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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#251
Kathryn Mann
#28156
Overall Influence
Kathryn Mann is a mathematician who has won the Rudin Award, Birman Prize, Duszenko Award, and Sloan Fellowship for her research in geometric topology and geometric group theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#252
Nalini Anantharaman
#36161
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Nalini Anantharaman is a French mathematician who has won major prizes including the Henri Poincaré Prize in 2012. Life Nalini Florence Anantharaman was born in Paris in 1976 to two mathematicians. Her father and her mother are Professors at the University of Orléans. She entered Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1994. She completed her PhD in Paris under the supervision of François Ledrappier in 2000 at Université Pierre et Marie Curie .
Go to Profile#253
Winnie Li
#49144
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Wen-Ch'ing Li is a Taiwanese-American mathematician and a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. She is a number theorist, with research focusing on the theory of automorphic forms and applications of number theory to coding theory and spectral graph theory. In particular, she has applied her research results in automorphic forms and number theory to construct efficient communication networks called Ramanujan graphs and Ramanujan complexes.
Go to Profile#254
Karine Chemla
#30954
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Karine Chemla is a French historian of mathematics and sinologist who works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique . She is also a senior fellow at the New York University Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#255
Hajnal Andréka
#44137
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hajnal Ilona Andréka is a Hungarian mathematician specializing in algebraic logic. She is a research professor emeritus at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#256
Judith Roitman
#32832
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Judith "Judy" Roitman is a mathematician, a retired professor at the University of Kansas. She specializes in set theory, topology, Boolean algebras, and mathematics education. Biography Roitman was born in 1945 in New York City. She attended Oberlin College, followed by Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1966 with a degree in English literature. Next, she became interested in mathematical linguistics. As she had little formal mathematical education, Roitman started taking mathematics classes at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. She had enjoyed mathematics as a high school student and found her interest renewed.
Go to Profile#257
Abigail Thompson
#26825
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Abigail A. Thompson is an American mathematician. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology. Education and career Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979, and earned her Ph.D. in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L. Shaneson. After visiting positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the University of California Davis faculty in 1988. Thompson had a postdoctoral fel...
Go to Profile#258
Mileva Prvanović
#45581
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Mileva Prvanović was a Serbian differential geometer. She is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Novi Sad and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Education and career Prvanović was born in Knjaževac on July 16, 1929, the daughter of mathematics professor Stanko Prvanović . After studying at the University of Belgrade, she earned a doctorate in 1955 from the University of Zagreb under the supervision of Danilo Blanuša, with a dissertation concerning differential geometry. In doing so, she became the first student in Serbia to earn a doctorate in geometry.
Go to Profile#259
Edna Grossman
#37842
Overall Influence
Edna Grossman is an American mathematician. She was born in Germany, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated with a B.S. in mathematics from Brooklyn College. She earned her M.S. in mathematics from New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where she also received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1972; her thesis, supervised by Wilhelm Magnus, concerned the symmetries of free groups. Grossman worked for IBM, where she was part of the team that designed and analyzed the Data Encryption Standard. She is known for her development, along with Bryant Tuckerman, of the first...
Go to Profile#260
Lisa Goldberg
#27535
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Lisa Goldberg is a financial economist and statistician who serves at the University of California, Berkeley as director of research at the Center for Risk Management Research and as Adjunct Professor of Statistics. She is also the Co-Director for the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk at UC Berkeley.
Go to Profile#261
Susan Howson
#42932
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Susan Howson is a British mathematician whose research is in the fields of algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. Education and career Howson received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1998 with thesis title Iwasawa Theory of Elliptic Curves for ρ-Adic Lie Extensions under the supervision of John H. Coates.
Go to Profile#262
Catharina Stroppel
#31312
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Catharina Stroppel is a German mathematician whose research concerns representation theory, low-dimensional topology, and category theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn, and vice-coordinator of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn.
Go to Profile#263
Vera Nikolaevna Maslennikova
#46230
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
Vera Nikolaevna Maslennikova was a Russian Mathematician known for her contributions to the theory of partial differential equations. Early life and war service Maslennikova was born on 29 April 1926 in the village of Priluki near Vologda in the former USSR. Little is known about her childhood except that she lost her parents when she was only eleven years old. In 1941 she entered the Moscow Textile Engineering School. Maslennikova served in the Great Patriotic War for Russia during the early 1940s in the 413th Independent Antiaircraft Artillery Division in the front-line army. For her servic...
Go to Profile#264
Katalin Vesztergombi
#39558
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Katalin L. Vesztergombi is a Hungarian mathematician known for her contributions to graph theory and discrete geometry. A student of Vera T. Sós and a co-author of Paul Erdős, she is an emeritus associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#265
Mary Kay Stein
#46361
Overall Influence
Mary Kay Stein is an American mathematics educator who works as a professor of learning sciences and policy and as the associate director and former director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#266
T. A. Sarasvati Amma
#38732
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
T. A. Sarasvati Amma was a scholar born in Cherpulassery, Palakkad District, Kerala, India. She has contributed to the fields of history of Mathematics and Sanskrit, through her work on Geometry of ancient and medieval India.
Go to Profile#267
Alice Rogers
#40815
Overall Influence
Frances Alice Rogers is a British mathematician and mathematical physicist. She is an emeritus professor of mathematics at King's College London. Research Rogers' research concerns mathematical physics and more particularly supermanifolds, generalizations of the manifold concept based on ideas coming from supersymmetry. She is the author of the book Supermanifolds: Theory and Applications .
Go to Profile#268
Ruth Aaronson Bari
#38022
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Ruth Aaronson Bari was an American mathematician known for her work in graph theory and algebraic homomorphisms. She was a professor at George Washington University, beginning in 1966. Career The daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States, Ruth Aaronson was born November 17, 1917, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
Go to Profile#269
Annie Easley
#11313
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Annie Easley was an American computer scientist and accomplished mathemetician who made critical contributions to NASA’s rocket systems and energy technologies over her 34-year career. As a black female in America during the 1950s she faced heavy adversity throughout her career and was often underrepresented and disregarded. Despite these barriers Easley demonstrated perserverance and determination to make a name for herself in a line of work dominated by males. She demonstrated exceptional skills in mathematics, data analysis, and code development across projects focused on alternative energ...
Go to Profile#270
Nicole Berline
#38756
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nicole Berline is a French mathematician. Life and work Berline studied from 1963 to 1966 at the and she was as an exchange student at the Moscow State University in Moscow in 1966/67. In 1967, she taught at the ENS de Jeunes filles and in 1971, she worked for the CNRS . In 1974 she received her doctorate at the University of Paris under the supervision of Jacques Dixmier . In 1976/77 she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1977 she became a professor at the University of Rennes 1 and she has taught at the Ecole Polytechnique since 1984.
Go to Profile#271
Erica Flapan
#46355
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Erica Flapan is an American mathematician, the Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. Education and career Flapan did her undergraduate studies at Hamilton College , graduating in 1977, and went on to graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of Daniel McMillan.
Go to Profile#272
Susan Murphy
#27044
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susan Allbritton Murphy is an American statistician, known for her work applying statistical methods to clinical trials of treatments for chronic and relapsing medical conditions. She is a professor at Harvard University, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#273
Irena Swanson
#36189
Overall Influence
Irena Swanson is an American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra. She is head of the Purdue University Department of Mathematics since 2020. She was a professor of mathematics at Reed College from 2005 to 2020.
Go to Profile#274
Monique Laurent
#40954
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Monique Laurent is a French computer scientist and mathematician who is an expert in mathematical optimization. She is a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam where she is also a member of the Management Team. Laurent also holds a part-time position as a professor of econometrics and operations research at Tilburg University.
Go to Profile#275
Malabika Pramanik
#44249
Overall Influence
Malabika Pramanik is a Canadian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Her interests include harmonic analysis, complex variables, and partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#276
Katherine E. Stange
#43255
Overall Influence
Katherine E. Stange is a Canadian-American mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a number theorist specializing in topics in arithmetic geometry.
Go to Profile#277
Tanja Eisner
#54403
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Tatjana Eisner is a German and Ukrainian mathematician specializing in functional analysis, operator theory as well as ergodic theory and its connection to number theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Leipzig University.
Go to Profile#278
Della Dumbaugh
#44966
Overall Influence
Della Jeanne Dumbaugh is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, focusing on the history of algebra and number theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Richmond, and the editor-in-chief of The American Mathematical Monthly.
Go to Profile#279
Alice S. Whittemore
#38908
Overall Influence
Alice Segers Whittemore is an American epidemiologist and biostatistician who studies the effects of genetics and lifestyle on cancer, after an earlier career as a pure mathematician studying group theory. She works as a professor of health research and policy and of biomedical data science at Stanford University, and has served as president of the International Biometric Society.
Go to Profile#280
Megumi Harada
#56953
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Megumi Harada is a mathematician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at McMaster University, where she holds a tier-two Canada Research Chair in Equivariant Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry.
Go to Profile#281
Jang-Mei Wu
#51426
Overall Influence
Jang-Mei Wu is a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in complex analysis, potential theory, quasiconformal mapping, and partial differential equations. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#282
Hazel Perfect
#43442
Overall Influence
Hazel Perfect was a British mathematician specialising in combinatorics. Contributions Perfect was known for inventing gammoids, for her work with Leon Mirsky on doubly stochastic matrices, for her three books Topics in Geometry, Topics in Algebra, and Independence Theory in Combinatorics, and for her work as a translator of Pavel Alexandrov's book An Introduction to the Theory of Groups .
Go to Profile#283
Irene Stegun
#32591
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Irene Ann Stegun was an American mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards who edited a classic book of mathematical tables called A Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as Abramowitz and Stegun.
Go to Profile#284
Amanda Chetwynd
#36330
Overall Influence
Amanda G. Chetwynd is a British mathematician and statistician specializing in combinatorics and spatial statistics. She is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Provost for Student Experience, Colleges and the Library at Lancaster University, and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Go to Profile#285
Yiqun Lisa Yin
#25579
Overall Influence
Yiqun Lisa Yin is a Chinese-American cryptographer and independent security consultant. Yin is known for breaking the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function, for developing the RC6 block cipher, and for her service as editor of the IEEE P1363 project for the standardization of public-key cryptography.
Go to Profile#286
Barbara Niethammer
#49582
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Barbara Niethammer is a German mathematician and materials scientist who works as a professor at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn. Her research concerns partial differential equations for physical materials, and in particular the phenomenon of Ostwald ripening by which particles in liquids grow over time.
Go to Profile#287
Ruth Baker
#36653
Overall Influence
Ruth Elizabeth Baker is a British applied mathematician and mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford whose research interests include pattern formation, morphogenesis, and the mathematical modeling of cell biology and developmental biology.
Go to Profile#288
Aretha Teckentrup
#46704
Overall Influence
Aretha Leonore Teckentrup is a UK-based mathematician, known for her research on uncertainty quantification and numerical analysis. Her work focuses on multilevel Monte Carlo methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations, Gaussian processes and Bayesian inference. She is a reader in the mathematics of data science at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#289
Nancy Reid
#50778
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nancy Margaret Reid is a Canadian theoretical statistician. She is a professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory. In 2015 Reid became Director of the Canadian Institute for Statistical Sciences.
Go to Profile#290
Alia Sabur
#50104
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Alia Sabur is an American materials scientist. She holds the record for being the world's youngest professor. Early life and education Sabur was born in New York City, New York. Her mother, Julie Sabur , worked as a reporter for News12 Long Island until 1995. She married Mohammed Sabur, a Pakistan native, in 1980. Alia, born on February 22, 1989, showed early signs of giftedness. She tested "off the IQ scale," according to an educator who tested her as a first-grader. As a fourth-grader, she left public school and was admitted to Stony Brook University at the age of 10, later graduating summa cum laude at 14.
Go to Profile#291
Nataša Šešum
#44520
Overall Influence
Nataša Šešum is a Professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, specializing in partial differential equations and geometric flow. Education Šešum earned her PhD in 2004 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Gang Tian. Her dissertation was Limiting Behavior of Ricci Flows.
Go to Profile#292
Luitgard Veraart
#47271
Overall Influence
Luitgard Anna Maria Veraart is a German applied mathematician specialising in mathematical finance, and particularly in assessing, modeling, and managing the risks associated with financial networks. She is a professor of mathematics at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#293
Judith Grabiner
#22096
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Judith Victor Grabiner is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who is Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Her main interest is in mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Go to Profile#294
Mei-Chu Chang
#52869
Overall Influence
Mei-Chu Chang is a mathematician who works in algebraic geometry and combinatorial number theory. Education Chang did her undergraduate studies in Taiwan and received a BS from National Taiwan University. She did her doctoral work at University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Robin Hartshorne and was awarded her PhD in 1982. Her dissertation was on Some Results on Stable Rank 2 Vector Bundles and Reflexive Sheaves on P3.
Go to Profile#295
Elisenda Grigsby
#43656
Overall Influence
Julia Elisenda Grigsby is an American mathematician who works as a professor at Boston College. Her research began with the study of low-dimensional topology, including knot theory and category-theoretic knot invariants. She is currently working in the field of machine learning.
Go to Profile#296
Jean E. Rubin
#46567
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Jean Estelle Hirsh Rubin was an American mathematician known for her research on the axiom of choice. She worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at Purdue University. Rubin wrote five books: three on the axiom of choice, and two more on more general topics in set theory and mathematical logic.
Go to Profile#297
Cécile DeWitt-Morette
#26906
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Cécile Andrée Paule DeWitt-Morette was a French mathematician and physicist. She founded a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps. For this and her publications, she was awarded the American Society of the French Legion of Honour 2007 Medal for Distinguished Achievement. Attendees at the summer school included over twenty students who would go on to be Nobel Prize winners, including Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Georges Charpak, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who identify the school for assisting in their success.
Go to Profile#298
Lisa Fauci
#47451
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Lisa J. Fauci is an American mathematician who applies computational fluid dynamics to biological processes such as sperm motility and phytoplankton dynamics. More generally, her research interests include numerical analysis, scientific computing, and mathematical biology. She is the Pendergraft Nola Lee Haynes Professor of Mathematics at Tulane University, and was president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics .
Go to Profile#299
Joséphine Guidy Wandja
#37966
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joséphine Guidy Wandja is an Ivorian mathematician. She is the first African woman with a PhD in mathematics. Early life She moved to France aged 14. She attended the Lycée Jules-Ferry in Paris, and later the Pierre and Marie Curie University. Her master's degree thesis was entitled Sous les courbes fermées convexes du plan et le théorème des quatre sommets . Whilst working in Paris in the late 1960s she was advised by René Thom, Henri Cartan and Paulette Liberman. She studied for a PhD at the University of Abidjan, becoming the first African woman to get a PhD in mathematics.
Go to Profile#300
Kathryn Hess
#46724
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Kathryn Pamela Hess is an American mathematician who has served as professor of mathematics at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne since 1999. She is known for her work on homotopy theory, category theory, and algebraic topology, both pure and applied. In particular, she applies the methods of algebraic topology to the study of neurology, cancer biology, and materials science. She is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile