Vera Pless (née Stepen, March 5, 1931 – March 2, 2020) was an American mathematician. She worked in combinatorics and coding theory. She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was born in West Side, Chicago, Illinois. She began working in physics at the University of Chicago, but soon won a fellowship to study at Northwestern University. Later she worked at military researching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked as a research associate for Project MAC.