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 people in Biology,
#16601
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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Norair Sisakian
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
Norair Martirosovich Sisakian was a Soviet biologist of Armenian origin who worked as an engineer in the Soviet space program, working mainly on biomechanics effects. Sisakian is also one of the founders of space biology, an outstanding organizer of science, a member of the Pugwash movement.
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Svante Samuel Murbeck
1859 - 1946 (87 years)
Svante Samuel Murbeck was a Swedish professor, botanist, pteridologist and explorer. Biography Murbeck was born in the parish of Hardeberga in Skåne County, Sweden. While studying at Lund University, Murbeck undertook a successful field trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina before receiving his PhD in geology and botany in 1891. That same year he was made a lecturer at the university. He took up a position as curator of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and from 1897 until 1902 he worked for the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Alnarp. Murbeck returned to Lund University to become professor of botany and director of the Botaniska trädgården from 1902-24.
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Albert Oppel
1831 - 1865 (34 years)
Carl Albert Oppel was a German paleontologist. History He was born at Hohenheim in Württemberg, on 19 December 1831. He first went to the University of Tübingen, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1853. The results of his work was published in Die Juraformation Englands, Frankreichs und des südwestlichen Deutschlands . He went to the Palaeontological Museum at Munich in 1858 and became an assistant there. It was in 1860 that he became the Professor of Palaeontology at the University of Munich. Then, a year later, he became the director of the Palaeontological Collection. Of his later works, i...
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Ludwig Imhoff
1801 - 1868 (67 years)
Ludwig Imhoff was a Swiss physician and entomologist. Imhoff was the son of a merchant Hieronymus Imhoff and his wife Johanna nee Wenk in Basel. He attended the Samuel Hopf school in Basel, which followed the educational methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. He then attended the Pädagogium in Basel. In 1820 he began law studies but switched to medicine. He studied medicine in Strasbourg, Heidelberg, Halle and Berlin. In 1826, after completing his studies, he returned to Basel. Here he worked as a doctor and naturalist. He married Maria Julia Auguste Heitz in 1829. Ludwig Imhoff habilitated at the University of Basel as a zoologist with a focus on entomology.
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Chittaranjan Andrade
#16612
Wilhelm Maribo Schøyen
1844 - 1918 (74 years)
Wilhelm Maribo Schøyen was a Norwegian entomologist. He was Norway's first government entomologist. Wilhelm Maribo Schøyen is considered one of Norway's most prominent entomologists. He was an avid writer and left behind a large collection of scientific publications. He was the father of the government entomologist Thor Hiorth Schøyen.
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Aristid Lindenmayer
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Aristid Lindenmayer was a Hungarian biologist. In 1968 he developed a type of formal language today called L-systems or Lindenmayer systems. Using those systems Lindenmayer modelled the behaviour of cells of plants. L-systems nowadays are also used to model whole plants.
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Forrest Shreve
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Forrest Shreve was an internationally known American botanist. His professional career was devoted to the study of the distribution of vegetation as determined by soil and climate conditions. His contributions to the plant biology world set the groundwork for modern studies and his books are regarded as classics by botanists worldwide.
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Tom Harris
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Professor Thomas Maxwell Harris FRS was an English paleobotanist. Education and career He was educated at Bootham School, York, Wyggeston School, Leicester, and University College, Nottingham, before continuing to complete his doctorate at Christ's College, Cambridge.
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Elizabeth McCoy
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Elizabeth McCoy was an American microbiologist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early life Elizabeth McCoy was born in Madison, Wisconsin, February 1, 1903. McCoy’s fascination with microbiology began early on the family farm where she lived with her family. Her parents, Esther Williamson and Cassius James McCoy, both attended college. Her mother was a professor and then an active practicing nurse for six years. McCoy's mother taught her about household hygiene and techniques to best preserve food. Her father was a professor but for health reasons had to retire.
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Conrad Vernon Morton
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Conrad Vernon Morton was an American botanist, who did notable writings on Ferns. He was also a specialist in Gesneriaceae and Solanaceae for the Smithsonian Institution from 1928. In 1938, botanists Standl. & Steyerm., published Mortoniodendron, a genus of flowering plants from Central America, belonging to the family Malvaceae in Conrad Morton's honour. Then in 1939, botanist Robert Everard Woodson published Mortoniella a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Central America, in the family Apocynaceae, also in his honour. Later in 1975, botanist Wiehler published Neomortonia, a genus of ...
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John Macleod
1876 - 1935 (59 years)
John James Rickard Macleod, , was a Scottish biochemist and physiologist. He devoted his career to diverse topics in physiology and biochemistry, but was chiefly interested in carbohydrate metabolism. He is noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin during his tenure as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, for which he and Frederick Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. Awarding the prize to Macleod was controversial at the time, because according to Banting's version of events, Macleod's role in the discovery was negligible. It was not until d...
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Myron Gordon
1899 - 1959 (60 years)
Myron Gordon was an American biologist and geneticist and became an expert on platy fish Xiphophorus while using them for his pioneering cancer research, starting in the late 1920s. Early papers were published while still a graduate student at Cornell University, but he is best known for his research at New York University and the New York Zoological Society .
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Joseph Charles Bequaert
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Joseph Charles Bequaert was an American naturalist of Belgian origin, born 24 May 1886 in Torhout and died on 12 January 1982 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Career Bequaert obtained a doctorate in botany at the University of Ghent in 1908. He was an entomologist, and from 1910 to 1912 he was part of la commission Belge sur la maladie du sommeil . From 1913 to 1915 he worked as a botanist in the Belgian Congo and also collected mollusks.
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James L. Peters
1889 - 1952 (63 years)
James Lee Peters was an American ornithologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Dr. Austin Peters and Francis Howie Lee on August 13, 1889. His early education was at the Roxbury Latin School, followed by his acceptance to Harvard University, where he graduated in 1912.
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Henry Shoemaker Conard
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Henry Shoemaker Conard was a leading authority on bryophytes and water lilies, as well as an early advocate of environmental preservation. From 1906 to 1955, Professor Conard worked at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. In 1954, he became the first to receive the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America, an award that has continued annually ever since.
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Martin Grotjahn
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Martin Grotjahn was a German-born American psychoanalyst who was known for his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. He was the son of doctor Alfred Grotjahn and was born in Berlin, Germany.
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Margaret Oakley Dayhoff
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Margaret Belle Dayhoff was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations .
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Raymond B. Cowles
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
Raymond Bridgman Cowles was a herpetologist and professor at University of California, Los Angeles. Born in the British Colony of Natal to American missionary parents, he emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. He attended Pomona College as an undergrad and earned his PhD at Cornell University under Albert Hazen Wright. He is known for his research on desert ecology and reptile thermoregulation, as well as his popular books on environmental conservation. Cowles died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 79. An obituary called him one of America's first ecologists and conservatio...
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Cecil Edmund Yarwood
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Cecil Edmund Yarwood was an American-Canadian plant pathologist whose work focused on obligate parasites of plants, viruses, and conditions that predisposed plants to infections. He is considered an authority on rust and powdery mildew.
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Hans Gaffron
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Dr. Hans Gaffron was born in Lima, Peru, on May 17, 1902, and was a son of the German physician Eduard Gaffron and his wife Hedwig von Gevekot. He was one of the earlier researchers trying to elucidate the mechanistic and biochemical details of photosynthesis and plant metabolism. His most notable finding was the discovery of a process whereby unicellular green algae can produce molecular Hydrogen in the presence of light, and that the precursors were derived from photosynthetic water-splitting. Applications based on his work have led to many efforts to develop H2 as a renewable biofuel.
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Francis Gilman Blake
1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Francis Gilman Blake was a leading American immunologist. He served as dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, president of the American Association of Immunologists, and physician-in-chief of the Yale–New Haven Hospital.
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Peter Alfred Gorer
1907 - 1961 (54 years)
Peter Alfred Gorer FRS was a British immunologist, pathologist and geneticist who pioneered the field of transplant immunology. Peter Gorer was born in London to Edgar and Rachel née Cohen Gorer. He died of lung cancer in 1961.
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P. Jackson Darlington Jr.
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Philip Jackson Darlington Jr. was an American entomologist, field naturalist, biogeographer, museum curator, and zoology professor. He was known for his collecting ability and his toughness and determination on field expeditions.
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William Seifriz
1888 - 1955 (67 years)
William Seifriz was a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania and an important figure in the history of plant physiology and plant cell biology. Personal life Seifriz was born on August 11, 1888, outside of Washington, D.C. to Paul Seifriz M.D. and his wife, both of whom emigrated from Germany in 1887. After Paul Seifriz died, Seifriz' mother ran a boarding house for scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture. This association with botanists led the young Seifriz to pursue the study of botany. After graduating McKinley Technical High School in 1907 as valedicto...
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Ernest Borek
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Ernest Borek was a Hungarian-American microbiologist, university professor, cancer researcher, and author. He was a professor at City University of New York and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons . He was chairman of the Colorado Regional Cancer Center's Support Review Committee of the National Cancer Institute.
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Archie Carr
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Archie Fairly Carr, Jr. was an American herpetologist, ecologist, and conservationist. He was a Professor of Zoology at the University of Florida and an acclaimed writer on science and nature. He brought attention to the world's declining sea turtle populations due to over-exploitation and habitat loss. Wildlife refuges in Florida and Costa Rica have been named in his honor.
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Claus W. Jungeblut
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Claus Washington Jungeblut was an American bacteriologist and vitamin researcher. Biography Jungeblut was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota to Nicholas and Gertrude Jungeblut. He was educated at University of Bern where he obtained his M.D. in 1921. He was an assistant at Robert Koch Institute .
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Willi Hennig
1913 - 1976 (63 years)
Emil Hans Willi Hennig was a German biologist and zoologist who is considered the founder of phylogenetic systematics, otherwise known as cladistics. In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his theory of cladistics, which he published in German in 1950, with a substantially revised English translation published in 1966. With his works on evolution and systematics he revolutionised the view of the natural order of beings. As a taxonomist, he specialised in dipterans .
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Tracy I. Storer
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Tracy Irwin Storer was an American zoologist known for his contributions to the wildlife of California and the ecology of the Sierra Nevada. He was a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis for over 30 years. He served as president of several biological societies, including the Cooper Ornithological Club , Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the Society of Mammalogists, and the Wildlife Society, and was a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences which in 1968 awarded him the Fellow's Medal, the academy's highest honor.
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Beatrice M. Sweeney
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Eleanor Beatrice Marcy "Beazy" Sweeney was an American plant physiologist and a pioneering investigator into circadian rhythms. At the time of her death she was professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she had worked since 1961.
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Hans Thacher Clarke
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
Hans Thacher Clarke was a prominent biochemist during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in England where he received his university training, but also studied in Germany and Ireland. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States.
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Philip Sheppard
1921 - 1976 (55 years)
Professor Philip MacDonald Sheppard, F.R.S. was a British geneticist and lepidopterist. He made advances in ecological and population genetics in lepidopterans, pulmonate land snails and humans. In medical genetics, he worked with Sir Cyril Clarke on Rh disease.
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Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland was an American zoologist and protistologist, famous for giving the first, strong empirical proof for the existence of a symbiotic relationship between internal microorganisms and their metazoan host.
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Ernest Kennaway
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Sir Ernest Laurence Kennaway FRS was a British pathologist and Royal Medal winner. He first became interested in natural life when, due to a childhood illness, he was encouraged to spend time outdoors. He was trained at University College London, and in 1898 was accepted into New College, Oxford on an open scholarship to study natural sciences. He graduated with a B.A. in 1903, and after three years at Middlesex Hospital he completed a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery. After graduating he worked for The Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine and UCL before returning to Oxford, this time to Brasenose College on a Hulme scholarship in 1909.
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Philip Loring
Philip Allen Loring is a human ecologist and author. Loring is currently the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy, and Society at the Arrell Food Institute at University of Guelph. He is known for his work on Arctic food security, natural resource conflict, and regenerative food systems. Loring authored Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology , and is the host of multiple academic podcasts.
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Clyde E. Keeler
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Clyde Edgar Keeler was a medical geneticist who is noted for his work on laboratory mice and the genetics of vision. His work was instrumental in the understanding of retinitis pigmentosa. He also seems to have published the first scientific paper on non-rod non-cone visual sensation.
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Theodor von Brand
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Theodor von Brand , full name Theodor Kurt Freiherr von Brand zu Neidstein, was a German American parasitologist. Theodor von Brand is a descendant of the German noble family von Brand. His mother Diana von Brandt was a née Freiin von Hirsch from a Jewish German noble family.
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Charles Paul Alexander
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Charles Paul Alexander was an American entomologist who specialized in the craneflies, Tipulidae. Charles Paul Alexander was the son of Emil Alexander and Jane Alexander . Emil immigrated to the United States in 1873 and changed his surname from Schlandensky to Alexander. Charles entered Cornell University in 1909, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1913 and a Ph.D. in 1918. Between 1917 and 1919, he was entomologist at the University of Kansas, then from 1919 to 1922, at the University of Illinois.
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E. Morton Jellinek
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Elvin Morton "Bunky" Jellinek , E. Morton Jellinek, or most often, E. M. Jellinek, was a biostatistician, physiologist, and an alcoholism researcher, fluent in nine languages and able to communicate in four others.
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Sabra Klein
Sabra Klein is an American microbiologist who is a Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research considers how sex and gender impact the immune system. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Klein investigated why men and women have different COVID-19 outcomes.
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Edwin Broun Fred
1887 - 1981 (94 years)
Edwin Broun Fred was an American bacteriologist and academic who was the 15th president of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serving from 1945 to 1958. Born in Virginia, Fred studied at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Göttingen. After briefly teaching at Virginia Polytechnic, Fred took a position with Wisconsin. He was dean of the graduate school from 1934 until 1943, then was dean of the College of Agriculture until 1945. He ascended to the presidency and was known for his response to the postwar growth in admissions. Fred was the president of the Society of Ameri...
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I. Michael Lerner
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Israel Michael Lerner was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist. Born in Harbin, Manchuria, he received his Ph.D. in genetics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1936. He was appointed instructor of poultry husbandry and joined the university's department of genetics in 1958.
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Lewis W. Wannamaker
1923 - 1983 (60 years)
Lewis William Wannamaker was an American biochemist who won the Robert Koch Prize with César Milstein in 1980. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University and his M.D. from the Duke University School of Medicine and taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1982 he was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 1983 at the age of 59.
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