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,
#1
Fan Chung
#2768
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Fan-Rong King Chung Graham , known professionally as Fan Chung, is an American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution .
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Karen Uhlenbeck
#3276
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.
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Ingrid Daubechies
#1650
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#4
Nicole El Karoui
#4607
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nicole El Karoui is a French mathematician and pioneer in the development of mathematical finance, born 29 May 1944 in Paris. She is considered one of the pioneers on the French school of mathematical finance and trained many engineers and scientists in this field. She is Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Sorbonne University, and held professorship positions at the École Polytechnique and Université du Maine. Her research has contributed to the application of probability and stochastic differential equations to modeling and risk management in financial markets.
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Gigliola Staffilani
#7375
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Gigliola Staffilani is an Italian-American mathematician who works as the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation.
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Sun-Yung Alice Chang
#8169
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sun-Yung Alice Chang is a Taiwanese American mathematician specializing in aspects of mathematical analysis ranging from harmonic analysis and partial differential equations to differential geometry. She is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.
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Claire Voisin
#6668
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Claire Voisin is a French mathematician known for her work in algebraic geometry. She is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and holds the chair of algebraic geometry at the Collège de France.
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Ruth Lawrence
#5946
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark is a British–Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. In the public eye, she is best known for having been a child prodigy in mathematics.
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Vera T. Sós
#9179
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Vera Turán Sós was a Hungarian mathematician who specialized in number theory and combinatorics. She was a student and close collaborator of both Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi. She also collaborated frequently with her husband Pál Turán, an analyst, number theorist, and combinatorist. Until 1987, she worked at the Department of Analysis at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Afterwards, she was employed by the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1997, Sós was awarded the Széchenyi Prize.
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Olga Ladyzhenskaya
#7714
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002. She is the author of more than two hundred scientific works, among which are six monographs.
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Olga Taussky-Todd
#5099
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Olga Taussky-Todd was an Austrian and later Czech-American mathematician. She published more than 300 research papers on algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis.
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Mary Ellen Rudin
#9374
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Mary Ellen Rudin was an American mathematician known for her work in set-theoretic topology. In 2013, Elsevier established the Mary Ellen Rudin Young Researcher Award, which is awarded annually to a young researcher, mainly in fields adjacent to general topology.
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Lisa Piccirillo
#11297
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lisa Marie Piccirillo is an American mathematician who works on geometry and low-dimensional topology. In 2020, Piccirillo published a mathematical proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics determining that the Conway knot is not a slice knot, answering an unsolved problem in knot theory first proposed over fifty years prior by English mathematician John Horton Conway. In July 2020, she became an assistant professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Monica Vișan
#12091
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Monica Vișan is a Romanian mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles who specializes in partial differential equations and is well known for her work on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation.
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Melanie Wood
#12738
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Melanie Matchett Wood is an American mathematician at Harvard University who was the first woman to qualify for the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team. She completed her PhD in 2009 at Princeton University and is currently Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, after being Chancellor's Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, and spending 2 years as Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
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Tamar Ziegler
#11722
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Tamar Debora Ziegler is an Israeli mathematician known for her work in ergodic theory, combinatorics and number theory. She holds the Henry and Manya Noskwith Chair of Mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University.
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Katherine Johnson
#2690
Overall Influence
1918 - 2020 (102 years)
Creola Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".
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Helena Rasiowa
#6444
Overall Influence
1917 - 1994 (77 years)
Helena Rasiowa was a Polish mathematician. She worked in the foundations of mathematics and algebraic logic. Early years Rasiowa was born in Vienna on 20 June 1917 to Polish parents. As soon as Poland regained its independence in 1918, the family settled in Warsaw. Helena's father was a railway specialist. She exhibited many different skills and interests, from music to business management and the most important of her interests, mathematics.
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Maryna Viazovska
#8507
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.
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Ellen Fetter
#4944
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory. Early life and education Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard. Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family. Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957. She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.
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Shihoko Ishii
#14324
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Shihoko Ishii is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the University of Tokyo. Her research area is algebraic geometry. Education Ishii received her bachelor's degree from Tokyo Women's Christian University in 1973 and her master's degree from Waseda University in 1975. She earned her PhD from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1983.
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Dorothy Maharam
#10885
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Dorothy Maharam Stone was an American mathematician born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who made important contributions to measure theory and became the namesake of Maharam's theorem and Maharam algebra.
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Maryam Mirzakhani
#4076
Overall Influence
1977 - 2017 (40 years)
#24
Leila Schneps
#7035
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Leila Schneps is an American mathematician and fiction writer at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique working in number theory. Schneps has written general audience math books and, under the pen name Catherine Shaw, has written mathematically themed murder mysteries.
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Maria Chudnovsky
#11135
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Maria Chudnovsky is an Israeli-American mathematician working on graph theory and combinatorial optimization. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Education and career Chudnovsky is a professor in the department of mathematics at Princeton University. She grew up in Russia and Israel, studying at the Technion, and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from Princeton University under the supervision of Paul Seymour. After postdoctoral research at the Clay Mathematics Institute, she became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 2005, and moved to Columbia University in 2006. By 2014, she was the Liu Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia.
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Ajit Iqbal Singh
#15470
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ajit Iqbal Singh is an Indian mathematician, specialising in functional analysis and harmonic analysis. Singh is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy , India's apex body of scientists and technologists. She is also a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences , based in Allahabad.
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Mary Tsingou
#7228
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Mary Tsingou is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek descent. She was one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is best known for having coded the celebrated computer experiment with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became an inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing and was a turning point in soliton theory.
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Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
#6106
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.
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Christina Sormani
#9967
Overall Influence
Christina Sormani is a professor of mathematics at City University of New York affiliated with Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is known for her research in Riemannian geometry, metric geometry, and Ricci curvature, as well as her work on the notion of intrinsic flat distance.
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Dusa McDuff
#11462
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.
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Marina Ratner
#13266
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Marina Evseevna Ratner was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who worked in ergodic theory. Around 1990, she proved a group of major theorems concerning unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, known as Ratner's theorems. Ratner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, awarded the Ostrowski Prize in 1993 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences the same year. In 1994, she was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
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Evelyn Boyd Granville
#10143
Overall Influence
1924 - 2023 (99 years)
Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American university; she earned it in 1949 from Yale University. She graduated from Smith College in 1945. She performed pioneering work in the field of computing.
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Jinyoung Park
#17705
Overall Influence
Jinyoung Park is a South Korean mathematician at Stanford University working in combinatorics and graph theory. In 2022, she released a preprint containing a 6-page proposed proof of the Kahn–Kalai conjecture with Huy Tuan Pham.
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Hélène Esnault
#13403
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Hélène Esnault is a French and German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Biography Born in Paris, Esnault earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Paris VII. She wrote her dissertation on Singularites rationnelles et groupes algebriques under the direction of Lê Dũng Tráng.
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Jean Pedersen
#18362
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Jean J. Pedersen was an American mathematician and author particularly known for her works on the mathematics of paper folding. Education and career Pedersen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of an ophthalmologist and a teacher. She studied home economics changing to a double major in mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, before becoming a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Utah under the supervision of E. Allen Davis.
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Radia Perlman
#2851
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol , which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for exampl...
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Jane M. Hawkins
#18676
Overall Influence
Jane Margaret Hawkins is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research concerns dynamical systems and complex dynamics, including cellular automata and Julia sets. More recent research has included work on cellular automata models for the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and Ebola.
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Emma Castelnuovo
#17806
Overall Influence
1913 - 2014 (101 years)
Emma Castelnuovo was an Italian mathematician and teacher of Jewish descent. In 2013, the year of her 100th birthday, the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction created an award named after Castelnuovo to recognize outstanding contributions to mathematics education.
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Cathleen Synge Morawetz
#13663
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Cathleen Synge Morawetz was a Canadian mathematician who spent much of her career in the United States. Morawetz's research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in transonic flow. She was professor emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she had also served as director from 1984 to 1988. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998.
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Nan Laird
#7980
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nan McKenzie Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.
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Raman Parimala
#12857
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Raman Parimala is an Indian mathematician known for her contributions to algebra. She is the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of mathematics at Emory University. For many years, she was a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Mumbai. She has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2019 and is on the Abel prize selection Committee 2021/2022.
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Mónica Clapp
#12196
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mónica Alicia Clapp Jiménez Labora is a mathematician at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México known for her work in nonlinear partial differential equations and algebraic topology. Life and work Clapp was born in Mexico City. She graduated from UNAM in 1974. Clapp then graduated with her Ph.D from Heidelberg University in 1979, and has been a faculty member at UNAM since that time.
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Doris Schattschneider
#15355
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Doris J. Schattschneider is an American mathematician, a retired professor of mathematics at Moravian College. She is known for writing about tessellations and about the art of M. C. Escher, for helping Martin Gardner validate and popularize the pentagon tiling discoveries of amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice, and for co-directing with Eugene Klotz the project that developed The Geometer's Sketchpad.
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Emma Lehmer
#18279
Overall Influence
1906 - 2007 (101 years)
Emma Markovna Lehmer was a mathematician known for her work on reciprocity laws in algebraic number theory. She preferred to deal with complex number fields and integers, rather than the more abstract aspects of the theory.
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Holly Krieger
#19234
Overall Influence
Holly Krieger is a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where she is also the Corfield Fellow at Murray Edwards College. Her current research interests are in arithmetic and algebraic aspects of families of complex dynamical systems. She is well known for her appearances in the popular mathematics YouTube video series Numberphile.
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Penelope Maddy
#6554
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Penelope Maddy is UCI Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Maddy specializes and is known for her influential work in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical realism. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979. Maddy’s early work was largely a defense of the position known as mathematical realism or Platonism, in which mathematical objects (like, say, numbers) are real objects in the universe (though abstract). This position resembles that of famous mathematical realists like the great logician Kurt Gödel, though importantly Maddy also considers sets of objects real, as well.
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Éva Tardos
#6844
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Éva Tardos is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient methods for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs or networks. She has done some work on network flow algorithms like approximation algorithms for network flows, cut, and clustering problems. Her recent work focuses on algorithmic game theory and simple auctions.
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Irene Fonseca
#20840
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Irene Maria Quintanilha Coelho da Fonseca is a Portuguese-American applied mathematician, the Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center for Nonlinear Analysis.
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Jean E. Sammet
#2171
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Jean E. Sammet was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language. She received her B.A. in Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and her M.A. in Mathematics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1949. She received an honorary D.Sc. from Mount Holyoke College in 1978.
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Dorothy Vaughan
#5791
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
Dorothy Jean Johnson Vaughan was an American mathematician and human computer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at the center.
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