
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Elizabeth Karl was an American mathematician who contributed significantly to the theory of orthopoles in geometry. This was the subject of her PhD thesis at Johns Hopkins University in 1931. She was Head of the Mathematics department at College Notre Dame of Maryland until 1965, when she retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.
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Mary Cleophas Garvin
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Sister Mary Cleophas, born Linetta Anna Garvin, was an American mathematician. Early life Linetta Garvin was born in Vickery, Ohio, one of six children of Odelia Margaret and automobile and meat salesman Austin Edward Garwin.
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Frieda Nugel
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Frieda Nugel was a German mathematician and civil rights activist, one of the first German women to earn a doctorate in mathematics. She earned her PhD at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1912, under the supervision of August Gutzmer.
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Eugenie Maria Morenus
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Eugenie Maria Morenus was an American mathematician and college professor. She taught Latin and mathematics at Sweet Briar College from 1909 to 1946. Early life and education Morenus was born in Cleveland, New York, the daughter of Eugene Morenus and Maria Euphemia Van Blarcom Morenus. Her father managed a glassworks. She graduated from Monogahela High School in 1898. She earned a bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1904, and a master's degree from the same school in 1905. She completed doctoral studies in mathematics at Columbia University in 1922. Her dissertation under Edward Kasner w...
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Käthe Kollwitz
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status.
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Mary Gertrude Haseman
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Mary Gertrude Haseman was an American mathematician known for her work in knot theory. Biography Mary Gertrude Haseman was born in or near the small town of Linton, Indiana, the seventh of nine children, to Elizabeth Christine and John Dieterich Haseman. Despite being raised on a farm, she and her siblings all pursued higher education; they all attended college, five had master's degrees, and five, including Mary, earned PhDs.
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Eleanor Pairman
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Eleanor "Nora" Pairman, also known as Nora Brown, was a Scottish mathematician and only the third woman to receive a doctorate in math from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. Later in life she developed novel methods to teach mathematics to blind students.
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Clara Eliza Smith
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Clara Eliza Smith was an American mathematician specializing in complex analysis who became the Helen Day Gould Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College. Smith was the daughter of Georgiana and Edward Smith, of Northford, Connecticut. She studied at Mount Holyoke College, then a seminary, while also studying art at Yale University. Her studies in the seminary program included geometry and trigonometry, but the college did not offer degrees at that time. She completed the program in 1885. After working as an art teacher at the Bloomsburg State Normal School in Pennsylvania from 1889 until...
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Josephine Burns Glasgow
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Josephine Elizabeth Burns Glasgow was an American mathematician whose Ph.D. thesis, "The abstract definitions of the groups of degree 8" was published in the American Journal of Mathematics. She was the second woman to receive a PhD from the University of Illinois.
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Mary Landers
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Mary Kenny Landers was an American mathematician who taught for many years at Hunter College. She was also known as "an early advocate of academic collective bargaining". Early life and education Mary Kenny was born on February 5, 1905, in Fall River, Massachusetts, one of six children of an Anglo-Irish mailman. After attending public school in Fall River, she became a student at Brown University in 1922. Beyond mathematics, her interests at Brown included violin and debate. After graduating in 1926, she became an Anne Crosby Emery fellow at Brown and earned a master's degree in mathematics t...
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Louise Nevelson
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire , she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home.
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Gertrude Jekyll
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Gertrude Jekyll was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden. Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by British and American gardening enthusiasts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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Annie MacKinnon
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Annie Louise MacKinnon Fitch was a Canadian-born American mathematician who worked with Felix Klein and became a professor of mathematics at Wells College. She was the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate at an American university.
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Wang Zhenyi
1768 - 1797 (29 years)
Wang Zhenyi was a Chinese scientist from the Qing dynasty. She breached the feudal customs of the time, which hindered women's rights, by working to educate herself in subjects such as astronomy, mathematics, geography, and medicine. She was well known for her contributions in astronomy, mathematics, and poetry. She was an acclaimed scholar: "An extraordinary woman of 18th century China."
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Mary Esther Trueblood
1879 - 1939 (60 years)
Mary Esther Trueblood Paine was an American mathematician and sociologist who taught mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education Mary Trueblood was born on May 6, 1872, near Richmond, Indiana, the daughter of Rev. Alpheus Trueblood of the Society of Friends, and the niece of pacifist Benjamin Franklin Trueblood. She did her undergraduate studies at Earlham College in Richmond, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1893, and became a mathematics and Latin teacher there. Her cousin, Thomas Trueblood, taught at the University of Mich...
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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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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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Aphra Behn
1640 - 1689 (49 years)
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea.
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Margaret Millington
1944 - 1973 (29 years)
Margaret Hilary Millington was an English-born mathematician. She was born Margaret Hilary Ashworth in Halifax, Yorkshire, the daughter of the local assistant head postmaster, and was educated there. She continued her studies at St Mary's College, Durham and went on to Oxford University, where she earned a PhD in 1968 with A. O. L. Atkin as her advisor. Also, in 1968, she married Lieutenant A.H. Millington, who was part of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. She was awarded a two-year Science Research Council Fellowship which allowed her to pursue research at any university. During...
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Stevie Smith
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith , was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
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Liouba Bortniker
1860 - 1900 (40 years)
Liouba Bortniker was a mathematician from the Russian Empire who became a naturalized French citizen, was the first woman to earn an agrégation in mathematics, the inaugural winner of the Peccot–Vimont prize of the Collège de France, and the first woman to publish in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences. She was known for her work on cyclides.
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Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes was an American librarian, mathematician, and botanist who became the first woman to become state librarian of Indiana and the first woman on the faculty of Purdue University.
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Mildred Sanderson
1889 - 1914 (25 years)
Mildred Leonora Sanderson was an American mathematician, best known for her mathematical theorem concerning modular invariants. Life Sanderson was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1889 and was the valedictorian of her class at the Waltham High School. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1910, winning Senior Honors in Mathematics. She obtained her Ph.D degree from the University of Chicago in 1913, publishing the thesis in which she set forth her mathematical theorem. She was Leonard Eugene Dickson's first female doctoral student.
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Anne Bosworth Focke
1868 - 1907 (39 years)
Anne Lucy Bosworth Focke was an American mathematician who became the first mathematics professor at what is now the University of Rhode Island, and later became the first female doctoral student of David Hilbert.
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Charlotte Elvira Pengra
1875 - 1916 (41 years)
Charlotte Elvira Pengra was an American mathematician. In 1901, she became the third person to receive a Ph.D. in math at the University of Wisconsin, and the sixth American woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics.
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Priscilla Braislin
1838 - 1888 (50 years)
Priscilla Harris Braislin Merrick was the first mathematics professor at Vassar College. Early life Braislin was originally from Burlington, New Jersey, the eldest of six children. Her father was Catholic and her mother Quaker, but with five of her siblings she became a Baptist; one of her brothers, Edward Braislin , became a Baptist minister.
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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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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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