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).
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List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,
#301
Susanna S. Epp
#29786
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Susanna Samuels Epp is an author, mathematician, and professor. Her interests include discrete mathematics, mathematical logic, cognitive psychology, and mathematics education, and she has written numerous articles, publications, and textbooks. She is currently professor emerita at DePaul University, where she chaired the Department of Mathematical Sciences and was Vincent de Paul Professor in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#302
Melania Alvarez
#38034
Overall Influence
Melania Alvarez de Adem is a Mexican mathematics educator who works as the Education Coordinator at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences , and Outreach Coordinator for the Department of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Go to Profile#303
Helga Baum
#54469
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Helga Baum is a German mathematician. She is professor for differential geometry and global analysis in the Institute for Mathematics of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Education Baum earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1980 at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her dissertation, Spin-Strukturen und Dirac-Operatoren über Pseudoriemannschen Mannigfaltigkeiten, was supervised by .
Go to Profile#304
Nina Snaith
#48536
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Nina Claire Snaith is a British mathematician at the University of Bristol working in random matrix theory and quantum chaos. Education Snaith was educated at the University of Bristol where she received her PhD in 2000 for research supervised by Jonathan Keating.
Go to Profile#305
Mary Rees
#52729
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Susan Mary Rees, FRS is a British mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Liverpool since 2018, specialising in research in complex dynamical systems. Career Rees was born in Cambridge. After obtaining her BA in 1974 and MSc in 1975 at St Hugh's College, Oxford, she did research in mathematics under the direction of Bill Parry at the University of Warwick, obtaining a PhD in 1978. Her first postdoctoral position was at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1978 to 1979. Later she worked at Institut des hautes études scientifiques and the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#306
Aline Bonami
#27342
Overall Influence
Aline Bonami is a French mathematician known for her expertise in mathematical analysis. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Orléans, and was president of the Société mathématique de France for 2012–2013.
Go to Profile#307
Seema Nanda
#45773
Overall Influence
Seema Nanda is an Indian mathematician. In her research she applies mathematics to study problems in biology, engineering and finance. Her research interests are primarily in solving real world problems using mathematics and computations.
Go to Profile#308
Jennifer Quinn
#46921
Overall Influence
Jennifer J. Quinn is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics, and professor of mathematics at the University of Washington Tacoma. She sits on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America, and is serving as its president for the years 2021 and 2022. From 2004 to 2008 she was co-editor of Math Horizons.
Go to Profile#309
Gwyneth Stallard
#40562
Overall Influence
Gwyneth Mary Stallard is a British mathematician whose research concerns complex dynamics and the iteration of meromorphic functions. She is a professor of pure mathematics at the Open University. Education and career Stallard read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, finishing in 1985, and earned her Ph.D. from Imperial College London in 1991. Her dissertation, Some problems in the iteration of meromorphic functions, was supervised by Irvine Noel Baker. She has spoken about the difficulty of finding postdoctoral research positions at a time when there were few such positions in England ...
Go to Profile#310
Lesley Sibner
#57532
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Lesley Millman Sibner was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She earned her Bachelors at City College CUNY in Mathematics. She completed her doctorate at Courant Institute NYU in 1964 under the joint supervision of Lipman Bers and Cathleen Morawetz. Her thesis concerned partial differential equations of mixed-type.
Go to Profile#311
Svetlana Katok
#52851
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Svetlana Katok is a Russian-American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. Education and career Katok grew up in Moscow, and earned a master's degree from Moscow State University in 1969; however, due to the anti-Semitic and anti-intelligentsia policies of the time, she was denied admission to the doctoral program there and instead worked for several years in the area of early and secondary mathematical education. She immigrated to the US in 1978, and earned her doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1983 under the supervision of Don Zagier.
Go to Profile#312
Graciela Boente
#20679
Overall Influence
Graciela Lina Boente Boente is an Argentine mathematical statistician at the University of Buenos Aires. She is known for her research in robust statistics, and particularly for robust methods for principal component analysis and regression analysis.
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Diana Shelstad
#53908
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Diana Frost Shelstad is a mathematician known for her work in automorphic forms. She is a professor at Rutgers University–Newark. She earned her doctorate at Yale University in 1974 studying real reductive algebraic groups.
Go to Profile#314
Ilse Ipsen
#48365
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ilse Clara Franziska Ipsen is a German-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at North Carolina State University. She was formerly associate director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, a joint venture of North Carolina State and other nearby universities.
Go to Profile#315
Pauline van den Driessche
#53954
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Pauline van den Driessche is a British and Canadian applied mathematician who is a professor emerita in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Victoria, where she has also held an affiliation in the department of computer science. Her research interests include mathematical biology, matrix analysis, and stability theory.
Go to Profile#316
Jessica Fintzen
#43218
Overall Influence
Jessica Fintzen is a German mathematician whose research concerns the representation theory of algebraic groups over the -adic numbers, with connections to the Langlands program. She is jointly appointed at the University of Cambridge, Duke University, and the University of Bonn.
Go to Profile#317
Weiqing Gu
#39855
Overall Influence
Weiqing Gu is a Chinese-American mathematician who works as the Avery Professor of Mathematics and director of the mathematics clinic at Harvey Mudd College. Her research concerns differential geometry and Grassmann manifolds. She has also worked with Harvey Mudd colleague Lisette de Pillis on the mathematical modeling of cancer.
Go to Profile#318
Lisette de Pillis
#35894
Overall Influence
Lisette G. de Pillis is an American mathematician at Harvey Mudd College and holds the Norman F. Sprague, Jr. Professorship of Life Sciences at Harvey Mudd. She chaired the Department of Mathematics in 2008-2009 and again from 2014 to 2019. She directed the Harvey Mudd College Global Clinic program from 2009 to 2014. She is also the co-director of the Harvey Mudd College Center for Quantitative Life Sciences.
Go to Profile#319
Maria E. Schonbek
#48455
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Maria Elena Schonbek is an Argentine-American mathematician at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research concerns fluid dynamics and associated partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations.
Go to Profile#320
María J. Esteban
#43363
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Maria J. Esteban is a Basque-French mathematician. In her research she studies nonlinear partial differential equations, mainly by the use of variational methods, with applications to physics and quantum chemistry. She has also worked on fluid-structure interaction.
Go to Profile#321
Svetlana Roudenko
#21092
Overall Influence
Svetlana A. Roudenko is a Russian-American mathematician known for her work in functional analysis and partial differential equations, and in particular in scattering theory and nonlinear Schrödinger equations. She is also known for her mentorship of women in mathematics, and is a Diversity Mentor Professor and professor of mathematics and statistics at Florida International University.
Go to Profile#322
Pallavi Dani
#55874
Overall Influence
Pallavi Dani is an Indian-American mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her research area is geometric group theory; in particular, she studies quasi-isometry invariantss of groups.
Go to Profile#323
Tara S. Holm
#56039
Overall Influence
Tara Suzanne Holm is a mathematician at Cornell University specializing in algebraic geometry and symplectic geometry. Life and career Holm graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College. Holm received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 under the supervision of Victor Guillemin. She went on to a three-year postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, before eventually joining the faculty at Cornell.
Go to Profile#324
Cora Sadosky
#39979
Overall Influence
1940 - 2010 (70 years)
Cora Susana Sadosky de Goldstein was a mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Howard University. Early life and education Sadosky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the daughter of mathematicians Manuel Sadosky and Corina Eloísa "Cora" Ratto de Sadosky. At the age of 6, she moved with her parents to France and Italy.
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Sylvia Bozeman
#56320
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sylvia D. Trimble Bozeman is an American mathematician and Mathematics educator. Early life and education Sylvia Bozeman was born in Camp Hill, Alabama on 1 August 1947. She was the third of five children to Horace T. Sr. and Robbie Jones. Although her father worked with numbers daily in his profession as an insurance agent, it was her mother, a housewife, who first cultivated Bozeman’s love for Mathematics. Bozeman attended segregated primary and secondary schools in Camp Hill, and was encouraged by her teachers and parents to continue her education. Her high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Frank Holley, further cultivated her interest.
Go to Profile#326
Raphaèle Herbin
#41021
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Raphaèle Herbin is a French applied mathematician; she is known for her work on the finite volume method. Herbin has been a professor at Aix-Marseille University since 1995, and directs the Institut de Mathématiques de Marseille. She earned her doctorate in 1986 at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, with the dissertation Approximation numérique d'inéquations variationnelles non linéaires par des méthodes de continuation supervised by Francis Conrad.
Go to Profile#327
Ileana Streinu
#43006
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ileana Streinu is a Romanian-American computer scientist and mathematician, the Charles N. Clark Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Smith College in Massachusetts. She is known for her research in computational geometry, and in particular for her work on kinematics and structural rigidity.
Go to Profile#328
Deanna Haunsperger
#46928
Overall Influence
Deanna Haunsperger is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Carleton College. She was the president of the Mathematical Association of America for the 2017–2018 term. She co-created and co-organized the Carleton College Summer Mathematics Program for Women, which ran every summer from 1995 to 2014.
Go to Profile#329
Vivette Girault
#49037
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Vivette Girault is a French mathematician, whose research expertise lies in numerical analysis, finite element methods and computational fluid dynamics. She has been affiliated with Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Go to Profile#330
Miriam Cohen
#46657
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Miriam Cohen is an Israeli mathematician and a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev whose main areas of research are Hopf algebras, quantum groups and Noncommutative rings.
Go to Profile#331
Jessica Purcell
#46129
Overall Influence
Jessica A. Shepherd Purcell is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology whose research topics have included hyperbolic Dehn surgery and the Jones polynomial. She is a professor of mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Go to Profile#332
Jennifer Hill
#27666
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jennifer Lynn Hill is an American statistician specializing in causal inference with applications to social statistics. She is a professor of applied statistics at New York University in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Go to Profile#333
Deborah J. Bennett
#32288
Overall Influence
Deborah Jo Bennett is an American mathematician, mathematics educator, and book author. She is a professor of mathematics at New Jersey City University. Education and career Bennett is originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama; her father was a military officer and her mother worked as a computer systems analyst. She majored in mathematics at the University of Alabama, graduating in 1972, and worked as a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis and as an operations researcher for the US Government Accountability Office before returning to graduate school for a master's degree in operations ...
Go to Profile#334
Angela Kunoth
#49666
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Angela Kunoth is a German mathematician specializing in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Cologne, and the editor-in-chief of SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.
Go to Profile#335
Cohl Furey
#48780
Overall Influence
Cohl Furey, also known as Nichol Furey, is a Canadian mathematical physicist. Career Furey has a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Simon Fraser University , Master's degree from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D in theoretical physics from the University of Waterloo . She was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2016 to 2019 and spent a few months at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. Since 2020, she has been at the Humboldt University of Berlin on a Freigeist-Fellowship by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Go to Profile#336
Jennifer Balakrishnan
#29869
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jennifer Shyamala Sayaka Balakrishnan is an American mathematician known for leading a team that solved the problem of the "cursed curve", a Diophantine equation that was known for being "famously difficult". More generally, Balakrishnan specializes in algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry. She is the Clare Boothe Luce Associate Professor at Boston University.
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Gerda de Vries
#37176
Overall Influence
Gerda de Vries is a Canadian mathematician whose research interests include dynamical systems and mathematical physiology. She is a professor of mathematical and statistical sciences at the University of Alberta, and the former president of the Society for Mathematical Biology.
Go to Profile#338
Nataša Pavlović
#40578
Overall Influence
Nataša Pavlović is a Serbian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research concerns fluid dynamics and nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations. She is known for her work with Nets Katz pioneering an approach to constructing singularities in equations resembling the Navier–Stokes equations, by transferring a finite amount of energy through an infinitely decreasing sequence of time and length scales.
Go to Profile#339
Daniela De Silva
#56019
Overall Influence
Daniela De Silva is an Italian mathematician known for her expertise in partial differential equations. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Barnard College and Columbia University. Education and career De Silva did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Naples Federico II, and earned a bachelor's degree there in 1997. She completed her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. Her dissertation, Existence and Regularity of Monotone Solutions to a Free Boundary Problem, was supervised by David Jerison.
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Sarah B. Hart
#45824
Overall Influence
Sarah B. Hart is a British mathematician specialising in group theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Birkbeck, University of London and the Head of Mathematics and Statistics at Birkbeck. In 2020, she was appointed to what may be the oldest chair in mathematics in Britain, the Gresham Professor of Geometry in Gresham College. She is the first woman to hold this position "since the chair was established in 1597".
Go to Profile#341
Birgit Speh
#57218
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Birgit Speh is Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University. She is known for her work in Lie groups, including Speh representations . Career Speh received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. She was the first female mathematician to be given tenure by Cornell University, and the first to receive the title of Professor.
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Elena Braverman
#41667
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Elena Yanovna Braverman is a Russian, Israeli, and Canadian mathematician known for her research in delay differential equations, difference equations, and population dynamics. She is a professor of mathematics and applied mathematics at the University of Calgary, and one of the editors-in-chief of the journal Advances in Difference Equations.
Go to Profile#343
Catherine Yan
#55185
Overall Influence
Catherine Huafei Yan is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University interested in algebraic combinatorics. Education and career Yan earned a bachelor's degree from Peking University in 1993. She was a student of Gian-Carlo Rota at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1997 with a dissertation on The Theory of Commuting Boolean Algebras.
Go to Profile#344
Martha Siegel
#39497
Overall Influence
Martha Jochnowitz Siegel is an American applied mathematician, probability theorist and mathematics educator who served as the editor of Mathematics Magazine from 1991 to 1996. In 2017 she won the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service of the Mathematical Association of America for "her remarkable leadership in guiding the national conversation on undergraduate mathematics curriculum". She was a faculty member in the mathematics department of Towson University from 1971 until 2015, when she became a professor emerita.
Go to Profile#345
Maria-Pia Geppert
#51759
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Maria-Pia Geppert was a German mathematician and biostatistician who co-founded the Biometrical Journal. Geppert was the first woman to become a full professor at the University of Tübingen. With Emmy Noether, Hilda Geiringer, Ruth Moufang, and Hel Braun, Geppert was one of only a handful of women to work in mathematics in Germany before World War II and later convert their degrees into research careers as full professors.
Go to Profile#346
Svitlana Mayboroda
#47122
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Svitlana Mayboroda is a Ukrainian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota and ETH Zurich. Research Mayboroda's research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including boundary value problems for elliptic partial differential equations. Her work has provided a new mathematical approach to Anderson localization, a phenomenon in physics in which waves are confined to a local region rather than propagating throughout a medium, and with this explanation she can predict the regions in which waves will be confined.
Go to Profile#347
Noriko H. Arai
#7914
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Noriko H. Arai is a Japanese researcher in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence, known for her work on a project to develop robots that can pass the entrance examinations for the University of Tokyo. She is a professor in the information and society research division of the National Institute of Informatics.
Go to Profile#348
Marcia Groszek
#54581
Overall Influence
Marcia Jean Groszek is an American mathematician whose research concerns mathematical logic, set theory, forcing, and recursion theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. Education As a high school student, Groszek felt isolated for her interest in mathematics, but she found a sense of community through her participation in the Hampshire College Summer Mathematics Program, and she went on to earn her bachelor's degree at Hampshire College. She completed her Ph.D. in 1981 at Harvard University. Her dissertation, Iterated Perfect Set Forcing and Degrees of Constructibility, ...
Go to Profile#349
Ruth Haas
#22993
Overall Influence
Ruth Haas is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Previously she was the Achilles Professor of Mathematics at Smith College. She received the M. Gweneth Humphreys Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2015 for her mentorship of women in mathematics. Haas was named an inaugural AWM Fellow in 2017. In 2017 she was elected President of the AWM and on February 1, 2019 she assumed that position.
Go to Profile#350
Mary Beth Ruskai
#23611
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Mary Beth Ruskai was an American mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics with interest in mathematical problems in quantum physics. She was a Fellow of the AAAS, AMS, APS, and AWM. Education Ruskai was the daughter of Michael J. Ruskai and Evelyn M. Ruskai . She had three sisters. She graduated from Notre Dame College in Cleveland, Ohio in 1965 with a BS in chemistry. She simultaneously received her M.A. in mathematics and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969. Her PhD thesis was about the N-Representability Problem.
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