Happy International Women’s Day! Check out this list of trailblazing mathematicians from around the world who have made an undeniable mark in the field. Today, we honor 18 women whose passion and excellence in mathematics inspire us.

1. Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and math professor at Stanford University. Mirzakhani and her best friend (Roya Beheshti) became the first Iranian women to qualify for the Mathematical Olympiad in high school. Her work eventually led her to become the first Iranian woman to win the Fields Medal in 2014. (Source: Mashup Math and Famous Mathematicians)

2. Erika Tatiana Camacho

Erika Tatiana Camacho is a Mexican-born American mathematical biologist and associate professor of applied mathematics at Arizona State University. She is a 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring awardee. (Source: Wikipedia)

3. Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska 

Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukranian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. In 2016, Viazovska received the Salem Prize and, in 2017, the Clay Research Award and the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for her work on sphere packing and modular forms. She is currently full professor at the Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. (Sources: Wikipedia and Pantheon)

4. Dorothy Vaughn

Dorothy is a respected high school math teacher turned “human supercomputer” for NASA. Vaughn worked on a racially segregated team of computer programmers assigned with using supercomputers to perform computations associated with NASA space launches, including sending astronaut John Glenn into orbit in 1962. (Source: Mashup Math)

5. Nalini Joshi

Nalini Joshi is an Australian mathematician. She is a professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney, the first woman in the School to hold this position, and is a past-president of the Australian Mathematical Society. Joshi is a member of the School’s Applied Mathematics Research Group. Her research concerns integrable systems. She was awarded the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2012. (Source: Wikipedia)

6. Shakuntala Devi 

Shakuntala Devi was a mathematician, astrologer, and author of one of India’s earliest studies of homosexuality. A genius who could impress people right from the age of three, Devi is often credited with the moniker of the ‘Human Computer’ for her ability to solve complex equations in mere seconds. She solved mathematical and calendric problems live on the BBC. Her talents also earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. A tireless achiever, Shakuntala Devi’s life and accomplishments have continued to inspire millions around the world till this day. (Source: She The People)

7. Emmy Noether

Noether is best known for discovering Noether’s Theorem, which links mathematics and physics extremely important. The theorem, named after her, relates the laws of nature and conservation to mathematical symmetry and how we understand the universe. Noether’s Theorem: States that every differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. At the time, her theory was truly groundbreaking and influenced in how mathematicians and scientists thought about and understood the workings of our universe. (Sources: Famous Mathematicians, Smithsonian Magazine, and Wikipedia)

8. Katherine Johnson

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. At 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. (Source: NASA)

9. Sofia Kovalevskaya 

Sofia would struggle for most of her adult life to gain the same privileges to study and teach mathematics as her male counterparts did. Despite this struggle, she would become a highly-regarded math professor and was the first woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first woman in Europe to become a full-time professor. Her greatest contribution to the field of mathematics was in her studies of differential equations and elliptic integrals, namely in relation to understanding the workings of Saturn and its rings. (Source: Mashup Math and Third Space Learning)

10. Grace Alele Williams

Grace Alele Williams was the first female Vice Chancellor of a Nigerian university in 1985. Working with the African Mathematics Program in Newton, Massachusetts, under the leadership of MIT professor Ted Martins, she participated in mathematics workshops held in various African cities from 1963 to 1975. She taught at the University of Lagos from 1965 to 1985, and spent a decade directing the Institute of Education, which introduced innovative non degree programmes, with many of the certificate recipients older women working as elementary school teachers. (Source: State University of New York at Buffalo)

11. Ruth Gonzalez

Born in Houston to Mexican parents, Ruth Gonzalez was interested in math throughout elementary school and high school. In 1986, she received her Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Rice, making her the first U.S.-born Hispanic woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics! She’s had an extensive career developing seismic imaging tools and encourages other minority girls and women to pursue a career in math and science. (Source: Dreambox)

12. Olabisi Oreofe Ugbebor 

Olabisi Oreofe Ugbebor is the first female professor in mathematics in Nigeria. Born in Lagos, she studied mathematics at the University of Ibadan and then at the University of London, where she obtained a PhD in 1976. She has written many papers on Brownian motion and economics and is a co-author of books such as Further Mathematics, Analytical Geometry and Mechanics, and Fundamentals of Abstract Algebra. (Source: University of Saint Andrews)

13. Sun-Yung Alice Chang

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. She served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) from 1989 to 1991 and was awarded the AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize for outstanding contributions to mathematics research by a woman in 1995. She was also invited as a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematics in 2002. (Sources: Princeton and Wikipedia)

14. Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck

 Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck 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. (Source: Wikipedia)

15. Wang Zhenyi

Wang Zhenyi was a self-taught Chinese mathematician and astronomer who published over 12 books including The Musts of Calculation, a rewritten, more accessible version of Mei Wending’s Principles of Calculation, which itself was an instrumental Chinese textbook. One of her biggest achievements is being recognised as an acclaimed scholar in Qing dynasty China. (Source: Scientific Women)

16. Hypatia 

Hypatia was an ancient Egyptian. She is considered the first known female math teacher in history and was also known for teaching astronomy and how to use an astrolabe device to model astronomical events. In addition to becoming a respected teacher of mathematics, she also made several advancements to mathematics, namely her work on conic sections and developing the concepts of ellipses, parabolas, and ellipses by dividing cones into two planes. (Sources: Famous Mathematicians and Smithsonian Magazine)

17. Julia Robinson

Julia Robinson was the first woman elected by the National Academy of Sciences and president of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Despite that fact that she remained un-well due to her health problems she never compromised on her mathematical education. She is most famously known for her work on Hilbert’s tenth problems and decision problems. (Source: Famous Mathematicians)

18. Carolina Araujo

Carolina Bhering de Araujo is a Brazilian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry, including birational geometry, Fano varieties, and foliations. Araujo was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She did her undergraduate studies in Brazil, completing a degree in mathematics in 1998 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She earned her PhD in 2004 at Princeton University, where her dissertation, supervised by János Kollár, was titled The Variety of Tangents to Rational Curves. Araujo won the L’Oreal Award for Women in Science in Brazil in 2008. (Source: Wikipedia)