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.
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#16601
Augustin Friedrich Walther
1688 - 1746 (58 years)
Augustin Friedrich Walther was a German anatomist, botanist and physician who was a native of Wittenberg. He was the son of theologian Michael Walther the Younger . In 1712 he earned his degree of philosophy from the University of Wittenberg, and in the following year received his medical doctorate from the University of Leipzig. At Leipzig he became a professor of anatomy , pathology and therapy . In 1730 he became director of the Leipzig Botanical Gardens, and in 1737 was rector at the university.
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William Murrill
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
William Alphonso Murrill was an American mycologist, known for his contributions to the knowledge of the Agaricales and Polyporaceae. In 1904, he became the assistant Curator at the New York Botanical Garden . He, along with the NYBG, founded the journal Mycologia and was its first editor for 16 years. Murrill was known to travel extensively to describe the mycota of Europe and the Americas. He traveled along the East Coast, Pacific Coast, Mexico and the Caribbean. Although Murrill was a very influential person at the NYBG, having worked his way up to become assistant director in 1908, his rather eccentric personality caused problems with his job.
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William Warde Fowler
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
William Warde Fowler was an English historian and ornithologist, and tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was best known for his works on ancient Roman religion. Among his most influential works was Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic . H. H. Scullard, in the introduction to his 1981 book on a similar topic, singled out Fowler's book as a particularly valuable resource despite its age, writing, "I have not been so presumptuous as to attempt to provide an alternative."
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Josef Augusta
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Josef Augusta was a Czech paleontologist, geologist, and science popularizer. From 1921 to 1925 Augusta studied at the Masaryk University in Brno. Between 1933 and 1968 he held posts at the Charles University in Prague as lecturer, professor, and dean of the faculty.
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Pavel Grošelj
1883 - 1940 (57 years)
Pavel Grošelj was a Slovene biologist and literary historian who was involved in the establishment and planning of a Slovene university . He was noted for various contributions to zoology and botany.
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František Mareš
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
František Mareš was a Czechoslovak professor of physiology and philosophy, and a nationalist politician. He was rector of the Charles University in 1920–21, and a member of the National Democrats.
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Charles Eugène Bertrand
1851 - 1917 (66 years)
Charles Eugène Bertrand was a French botanist, paleobotanist and geologist. He is remembered for his research involving the formation of coal. He studied sciences in Paris, where he had as influences botanist Joseph Decaisne and plant physiologist Pierre Paul Deherain. In 1874 he obtained his doctorate in sciences, and was later appointed professor of botany at the University of Lille . From 1881 to 1887, he was head of the Archives botaniques du nord de la France.
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Henry Harold Welch Pearson
1870 - 1916 (46 years)
Henry Harold Welch Pearson was a British-born South African botanist, chiefly remembered for founding Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in 1913. Biography Pearson started his career as a chemist's assistant, but changed his interests after attending a lecture on plants by Albert Seward at Eastbourne in 1892. He taught for a while and was awarded a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1896, obtaining a first class in the Natural Science Tripos.
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Maximilian von Frey
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Maximilian Ruppert Franz von Frey was an Austrian-German physiologist who was born in Salzburg. He received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1877, and subsequently worked at Carl Ludwig's Physiological Institute in Leipzig. Later he was a professor of physiology at the Universities of Würzburg and Zurich.
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Harry S.N. Greene
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Harry S.N. Greene, M.D. was an American pathologist. He was the Anthony N. Brady Professor and chairman of the department of pathology at the Yale School of Medicine. He joined the Yale faculty in 1943 and was named chair of the department in 1950. He remained chairman for nearly 20 years until his death in 1969 at the age of 64. He was a colorful and memorable teacher.
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D. Franklin Williams
#16612
Karl Beurlen
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Karl Beurlen was a German paleontologist. Beurlen was born in Aalen. He attended University of Tübingen. He completed a PhD in 1923. Beurlen was a proponent of orthogenesis and saltational evolution. He used the term metakinesis to describe sudden changes of development in organisms. He also invented the term palingenesis as a mechanism for his orthogenetic theory of evolution.
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Elísio de Moura
1877 - 1977 (100 years)
Elísio de Moura Azevedo, was a Portuguese physician, professor, psychiatrist and the first president of the College of Physicians in 1939. Biography Elísio de Moura was notable for teaching and research in psychiatry and neurology. He contributed, in the beginning of the Republic, to keep the faculty of medicine at the University of Coimbra, which was at risk of moving to the new University of Lisbon and University of Porto.
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Ivan Đaja
1884 - 1957 (73 years)
Ivan Đaja was a Serbian biologist, physiologist, author and philosopher. He was founder of the Chair for physiology at the Serbian Institute for Physiology, rector of the University of Belgrade, and member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts. Đaja was a popularizer of biology, performed research in the role of the adrenal glands in thermoregulation, as well as pioneering work in hypothermia.
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Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Behn
1808 - 1878 (70 years)
Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Behn was a German anatomist and zoologist. For eight years he was president of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. From 1828 he studied medicine at the Universities of Göttingen and Kiel, afterwards continuing his education in Paris , where he made the acquaintanceship of famed scientists that included Dupuytren, Flourens, Poiseuille and Chevreul. In 1837 he was named an associate professor of anatomy and physiology as well as director of the anatomical institute and the zoological museum at Kiel.
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Matthias Numsen Blytt
1789 - 1862 (73 years)
Matthias Numsen Blytt was a Norwegian botanist. He was born at Overhalla in Nord-Trøndelag, Norway. He attended the University of Christiania and the University of Copenhagen. Blytt was professor of botany at the University of Oslo.
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John Scouler
1804 - 1871 (67 years)
John Scouler was a Scottish naturalist. Life Scouler, the son of a calico-printer, was born in Glasgow on 31 December 1804. He received the rudiments of his education at Kilbarchan, but was sent very early to the University of Glasgow. When his medical course there was completed, he went to Paris and studied at the Jardin des Plantes.
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Frederick Keeble
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Sir Frederick William Keeble, CBE, FRS was a British biologist, academic, and scientific adviser, who specialised in botany. He was Sherardian Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford from 1920 to 1927 and Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution from 1937 to 1941.
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Nikolay Sklifosovsky
1836 - 1904 (68 years)
Nikolai Vasilyevich Sklifosovsky was a Russian surgeon and physiologist of Moldavian origin. He was born near the town of Dubasari, which is now in Transnistria. Sklifosovsky was a professor of medicine in Saint Petersburg, Kiev, and Moscow. He was a founder of the «Clinical Town» at Devichye Pole.
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William Sargant
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
William Walters Sargant was a British psychiatrist who is remembered for the evangelical zeal with which he promoted treatments such as psychosurgery, deep sleep treatment, electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy.
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August Brauer
1863 - 1917 (54 years)
August Bernhard Brauer was a German zoologist. Brauer was born in Oldenburg. He studied natural sciences at the Universities of Bonn, Berlin and Freiburg, obtaining his doctorate in 1895 with a thesis on the ciliate- Bursaria truncatella titled Bursaria truncatella unter Berücksichtigung anderer Heterotrichen und der Vorticellinen. In 1892 he received his habilitation at the University of Marburg, where he subsequently worked as a lecturer. In 1894–95 he conducted scientific studies in the Seychelles.
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Alexander Cave
1900 - 2001 (101 years)
Alexander James Edward Cave was a British anatomist. Early life and education Cave was born in Manchester and was educated at Manchester High School. He then read medicine at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1923.
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Arthur Dendy
1865 - 1925 (60 years)
Arthur Dendy was an English zoologist known for his work on marine sponges and the terrestrial invertebrates of Victoria, Australia, notably including the "living fossil" Peripatus. He was in turn professor of zoology in New Zealand, in South Africa and finally at King's College London. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Fahire Battalgil
1902 - 1948 (46 years)
Fahire Battalgil was a Turkish ichthyologist who was one of the first women to be appointed as a professor at a university in Turkey. Name Battalgil was known as Fahire Akim Hanim during the early part of her life. The surname Battalgil was adopted by her family to comply with the Republic of Turkey's 1934 Surname Law and the spelling of this was changed to Battalgazi from 1943.
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Nicolae Leon
1862 - 1931 (69 years)
Nicolae Leon was a Romanian biologist. He was the elder half brother of the naturalist Grigore Antipa. Leon was born in Băiceni, a village in Curtești commune in Botoșani County. Starting in 1881 he studied at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Iași. In 1884 he went to the University of Jena to study zoology, obtaining his degree in 1887. After returning to Iași, he became a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in 1889. Later on he was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and then Rector of the University of Iași in 1918 and 1920-1921.
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Johann Amman
1707 - 1741 (34 years)
Johann Amman, Johannes Amman or Иоганн Амман was a Swiss-Russian botanist, a member of the Royal Society and professor of botany at the Russian Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg. Notable work He is best known for his Stirpium Rariorum in Imperio Rutheno Sponte Provenientium Icones et Descriptiones published in 1739 with descriptions of some 285 plants from Eastern Europe and Ruthenia . The plates are unsigned, though an engraving on the dedicatory leaf of the work is signed "Philipp Georg Mattarnovy", a Swiss-Italian engraver, Filippo Giorgio Mattarnovi , who worked at the St. Petersburg ...
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John William Heslop-Harrison
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Prof John William Heslop Harrison, FRS FRSE , was Professor of Botany at King's College, Durham University . He enjoyed a brilliant career, specialising in the genetics of moths, but is now best remembered for an alleged academic fraud.
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Spencer Le Marchant Moore
1850 - 1931 (81 years)
Spencer Le Marchant Moore was an English botanist. Biography Moore was born in Hampstead. He worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from about 1870 to 1879, wrote a number of botanical papers, and then worked in an unofficial capacity at the Natural History Museum from 1896 until his death.
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Eleanor Anne Ormerod
1828 - 1901 (73 years)
Eleanor Anne Ormerod was a pioneer English entomologist. Based on her studies in agriculture, she became one of the first to define the field of agricultural entomology. She published an influential series of articles on useful insects and pests in the Gardeners' Chronicle and the Agricultural Gazette along with annual reports from 1877 to 1900. These annual reports were produced by summarizing information provided by her network of correspondents from across Britain. Belonging to the landed gentry, she worked as an honorary consulting entomologist with the Royal Agricultural Society of England and received no pay for any of her work.
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Eduard Paul Tratz
1888 - 1977 (89 years)
Eduard Paul Tratz was an Austrian zoologist. Ahnenerbe Tratz was the founder of Salzburg's Haus der Natur, one of the leading museums of natural history in Austria, in 1924. A member of the Nazi Party, he ensured significant funding for the museum after the Anschluss and spent much of it adding eight new areas dealing with such topics as eugenics and racial hygiene. He played a leading role in helping to popularise "Rassenkunde" in Austria and was also a departmental head in the Ahnenerbe .
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Rolf Nordhagen
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Rolf Nordhagen was a Norwegian botanist. His greatest scientific efforts were in the area of plant sociology. Personal life Rolf Nordhagen was born in Kristiania as a son of artist Johan Nordhagen and Christine Magdalene, née Johansen . He was a brother of Olaf Nordhagen and Martha Gladtved-Prahl. In August 1925 in Oslo he married Elisabeth Marie Myhre . He was the father of art historian Per Jonas Nordhagen and computer scientist, Rolf Nordhagen .
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Hippolyte Lucas
1814 - 1899 (85 years)
Pierre-Hippolyte Lucas was a French entomologist. Lucas was an assistant-naturalist at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. From 1839 to 1842 he studied fauna as part of the scientific commission on the exploration of Algeria.
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Kristian Horn
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Kristian Horn was a Norwegian botanist and humanist. Biography He was born in Brandbu as a son of store owner Martinius Horn and Gina Kristoffersen . In 1932 he married Ester Jynge, a daughter of railway director Andreas Grimelund Jynge. Their son Per Kristian Horn became a scenographer, and was formerly married to Ellen Horn. Kristian Horn is also a grandfather of Anders Horn.
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Anton Wilhelm Plaz
1708 - 1784 (76 years)
Anton Wilhelm Plaz was a German physician and botanist. From 1723 he studied medicine at the universities of Leipzig and Halle, receiving his doctorate at the latter institution in 1728. In 1733 he became an associate professor of botany at Leipzig, where afterwards, he successively served as a full professor of botany , physiology , anatomy and surgery , pathology and therapy . From 1773 to 1784 he was dean to the medical faculty at the university. He was a member of the Römisch Kaiserlichen Akademie der Naturforscher.
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Nikolaus Poda von Neuhaus
1723 - 1798 (75 years)
Nikolaus Poda von Neuhaus is best known for his work in the field of entomology in the middle to late 1700s. Born October 4, 1723, in Vienna, Austria, to a noble family of Austrian descent, Nikolaus Poda von Neuhaus studied across his home country for years before working as a professor at multiple universities in both Hungary and Austria until his death on April 29, 1798.
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Charles Frédéric Martins
1806 - 1889 (83 years)
Charles Frédéric Martins was a French physician, botanist, geologist, naturalist, and translator. Biography Born in Paris, Martins was a Protestant of German descent. He went to school in Paris and Geneva and studied medicine at the University of Paris with medical internship at the Hôpitaux de Paris. There he obtained his doctorate in 1834 with dissertation Principes de la méthode naturelle appliqués à la classification des maladies de la peau . In 1839 he received his agrégation in natural history in Paris. He taught natural history at the Medical Faculty of the Sorbonne. At the University...
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Adolf Loewy
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Adolf Loewy was a German physiologist. A native of Berlin, Loewy studied medicine at the University of Berlin as a student of Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hugo Kronecker, obtaining his medical doctorate in 1885. Later on, he was an assistant to physiologist Nathan Zuntz in Berlin . In 1900 he became an assistant professor, and in 1921 was a professor and in charge of the Schweizerisches Institut für Hochgebirgsphysiologie und Tuberkuloseforschung at Davos.
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Ruth Margery Addoms
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Ruth Margery Addoms , was an American botanist at Duke University specializing in the study of plant anatomy and plant physiology. She contributed to the study of growth-promoting substances in plants.
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John Mitchell
1711 - 1768 (57 years)
John Mitchell was a colonial American physician and botanist. He created the most comprehensive and perhaps largest 18th-century map of eastern North America, known today as the Mitchell Map. First published in 1755, in conjunction with the imminent Seven Years' War, the map was subsequently used during the Treaty of Paris to define the boundaries of the newly independent United States and has been resolving border disputes since.
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Malcolm W. Greaves
#16641
Willet M. Hays
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Willet Martin Hays was an American plant breeder and U. S. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. Biography Hays was born 19 October 1859 on a farm near Eldora, Iowa. He graduated from Drake University in 1885 and obtained a master's degree in agriculture from the Iowa State College at Ames. In 1888 he became the first faculty member of the newly founded Minnesota Agricultural Experimental Station of the University of Minnesota at St. Paul. He served there until 1904, interrupted by a two-year stint at the North Dakota Agricultural College at Fargo 1891–1893.
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Ernst Hallier
1831 - 1904 (73 years)
Ernst Hallier was a German botanist and mycologist. As a young man he was trained as a gardener, later studying botany at the universities of Berlin, Jena and Göttingen. From 1858 he served as an instructor at the Pharmaceutical Institute in Jena, where in 1860 he obtained his habilitation. In 1865 he became an associate professor, resigning his professorship 19 years later .
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Charles Cleveland Nutting
1858 - 1927 (69 years)
Charles Cleveland Nutting was an American zoologist, born in Jacksonville, Illinois. He graduated from Blackburn University and received the M. A. degree from the same institution in 1882. He conducted various zoological expeditions—in Central America for the Smithsonian Institution , in Florida , on the Saskatchewan River —and was naturalist of the Albatross Hawaiian expedition in 1902. He was professor of zoology and curator of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Iowa from 1886 to 1890 and thereafter was head of his department. Nutting's most important publications are s...
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Walter C. Lowdermilk
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Walter Clay Lowdermilk was a soil conservationist who worked in countries throughout the world to help protect and reclaim lands in order to better feed their population. Lowdermilk worked with the Belgian Relief Effort after World War I, in China in the 1920s to help avert famine, with the Soil Conservation Service, in fascist Italy in the 1930s, in the United States, and in Mandatory Palestine planning land and water use.
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Lucien Plantefol
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Lucien Plantefol was a French botanist and member of the French Academy of Sciences who developed a theory of leaf helices to explain phyllotaxis. Life and Work Plantefol was born in Falaise on 24 April 1891 and spent his youth in Montbéliard. He was called up in 1914 as a second lieutenant in the 82nd Infantry Regiment, but was quickly wounded in the Battle of the Meuse and returned from the front to work in the physiology and chemistry laboratories of the National Defense. There he helped to develop the gas mask.
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Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen
1841 - 1900 (59 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen was a German geologist and paleontologist. He was born in Munich and died in Vienna. Overview He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Munich, where he studied the rocks and fossils of the Jurassic system, and published an elaborate work on geology that was crowned by the university. In 1866, he became an instructor in palaeontology at the University of Munich and at the same time taught Princess Theresa and Prince Arnulf of Bavaria. Although an excellent teacher, and especially competent in practical work, Waagen, who was a most loyal Catholic, had little prospect of obtaining a professorship at the University of Munich.
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Aleksandr Fomin
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
Aleksandr Vasiljevich Fomin was a botanist. He studied ferns and seed plants. He was also a director of the Kyiv University Botanical Garden; which was renamed after him, when he died. He was a subject of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union.
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Theodoor Gerard van Lidth de Jeude
1788 - 1863 (75 years)
Theodoor Gerard van Lidth de Jeude was a Dutch physician, veterinarian, and zoologist and was the first director of the newly established Rijks Veterinary College where Veterinary medicine was first taught in the Netherlands in late 1821. His primary contribution to science was the collecting of specimens.
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Henri Lucien Jumelle
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Henri Lucien Jumelle was a French botanist. From 1887 to 1894, he worked as a plant physiologist at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris. Afterwards, he was a professor of botany at the Faculté des Sciences in Marseille . From 1898 to 1916, he was assistant director, then director of the Musée colonial et du Jardin botanique in Marseille.
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Albert Maige
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Albert Maige was a French botanist. Among his works was on the forest flora of Algeria. A major contribution was on the synthesis, movement and storage of starch examining the role of the leucoplast, and the enzymes involved in amylolysis in the cytoplasm.
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