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,
#401
Yvonne Dold-Samplonius
#59960
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Yvonne Dold-Samplonius was a Dutch mathematician and historian who specialized in the history of Islamic mathematics during the Middle age. She was particularly interested in the mathematical methods used by Islamic architects and builders of the Middle Ages for measurements of volumes and measurements of religious buildings or in the design of muqarnas.
Go to Profile#402
Anna Nagurney
#21878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Anna Nagurney is an American mathematician, economist, educator and writer in the field of Operations Management. Nagurney is the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she held the John F. Smith Memorial Professorship of Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management from 1998 to 2021.
Go to Profile#403
Gila Hanna
#43458
Overall Influence
Gila Hanna is a Canadian mathematics educator and philosopher of mathematics whose research interests include the nature and educational role of mathematical proofs, and gender in mathematics education. She is professor emerita in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the former director of mathematics education at the Fields Institute, and the founder of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education.
Go to Profile#404
Valerie Isham
#48313
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Valerie Susan Isham is a British applied probabilist and former President of the Royal Statistical Society. Isham's research interests in include point processes, spatial processes, spatio-temporal processes and population processes.
Go to Profile#405
Marjorie Senechal
#53877
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Marjorie Lee Senechal is an American mathematician and historian of science, the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College and editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer. In mathematics, she is known for her work on tessellations and quasicrystals; she has also studied ancient Parthian electric batteries and published several books about silk.
Go to Profile#406
Penny Haxell
#66837
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Penelope Evelyn Haxell is a Canadian mathematician who works as a professor in the department of combinatorics and optimization at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include extremal combinatorics and graph theory.
Go to Profile#407
Ursula Gather
#45568
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ursula Gather is a German statistician and academic administrator. From 2008 to 2020, she was rector of TU Dortmund University. Since 2013, Gather has been chairwoman of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation.
Go to Profile#408
Karen Willcox
#51026
Overall Influence
Karen Elizabeth Willcox is an aerospace engineer and computational scientist best known for her work on reduced-order modeling and the study of multi-fidelity methods. She is currently the director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas.
Go to Profile#409
Zoé Chatzidakis
#54970
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Zoé Maria Chatzidakis is a mathematician who works as a director of research at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Her research concerns model theory and difference algebra. She was invited to give the Tarski Lectures in 2020, though the lectures were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Go to Profile#410
Keti Tenenblat
#59618
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Keti Tenenblat is a Turkish-Brazilian mathematician working on Riemannian geometry, the applications of differential geometry to partial differential equations, and Finsler geometry. Together with Chuu-Lian Terng, she generalized Backlund theorem to higher dimensions.
Go to Profile#411
Rachel Roberts
#62739
Overall Influence
Rachel Roberts is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology, including foliations and contact geometry. She is the Elinor Anheuser Professor of Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis.
Go to Profile#412
Rosemary A. Bailey
#43263
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Rosemary A. Bailey is a British statistician who works in the design of experiments and the analysis of variance and in related areas of combinatorial design, especially in association schemes. She has written books on the design of experiments, on association schemes, and on linear models in statistics.
Go to Profile#413
Ragni Piene
#49777
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ragni Piene is a Norwegian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, with particular interest in enumerative results and intersection theory. Education and career After a bachelor's degree from the University of Oslo in 1969 and a DEA from Université de Paris in 1970 Piene received a doctorate in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, advised by Steven Kleiman. Her dissertation was titled Plücker Formulas.
Go to Profile#414
Elisabeth M. Werner
#62865
Overall Influence
Elisabeth M. Werner is a mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Case Western Reserve University, as associate director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, and as maître de conférences at the Lille University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include convex geometry, functional analysis, probability theory, and their applications.
Go to Profile#415
Thaleia Zariphopoulou
#52267
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Thaleia Zariphopoulou is a Greek-American mathematician specializing in mathematical finance. She is the Chair in Mathematics and the V. H. Neuhaus Centennial Professor of Finance at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#416
Collette Coullard
#48987
Overall Influence
Collette René Coullard is an American mathematician, industrial engineer, operations researcher, and matroid theorist known for her research on combinatorial optimization problems that combine facility location and stock management. Formerly a professor at Purdue University, the University of Waterloo, Northwestern University, and Lake Superior State University, she has retired to become a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#417
Yvette Amice
#57088
Overall Influence
1936 - 1993 (57 years)
Yvette Amice was a French mathematician whose research concerned number theory and -adic analysis. She was president of the Société mathématique de France. Education Amice studied mathematics at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in Sèvres, beginnining in 1956 and earning her agrégation in 1959. She became an assistant at the Faculté des sciences de Paris until 1964, when she completed a state doctorate under the supervision of Charles Pisot. Her dissertation was Interpolation p-adique [p-adic interpolation].
Go to Profile#418
Maria Bruna
#50927
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Maria Bruna Estrach is an applied mathematician whose interests include stochastic modelling of multiscale phenomena with applications in mathematical biology and industry. She is affiliated with the University of Cambridge, where she is a university lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#419
Jacqueline Ferrand
#27946
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Jacqueline Lelong-Ferrand was a French mathematician who worked on conformal representation theory, potential theory, and Riemannian manifolds. She taught at universities in Caen, Lille, and Paris.
Go to Profile#420
Hoàng Xuân Sính
#40704
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Hoàng Xuân Sính is a Vietnamese mathematician, a student of Grothendieck, the first female mathematics professor in Vietnam, the founder of , and a recipient of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Go to Profile#421
Sijue Wu
#66156
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Sijue Wu is a Chinese-American mathematician who works as the Robert W. and Lynne H. Browne Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Her research involves the mathematics of water waves.
Go to Profile#422
Regina Tyshkevich
#66758
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Regina Iosifovna Tyshkevich was a Belarusian mathematician, an expert in graph theory, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, professor of the Belarusian State University. Her main scientific interests included Intersection graphs, degree sequences, and the reconstruction conjecture. She was also known for an independent introduction and investigation of the class of split graphs and for her contributions to line graphs of hypergraphs.
Go to Profile#423
Paulette Libermann
#42265
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Paulette Libermann was a French mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Early life and education Libermann was one of three sisters born to a family of Russian-Ukrainian Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to Paris.
Go to Profile#424
Marjorie Batchelor
#61198
Overall Influence
Marjorie Blake Batchelor-Winter is an American mathematician known for her work on coalgebras and supermanifolds. She is an emeritus staff member in the department of pure mathematics and mathematical statistics at the University of Cambridge in England, where she was formerly the graduate education officer and director of the Cambridge Mathematics Placements summer programme.
Go to Profile#425
Vasanti N. Bhat-Nayak
#50302
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Vasanti N. Bhat-Nayak was a mathematician whose research concerned balanced incomplete block designs, bivariegated graphs, graceful graphs, graph equations and frequency partitions. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Mumbai in 1970 with the dissertation Some New Results in PBIBD Designs and Combinatorics. S. S. Shrikhande was her advisor. After completing her doctorate, she remained on the faculty at the university, and eventually served as department head.
Go to Profile#426
Alvany Rocha
#60436
Overall Influence
Alvany Rocha-Caridi is a mathematician at the City University of New York who specializes in the theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras, and who is particularly known for her computation of the characters of the Virasoro algebra.
Go to Profile#427
Caroline Uhler
#34259
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Caroline Uhler is a Swiss statistician working in the field of machine learning and applications in genomics. Her research focuses on developing methods for causal inference to infer regulatory relationships from different data modalities . She is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, she is a Core Institute Member at the Broad Institute, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center.
Go to Profile#428
Marilda Sotomayor
#42513
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marilda A. Oliveira Sotomayor is a Brazilian mathematician and economist known for her research on auction theory and stable matchings. She is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Brazilian Society of Econometrics, and Brazilian Society of Mathematics. She was elected fellow of the Econometric Society in 2003 and international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Go to Profile#429
Antonella Zanna
#57601
Overall Influence
Antonella Zanna Munthe-Kaas is an Italian applied mathematician and numerical analyst whose research includes work on numerical integration of differential equations and applications to medical imaging. She is a professor and head of the mathematics department at the University of Bergen in Norway.
Go to Profile#430
Ilse Fischer
#55480
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ilse Fischer is an Austrian mathematician whose research concerns enumerative combinatorics and algebraic combinatorics, connecting these topics to representation theory and statistical mechanics. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#431
Aparna Higgins
#48676
Overall Influence
Aparna W. Higgins is a mathematician known for her encouragement of undergraduate mathematicians to participate in mathematical research. Higgins originally specialized in universal algebra, but her more recent research concerns graph theory, including graph pebbling and line graphs. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Dayton.
Go to Profile#432
Abdulalim A. Shabazz
#36156
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Abdulalim Abdullah Shabazz was an African American Professor of Mathematics. He received the National Association of Mathematicians Distinguished Service Award for his years of mentoring and teaching excellence. President of the United States Bill Clinton awarded Shabazz a National Mentor award in September 2000.
Go to Profile#433
Erica Klarreich
#58462
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Erica Gail Klarreich is an American mathematician, journalist and science popularizer. Early life and education Klarreich's father was a professor of mathematics, and her mother was a mathematics teacher.
Go to Profile#434
Luminița Vese
#40792
Overall Influence
Luminița Aura Vese is a Romanian professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for her research in image processing, including work on active contour models, level-set methods, image segmentation, and inpainting.
Go to Profile#435
Angelika Steger
#57275
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Angelika Steger is a mathematician and computer scientist whose research interests include graph theory, randomized algorithms, and approximation algorithms. She is a professor at ETH Zurich. Education and career After earlier studies at the University of Freiburg and Heidelberg University, Steger earned a master's degree from Stony Brook University in 1985. She completed a doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1990, under the supervision of Hans Jürgen Prömel, with a dissertation on random combinatorial structures, and earned her habilitation from Bonn in 1994. After a visiting position a...
Go to Profile#436
Christiane Rousseau
#53469
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Christiane Rousseau is a French and Canadian mathematician, a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the Université de Montréal. She was president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2004.
Go to Profile#437
Gesine Reinert
#54179
Overall Influence
Gesine Reinert is a German statistician who is University Professor in Statistics at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Her research concerns the probability theory and statistics of biological sequences and biological networks.
Go to Profile#438
Olive Jean Dunn
#51679
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Olive Jean Dunn was an American mathematician and statistician, and professor of biostatistics at the University of California Los Angeles . She described methods for computing confidence intervals and also codified the Bonferroni correction's application to confidence intervals. She authored the textbook Basic Statistics: A Primer for the Biomedical Sciences in 1977.
Go to Profile#439
Vanessa Robins
#58424
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Vanessa Robins is an Australian applied mathematician whose research interests include computational topology, image processing, and the structure of granular materials. She is a fellow in the departments of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Australian National University, where she was ARC Future Fellow from 2014 to 2019.
Go to Profile#440
Colette Guillopé
#58095
Overall Influence
Colette Guillopé is a French mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. She is a professor at Paris 12 Val de Marne University, where she is also the gender officer for the university.
Go to Profile#441
Robyn Owens
#54770
Overall Influence
Robyn Anne Owens is an Australian applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in computer vision and face recognition, and on the non-invasive imaging of lactation. Formerly a professor at the University of Western Australia and the deputy vice-chancellor for research at UWA, she retired in 2019, and remains affiliated with UWA as a professorial fellow.
Go to Profile#442
Kathrin Bringmann
#47809
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Kathrin Bringmann is a German number theorist in the University of Cologne, Germany, who has made fundamental contributions to the theory of mock theta functions. Education and career Kathrin Bringmann was born on 8 May 1977, in Muenster, Germany. She passed the State Examinations in Mathematics and Theology at the University of Würzburg, Germany, in 2002, and obtained a Diploma in Mathematics at Würzburg in 2003. She received PhD in 2004 from University of Heidelberg under the supervision of .
Go to Profile#443
Alice Silverberg
#55707
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alice Silverberg is professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. She was faculty at the Ohio State University from 1984 through 2004. She has given over 300 lectures at universities around the world, and she has brought attention to issues of sexism and discrimination through her blog Alice's Adventures in Numberland.
Go to Profile#444
Maria Heep-Altiner
#62239
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Maria Heep-Altiner is a German mathematician, actuary and university lecturer. Life After graduating from the Prince Johann Ludwig School in Hadamar in 1978, Heep-Altiner studied mathematics and economics at the University of Bonn. In 1989 she earned her doctorate in mathematics on the number theory" under Günter Harder and Michael Rapoport.
Go to Profile#445
Hajer Bahouri
#69180
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Hajer Bahouri is a Franco-Tunisian mathematician who is interested in partial differential equations. She is Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Laboratory of Analysis and Applied Mathematics at the University Paris-Est-Créteil-Val-de-Marne.
Go to Profile#446
Kirsten Eisenträger
#56770
Overall Influence
Anne Kirsten Eisenträger is a professor of mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University, known for her research on computational number theory, Hilbert's tenth problem, and applications in cryptography.
Go to Profile#447
Fioralba Cakoni
#63232
Overall Influence
Fioralba Cakoni is an American-Albanian mathematician and an expert on inverse scattering theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Education and career Cakoni earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Tirana in 1987 and 1990 respectively. She completed her Ph.D. in 1996, jointly between the University of Tirana and University of Patras, supervised by George Dassios. Her dissertation was Some Results on the Abstract Wave Equation. Problems of the Scattering Theory in Elasticity and Thermoelasticity in Low-Frequency.
Go to Profile#448
Mary Perry Smith
#48603
Overall Influence
Mary Perry Smith was an American mathematics educator who cofounded the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement program and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. Early life and education Perry Smith was born on May 29, 1926, and was originally from Evansville, Indiana, one of six children of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; her maternal grandfather, Henry Allen Perry had been a chaplain and mathematics teacher at the Tuskegee Institute, where her parents met. As a child she moved frequently, to Kokomo, Logansport, Anderson, Crawfordsville, and Frankfort, all in Indiana.
Go to Profile#449
Sonja Petrović
#21831
Overall Influence
Sonja Petrović is a Serbian-American statistician and associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics, College of Computing, at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on mathematical statistics and algebraic statistics, applied and computational algebraic geometry and random graph models. She was elected to the International Statistics Institute in 2015.
Go to Profile#450
Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
#43261
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
