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
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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Mary Everest Boole
1832 - 1916 (84 years)
Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole. Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.
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Florence Nightingale
1820 - 1910 (90 years)
Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She significantly reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living standards. Nightingale gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.
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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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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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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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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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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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