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,
#351
Olga Bondareva
#45141
Overall Influence
1937 - 1991 (54 years)
Olga Nikolaevna Bondareva was a distinguished Soviet mathematician and economist. She contributed to the fields of mathematical economics, especially game theory. Bondareva is best known as one of the two independent discoverers of the Bondareva–Shapley theorem.
Go to Profile#352
Larisa Maksimova
#23221
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Larisa Lvovna Maksimova is a Russian mathematical logician known for her research in non-classical logic. Education and career Maksimova was born on November 5, 1943, in Kochenyovo, the daughter of two biologists who had temporarily moved there from Tomsk State University to escape the war. She grew up in Novosibirsk, where her parents became geographers at the Novosibirsk Pedagogical Institute. She studied mechanics and mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, publishing her first paper on Wilhelm Ackermann's axioms for strict implication in relevance logic in 1964 and graduating in 1965...
Go to Profile#353
Lois Curfman McInnes
#39012
Overall Influence
Lois Virginia Curfman McInnes is an American applied mathematician who works as a senior computational scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, where she works on the numerical solution of nonlinear partial differential equations for scientific applications.
Go to Profile#354
Kristin Lauter
#50887
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Kristin Estella Lauter is an American mathematician and cryptographer whose research interest is broadly in application of number theory and algebraic geometry in cryptography. She is particularly known for her work in the area of elliptic curve cryptography. She was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, from 1999–2021 and the head of the Cryptography Group from 2008–2021; her group developed Microsoft SEAL. In April 2021, Lauter joined Facebook AI Research as the West Coast Head of Research Science. She became the President-Elect of the Association for Women in Mathema...
Go to Profile#355
Asuman Aksoy
#30833
Overall Influence
Asuman Güven Aksoy is a Turkish-American mathematician whose research concerns topics in functional analysis, metric geometry, and operator theory including Banach spaces, measures of non-compactness, fixed points, Birnbaum–Orlicz spaces, real trees, injective metric spaces, and tight spans. She works at Claremont McKenna College, where she is Crown Professor of Mathematics and George R. Roberts Fellow.
Go to Profile#356
Ariane Mézard
#33166
Overall Influence
Ariane Mézard is a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Sorbonne University who works in arithmetic geometry. Education Mézard studied at the École normale supérieure de Lyon from 1992 to 1996. She received her Ph.D. under the supervision of Roland Gillard at Joseph Fourier University in 1998. She received her habilitation in 2005 during her time at Paris-Sud University.
Go to Profile#357
Silvia Heubach
#47776
Overall Influence
Silvia Heubach is a German-American mathematician specializing in enumerative combinatorics, combinatorial game theory, and bioinformatics. She is a professor of mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#358
Reiko Sakamoto
#61601
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Reiko Sakamoto is a Japanese mathematician affiliated with Nara Women's University. Her teachers have included Sigeru Mizohata and Masaya Yamaguchi; her students have included Yoshihiro Shibata. She is known for her research on mixed boundary conditions for hyperbolic partial differential equations, for which she won the 1974 Iyanaga Prize of the Mathematical Society of Japan, and for her book on hyperbolic boundary value problems.
Go to Profile#359
Gunilla Kreiss
#49539
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Gunilla Kreiss is a Swedish applied mathematician and numerical analyst specializing in level-set methods and numerical methods for partial differential equations, especially for problems arising in fluid dynamics including two-phase flow, shear flow, and Burgers' equation. She is professor of numerical analysis in the Department of Information Technology, Division of Scientific Computing at Uppsala University, and editor-in-chief of BIT Numerical Mathematics.
Go to Profile#360
Karen Saxe
#58246
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Karen Saxe is an American mathematician who specializes in functional analysis, and in the mathematical study of issues related to social justice. She is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics, Emerita at Macalester College,. She is Associate Executive Director of the American Mathematical Society and Director of its Office of Government Relations, based in Washington DC.
Go to Profile#361
Karin Melnick
#59148
Overall Influence
Karen Melnick is a mathematician and associate professor at University of Maryland, College Park. She specializes in differential geometry and was most recently awarded the 2020-2021 Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars by the American Mathematical Society.
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Deborah Tepper Haimo
#51627
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Deborah Tepper Haimo was an American mathematician who became president of the Mathematical Association of America . Her research concerned "classical analysis, in particular, generalizations of the heat equation, special functions, and harmonic analysis".
Go to Profile#363
Ann E. Watkins
#43091
Overall Influence
Ann Esther Watkins is an American mathematician and statistician specializing in statistics education. She edited the College Mathematics Journal from 1989 to 1994, chaired the Advanced Placement Statistics Development Committee from 1997 to 1999, and was president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2001 to 2002.
Go to Profile#364
Ruth F. Curtain
#54500
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Ruth F. Curtain was an Australian mathematician who worked for many years in the Netherlands as a professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen. Her research concerned infinite-dimensional linear systems.
Go to Profile#365
Ingeborg Seynsche
#34742
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Martha Mechthild Ingeborg Seynsche was a German mathematician. She was one of the first women to be allowed to earn a doctorate on a mathematical topic in Göttingen. Life and work Her father Johannes Seynsche was a professor and senior teacher at the Unterbarmer Higher Girls' School. Her mother was Anna Seynsche , née Limbach. Ingeborg passed her Abitur in Unterbarmen in 1924. She then studied in Marburg and Göttingen, and in 1929 passed the state examination for teachers in pure and applied mathematics and physics. She went on to become an assistant at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen.
Go to Profile#366
Tamar Schlick
#48508
Overall Influence
Tamar Schlick is an American applied mathematician who works as a professor of chemistry, mathematics, and computer science at New York University. Her research involves developing and applying tools for modeling and simulating biomolecules.
Go to Profile#367
Simone Warzel
#53681
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Simone Warzel is a German mathematical physicist at the Technical University of Munich. Her research involves statistical mechanics and the many-body problem in quantum mechanics. She is a co-author of the book Random Operators: Disorder Effects on Quantum Spectra and Dynamics.
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Winifred Asprey
#14838
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Winifred "Tim" Alice Asprey was an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was one of only around 200 women to earn PhDs in mathematics from American universities during the 1940s, a period of women's underrepresentation in mathematics at this level. She was involved in developing the close contact between Vassar College and IBM that led to the establishment of the first computer science lab at Vassar.
Go to Profile#369
Fariba Fahroo
#48290
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Fariba Fahroo is an American Persian mathematician, a program manager at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and a former program manager at the Defense Sciences Office. Along with I. M. Ross, she has published papers in pseudospectral optimal control theory. The Ross–Fahroo lemma and the Ross–Fahroo pseudospectral method are named after her. In 2010, she received , the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award for fundamental contributions to flight mechanics.
Go to Profile#370
Celia Hoyles
#47491
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Areas of Specialization: Mathematics Education, Mathematics Policy, Applied Mathematics Celia Mary Hoyles (née French) was born in Chigwell, Essex, a small town in the UK located about 20 miles northeast of London. She is Professor of Mathematics Education at UCL Institute of Education (UCL), as well as in that university’s Institute of Education. After graduating from Loughton County High School in 1964, French (as she was then known) attended the University of Manchester, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1967, with a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics. Upon graduation from university, French taught mathematics at a high school in London’s East End.
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Nancy K. Nichols
#50908
Overall Influence
Nancy K. Nichols is an applied mathematician and numerical analyst whose research concerns numerical methods for differential equations, linear algebra, and control theory, and data assimilation. She is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Reading.
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Maria Hasse
#55542
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Maria-Viktoria Hasse was a German mathematician who became the first female professor in the faculty of mathematics and science at TU Dresden. She wrote books on set theory and category theory, and is known as one of the namesakes of the Gallai–Hasse–Roy–Vitaver theorem in graph coloring.
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Amy Cohen-Corwin
#56732
Overall Influence
Amy Cohen-Corwin is a professor emerita of mathematics at Rutgers University, and former Dean of University College at Rutgers University. In 2006, she was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Hilary Priestley
#51468
Overall Influence
Hilary Ann Priestley is a British mathematician. She is a professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where she has been Tutor in Mathematics since 1972. Hilary Priestley introduced ordered separable topological spaces; such topological spaces are now usually called Priestley spaces in her honour. The term "Priestley duality" is also used for her application of these spaces in the representation theory of distributive lattices.
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Cabiria Andreian Cazacu
#56147
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Cabiria Andreian Cazacu was a Romanian mathematician known for her work in complex analysis. She held the chair in mathematical analysis at the University of Bucharest from 1973 to 1975, and was dean of the faculty of mathematics at the University of Bucharest from 1976 to 1984.
Go to Profile#376
Susan Landau
#10708
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#377
Suzanne Lenhart
#60456
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Suzanne Marie Lenhart is an American mathematician who works in partial differential equations, optimal control and mathematical biology. She is a Chancellor's Professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee, an associate director for education and outreach at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, and a part-time researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#378
Deborah Chung
#46282
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Deborah Duen Ling Chung is an American scientist and university professor. Early life and education Chung was born and raised in Hong Kong. Her mother was Rebecca Chan Chung , whose mother was Lee Sun Chau .
Go to Profile#379
Leslie Hogben
#38295
Overall Influence
Leslie Hogben is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory and linear algebra, and known for her mentorship of graduate students in mathematics. She is a professor of mathematics at Iowa State University, where she held the Dio Lewis Holl Chair in Applied Mathematics 2012-2020; she is also professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State, associate dean for graduate studies and faculty development of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State, and associate director for diversity at the American Institute of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#380
Katrin Wendland
#55839
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Katrin Wendland is a German mathematical physicist who works as a professor at Trinity College Dublin. Wendland earned a diploma in mathematics from the University of Bonn in 1996, and a PhD in physics from the University of Bonn in 2000, under the supervision of Werner Nahm. After being a lecturer and then senior lecturer at the University of Warwick from 2002 to 2006, she returned to Germany as a professor at the University of Augsburg, where she held the Chair for Analysis and Geometry. She moved to Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in 2011 and then to Trinity College Dublin in 2022.
Go to Profile#381
Christine Guenther
#44698
Overall Influence
Christine Guenther is an American mathematician known for her research on the differential geometry of manifolds, including the Ricci flow. She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Pacific University.
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Maria Cibrario
#62056
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Elisa Maria Eugenia Cibrario Cinquini was an Italian mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and known for her research in association with Guido Fubini, Giuseppe Peano, and Francesco Tricomi.
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Michèle Artigue
#28713
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michèle Artigue is a French expert in mathematics education, a professor emeritus at Paris Diderot University and the former president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction. Early life and education Artigue was born in 1946 in Bordères-sur-l'Échez, a small town in the Pyrenees. She was the daughter of a kindergarten teacher, and writes that she was "always interested in mathematics". She attended the lycée in Tarbes, the nearest town large enough for that level of school, and then spent two years in a preparatory mathematics course for entrance to the grandes écoles in T...
Go to Profile#384
Katya Scheinberg
#47208
Overall Influence
Katya Scheinberg is a Russian-American applied mathematician known for her research in continuous optimization and particularly in derivative-free optimization. She works at Cornell University and is a professor in Cornell's School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.
Go to Profile#385
Viviane Baladi
#52144
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Viviane Baladi is a mathematician who works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France. Originally Swiss, she has become a naturalized citizen of France. Her research concerns dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#386
Tamara G. Kolda
#42928
Overall Influence
Tamara G. Kolda is an American applied mathematician and former Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She is noted for her contributions in computational science, multilinear algebra, data mining, graph algorithms, mathematical optimization, parallel computing, and software engineering. She is currently a member of the SIAM Board of Trustees and served as associate editor for both the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.
Go to Profile#387
Sara Zahedi
#52040
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Sara Zahedi is an Iranian-Swedish mathematician who works in computational fluid dynamics and holds an associate professorship in numerical analysis at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. She is one of ten winners and the only female winner of the European Mathematical Society Prize for 2016 "for her outstanding research regarding the development and analysis of numerical algorithms for partial differential equations with a focus on applications to problems with dynamically changing geometry". The topic of Zahedi's EMS Prize lecture was her recent research on the CutFEM method of so...
Go to Profile#388
Dona Strauss
#31815
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dona Anschel Papert Strauss is a South African mathematician working in topology and functional analysis. Her doctoral thesis was one of the initial sources of pointless topology. She has also been active in the political left, lost one of her faculty positions over her protests of the Vietnam War, and became a founder of European Women in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#389
Jennifer Seberry
#25570
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.
Go to Profile#390
Gudrun Kalmbach
#50984
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Gudrun Kalmbach is a German mathematician and educator known for her contributions in the field of quantum logic and for the educational programmes she developed. Career After teacher training in mathematics and chemistry, Kalmbach obtained a PhD at the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Hans Grauert on the topic of low-dimensional CW complexes in non-compact manifolds.
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Amy Dahan
#48033
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Amy Dahan-Dalmédico is a French mathematician, historian of mathematics, and historian of the politics of climate change. Education and career Dahan earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1979 and taught mathematics at the University of Amiens until 1983, when she became a researcher for the CNRS. She has also taught at the École Polytechnique, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and Université libre de Bruxelles. She earned a second doctorate in the history of mathematics in 1990, and is an emeritus member of the Alexandre Koyré Center for Research in the History of Science and ...
Go to Profile#392
Irina Mitrea
#47761
Overall Influence
Irina Mitrea is a Romanian-American mathematician who works as professor and department chair at the Department of Mathematics of Temple University. She is known for her contributions to harmonic analysis, particularly on the interface of this field with partial differential equations, geometric measure theory, scattering theory, complex analysis and validated numerics. She is also known for her efforts to promote mathematics among young women.
Go to Profile#393
Corinna Ulcigrai
#36553
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Corinna Ulcigrai is an Italian mathematician working on dynamical systems. With Krzysztof Frączek in 2013, Ulcigrai is known for proving that in the Ehrenfest model most trajectories are not ergodic.
Go to Profile#394
Sarah Witherspoon
#60404
Overall Influence
Sarah Jane Witherspoon is an American mathematician interested in topics in abstract algebra, including Hochschild cohomology and quantum groups. She is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University
Go to Profile#395
Susanne Brenner
#53768
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susanne Cecelia Brenner is an American mathematician, whose research concerns the finite element method and related techniques for the numerical solution of differential equations. She is a Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Previously, she held the Nicholson Professorship of Mathematics and the Michael F. and Roberta Nesbit McDonald Professorship at Louisiana State University, She currently chairs the editorial committee of the journal Mathematics of Computation. During 2021-2022 she is serving as President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics .
Go to Profile#396
Mary Jackson
#18573
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA's first black female engineer.
Go to Profile#397
Eva-Maria Graefe
#58852
Overall Influence
Eva-Maria Graefe is a German mathematical physicist who works as a reader in mathematical physics at Imperial College London and as a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society. Her research involves ultracold atoms and non-Hermitian quantum mechanics, an area she describes informally as the study of "holes in quantum systems" by which dissipation degrades their quantum behavior.
Go to Profile#398
Radha Kessar
#61244
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Radha Kessar is an Indian mathematician known for her research in the representation theory of finite groups. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester, and in 2009 won the Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#399
Deanna Needell
#48859
Overall Influence
Deanna Needell is an American applied mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. She authors The Needell in the Haystack, a column published in the Girls' Angle Bulletin. Education Deanna Needell received her PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Davis in 2009. Her dissertation title was Topics in Compressed Sensing.
Go to Profile#400
Mina Aganagić
#41555
Overall Influence
Mina Aganagić is a mathematical physicist who works as a professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics, the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
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