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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Biology,
#16701
Rebecca Lancefield
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Rebecca Craighill Lancefield was a prominent American microbiologist. She joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1918, and was associated with that institute throughout her long and outstanding career. Her bibliography comprises more than 50 publications published over 60 years.
Go to Profile#16702
Erich Lindemann
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Erich Lindemann was a German-American writer and psychiatrist, specializing in bereavement. He worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as the Chief of Psychiatry and is noted for his extensive study on the effects of traumatic events on survivors and families after the Cocoanut Grove night club fire in 1942. His contributions to the field of mental health led to the naming of a joint Harvard University–Commonwealth of Massachusetts-run mental health complex in Boston in his honor, the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center. He died on November 16, 1974.
Go to Profile#16703
Philip Handler
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Philip Handler was an American nutritionist, and biochemist. He was President of the United States National Academy of Sciences for two terms from 1969 to 1981. He was also a recipient of the National Medal of Science.
Go to Profile#16704
Marie Lebour
1876 - 1971 (95 years)
Marie Victoire Lebour was a British marine biologist known for her study of the life cycles of various marine animals. She published more than 175 works during her long career. Early life and education Marie Lebour was born the youngest of three daughters to Emily and George Lebour in Woodburn, Northumberland on 20 August 1876. Her father was a professor of geology and Marie regularly joined him on expeditions, collecting specimens for her own collections. She attended Armstrong College and studied art, then went on to Durham University, where she earned degrees in zoology: an associate degre...
Go to Profile#16705
Richard D. Bardgett
1900 - Present (126 years)
#16706
Hugo Theorell
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Axel Hugo Theodor Theorell was a Swedish scientist and Nobel Prize laureate in medicine. He was born in Linköping as the son of Thure Theorell and his wife Armida Bill. Theorell went to Secondary School at Katedralskolan in Linköping and passed his examination there on 23 May 1921. In September, he began to study medicine at the Karolinska Institute and in 1924 he graduated as a Bachelor of Medicine. He then spent three months studying bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under Professor Albert Calmette. In 1930 he obtained his M.D. degree with a theory on the lipids of the blood p...
Go to Profile#16707
Charles Glen King
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Charles Glen King was an American biochemist who was a pioneer in the field of nutrition research and who isolated vitamin C at the same time as Albert Szent-Györgyi. A biography of King states that many feel he deserves equal credit with Szent-Györgyi for the discovery of this vitamin.
Go to Profile#16708
C. C. Little
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Clarence Cook Little was an American genetics, cancer, and tobacco researcher and academic administrator, as well as a proponent of eugenics. Early life C. C. Little was born in Brookline, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University after his secondary education at the Noble and Greenough School. Little received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1910, an M.S. in 1912, and D.Sc. in 1914 in zoology, with special focus in the new science of genetics. During World War I, Little served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, attaining the rank of Major. Following the war he spent three years at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Go to Profile#16709
Simeon Burt Wolbach
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Simeon Burt Wolbach was an American pathologist, researcher, teacher, and journal editor who elucidated the infection vectors for Rocky Mountain spotted fever and epidemic typhus. He was president of the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists and of the American Society for Experimental Pathology.
Go to Profile#16710
Charles Roy Henderson
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Charles Roy Henderson was an American statistician and a pioneer in animal breeding — the application of quantitative methods for the genetic evaluation of domestic livestock. This is critically important because it allows farmers and geneticists to predict whether a crop or animal will have a desired trait, and to what extent the trait will be expressed. He developed mixed model equations to obtain best linear unbiased predictions of breeding values and, in general, any random effect. He invented three methods for the estimation of variance components in unbalanced settings of mixed models, ...
Go to Profile#16711
Harry Stack Sullivan
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives" and that "[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist". Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.
Go to Profile#16712
Vincent du Vigneaud
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Vincent du Vigneaud was an American biochemist. He was recipient of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone," a reference to his work on the peptide hormone oxytocin.
Go to Profile#16713
Harry Steenbock
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Harry Steenbock was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Steenbock graduated from Wisconsin in 1916, where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. Vitamin D Steenbock was born in Charlestown, Wisconsin, and grew up on a model farm outside New Holstein, Wisconsin. His graduate advisor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was Edwin B. Hart. His first publication reported the results of the single-grain experiment on which he assisted with Hart and Stephen Moulton Babcock. During his graduate career, Steenbock also served as an assistant in the lab of Elmer McCollum.
Go to Profile#16714
Colin Munro MacLeod
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Colin Munro MacLeod was a Canadian-American geneticist. He was one of a trio of scientists who discovered that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA is responsible for the transformation of the physical characteristics of bacteria, which subsequently led to its identification as the molecule responsible for heredity.
Go to Profile#16715
Nikolaas Tinbergen
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.
Go to Profile#16716
Leonor Michaelis
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
Leonor Michaelis was a German biochemist, physical chemist, and physician, known for his work with Maud Menten on enzyme kinetics in 1913, as well as for work on enzyme inhibition, pH and quinones. Early life and education Leonor Michaelis was born in Berlin, Germany, on 16 January 1875, and graduated from the humanistic Koellnisches Gymnasium in 1893 after passing the Abiturienten Examen. He was Jewish. It was here that Michaelis's interest in physics and chemistry was first sparked as he was encouraged by his teachers to utilize the relatively unused laboratories at his school.
Go to Profile#16717
John Thomas Curtis
1913 - 1961 (48 years)
John Thomas Curtis was an American botanist and plant ecologist. He is particularly known for his lasting contribution to the development of numerical methods in ecology. Together with J. Roger Bray, he developed the method of polar ordination with its inherent distance measure, the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity.
Go to Profile#16718
Homer W. Smith
1895 - 1962 (67 years)
Homer William Smith was an American physiologist and science writer known for his experiments on the kidney and philosophical writings on natural history and the theory of evolution. Biography Smith was born in Denver, and three years later, his family moved to Cripple Creek, Colorado, which was included in both the Cripple Creek miners' strike of 1894 and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–04. He had a stutter from about the age of five, to which he attributes his introspectiveness. Smith's mother died by the time he was seven; he had five older siblings at the time, the oldest of which was 26....
Go to Profile#16719
George W. Corner
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
George Washington Corner FRS FRSE was an American physician, embryologist and pioneer of the contraceptive pill. He received an outstanding ten honorary degrees from various universities. He played a critical role in the discovery of progesterone. He was described as both a medical historian and a humanist.
Go to Profile#16720
Georgios Papanikolaou
1883 - 1962 (79 years)
Georgios Nikolaou Papanikolaou was a Greek physician, zoologist and microscopist who was a pioneer in cytopathology and early cancer detection, and inventor of the "Pap smear". After studying medicine in Greece and Germany, he emigrated in 1913 to the United States and was faculty at Cornell Medical College. He first reported that uterine cancer cells could be detected in vaginal smears in 1928, but his work was not widely recognized until the 1940s. An extensive trial of his techniques was carried out in the early 1950s. In 1961, he was invited to the University of Miami to lead and develop ...
Go to Profile#16721
Henry Turner
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Henry Hubert Turner was an American endocrinologist, noted for his published description of Turner syndrome in 1938 at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Internal Secretions. He served as chief of endocrinology and as associate dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.
Go to Profile#16722
David Nachmansohn
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
David Nachmansohn was a German-Jewish biochemist responsible for elucidating the role of phosphocreatine in energy production in the muscles, and the role of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in nerve stimulation. He is also recognised for his basic research into the biochemistry and mechanism underlying bioelectric phenomena.
Go to Profile#16723
Elvin C. Stakman
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Elvin Charles Stakman was an American plant pathologist who was a pioneer of methods of identifying and combatting disease in wheat. He became an internationally renowned phytopathologist for his studies of the genetics and epidemiology of stem rust. Stakman is credited with improving crop yields both in North America and worldwide as part of the Green Revolution.
Go to Profile#16724
Robert H. MacArthur
1930 - 1972 (42 years)
Robert Helmer MacArthur was a Canadian-born American ecologist who made a major impact on many areas of community and population ecology. He is considered a founder of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Go to Profile#16725
Curt Stern
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Curt Stern was a German-born American geneticist. Life Curt Jacob Stern was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany on August 30, 1902. He was the first son of Earned S. Stern, born 1862 in England, who was interned during World War I, and Anna Stern, née Anna Liebrecht who was a schoolteacher . Her father C. Liebrecht was a teacher at the Israelitische Gemeindeschule Gleiwitz, a "Gymnasium" in Upper Silesia, with a PhD in mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Breslau. His father dealt in antiques and dental supplies, and his mother was a schoolteacher. The family moved to a suburb in Berlin shortly after his birth.
Go to Profile#16726
W. Ross Ashby
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
William Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
Go to Profile#16727
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...
Go to Profile#16728
David Rittenberg
1906 - 1970 (64 years)
David Rittenberg was an American biochemist who pioneered the isotopic tagging of molecules. He was born and died in New York, and spent almost the whole of his life there. He obtained his B.S. in 1929 from the City College of New York, and his Ph.D. in 1935 at Columbia University under the supervision of Harold Urey.
Go to Profile#16729
William F. Windle
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
William Frederick Windle was an American anatomist and experimental neurologist. Biography Windle graduated in 1921 with a B.S. from Denison University. At Northwestern University Medical School , he graduated with an M.S. in 1923 and a Ph.D. in anatomy in 1926. His Ph.D. thesis Studies on the trigeminal nerve with particular reference to the pathway for painful afferent impulses was supervised by S. Walter Ranson .
Go to Profile#16730
André Frédéric Cournand
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
André Frédéric Cournand was a French-American physician and physiologist. Biography Cournand was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 along with Werner Forssmann and Dickinson W. Richards for the development of cardiac catheterization.
Go to Profile#16731
Leo Loeb
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Leo Loeb , was a German-American physician, educator, and experimental pathologist. Early life Loeb, son of a Jewish family from the German Eifel region, was born in 1869 in Mayen, Kingdom of Prussia. He was orphaned as a child and grew up in the care of an uncle. Because of ill health, Leo was educated in schools that were located in German "spa" towns. As a teenager, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, but his tenure there was short. Indeed, over the succeeding couple of years, he spent only brief periods at several universities, in Berlin, Freiburg, and Basel, unable to focus his interests.
Go to Profile#16732
Ernst Chain
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Sir Ernst Boris Chain was a German-born British biochemist best known for being a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin. Life and career Chain was born in Berlin, the son of Margarete and Michael Chain, a chemist and industrialist dealing in chemical products. His family was of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father emigrated from Russia to study chemistry abroad and his mother was from Berlin. In 1930, he received his degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University. His father descends from Zerahiah ben Shealtiel Ḥen w...
Go to Profile#16733
Dwight Ingle
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Dwight Joyce Ingle was an American physiologist and endocrinologist who was the chairman of the physiology department at the University of Chicago. His obituary in the National Academy of Sciences' Biographical Memoirs described him as "a first-rank, pioneering scientist in a new and uncharted field [i.e. endocrinology]."
Go to Profile#16734
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.
Go to Profile#16735
Katherine Esau
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Katherine Esau was a pioneering German-American botanist who studied plant anatomy and the effects of viruses. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants are key texts. In 1989, Esau received the National Medal of Science "In recognition of her distinguished service to the American community of plant biologists, and for the excellence of her pioneering research, both basic and applied, on plant structure and development, which has spanned more than six decades; for her superlative performance as an educator, in the classroom and through her books; for the encouragement and inspira...
Go to Profile#16736
Sol Spiegelman
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Sol Spiegelman was an American molecular biologist. He developed the technique of nucleic acid hybridization, which helped to lay the groundwork for advances in recombinant DNA technology. Early life and education Spiegelman was born in Brooklyn, New York City in 1914. He attended the City College of New York and was initially interested in biology, but found the courses uninspiring and instead chose to focus on math and physics. During his undergraduate work he took a leave of absence to work in a biology laboratory, where he studied the genetics of bacteria. He graduated in 1939 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.
Go to Profile#16737
David Lack
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
David Lambert Lack FRS was a British evolutionary biologist who made contributions to ornithology, ecology, and ethology. His 1947 book, Darwin's Finches, on the finches of the Galapagos Islands was a landmark work as were his other popular science books on Life of the Robin and Swifts in a Tower. He developed what is now known as Lack's Principle which explained the evolution of avian clutch sizes in terms of individual selection as opposed to the competing contemporary idea that they had evolved for the benefit of species . His pioneering life-history studies of the living bird helped in changing the nature of ornithology from what was then a collection-oriented field.
Go to Profile#16738
Satyu Yamaguti
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
was a Japanese parasitologist, entomologist, and helminthologist. He was a specialist of mosquitoes and helminths such as digeneans, monogeneans, cestodes, acanthocephalans and nematodes. He also worked on the parasitic crustaceans Copepoda and Branchiura. Satyu Yamaguti wrote more than 60 scientific papers and, more importantly, several huge monographs which are still in use by scientists all over the world and were cited over 1,000 times each.
Go to Profile#16739
Harald Sverdrup
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Harald Ulrik Sverdrup was a Norwegian oceanographer and meteorologist. He served as director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Norwegian Polar Institute. Background He was born at Sogndal in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. He was the son of Lutheran theologian Edvard Sverdrup and Maria Vollan . His sister Mimi Sverdrup Lunden was an educator and author. His brother Leif Sverdrup was a General with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His brother Einar Sverdrup was CEO of Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani.
Go to Profile#16740
Albert Baird Hastings
1895 - 1987 (92 years)
Albert Baird Hastings was an American biochemist and physiologist. He spent 28 years as the department chair and Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard University. After retiring from Harvard, Hastings moved to the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation , where he became the director of the division of biochemistry and helped to establish the institution's emerging program in basic research. In 1966, he became one of the first faculty members at the University of California, San Diego's new medical school. His research focused on the biochemical underpinnings of physiology...
Go to Profile#16741
Roger Stanier
1916 - 1982 (66 years)
Roger Yate Stanier was a Canadian microbiologist who was influential in the development of modern microbiology. As a member of the Delft School and former student of C. B. van Niel, he made important contributions to the taxonomy of bacteria, including the classification of blue-green algae as cyanobacteria. In 1957, he and co-authors wrote The Microbial World, an influential microbiology textbook which was published in five editions over three decades. In the course of 24 years at the University of California, Berkeley he reached the rank of professor and served as chair of the Department of Bacteriology before leaving for the Pasteur Institute in 1971.
Go to Profile#16742
Maurice Yonge
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Sir Charles Maurice Yonge, CBE, FRS FRSE was an English marine zoologist. Life Charles Maurice Yonge was born in Silcoates School near Wakefield in Yorkshire in 1899 the son of John Arthur Yonge and his wife, Sarah Edith Carr. He was educated at Silcoates School, where his father was headmaster.
Go to Profile#16743
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory . This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today.
Go to Profile#16744
Alexis Carrel
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.
Go to Profile#16745
Karl Meyer
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Karl Meyer was a German biochemist. He worked on connective tissue and determined the properties of hyaluronan in the 1930s. Biography He was born on 4 September 1899 in Kerpen, Germany. Meyer studied medicine and received his Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in 1924. He moved to Berlin and received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1927. In 1930 Herbert Evans invited Meyer to work as assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He then moved to New York and worked at the Columbia University doing research on hyaluronan.
Go to Profile#16746
Raymond Cecil Moore
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Raymond Cecil Moore was an Americann geologist and paleontologist. He is known for his work on Paleozoic crinoids, bryozoans, and corals. Moore was a member of US Geological Survey from 1913 until 1949. In 1919 he became professor at the University of Kansas . In 1953 Professor Moore organized the launch and became the first editor of the still ongoing multi-volume work Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Contributors to the Treatise have included the world's specialists in the field. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1958. In 1970 he was awarded the Mary Clar...
Go to Profile#16747
Mary Beckerle
Mary C. Beckerle is an American cell biologist who studies cancer at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah School of Medicine. At Huntsman Cancer Institute, she serves as the CEO and also as Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs at the University of Utah. Beckerle's research helped to define a novel molecular pathway for cell motility, and more recently, she has begun research into Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer. Beckerle's lab made a ground breaking discovery in regards to Ewing's Sarcoma in relation to the EWS/FLI protein. Her lab discovered EWS/FLI to disru...
Go to Profile#16748
Karl Friedrich Meyer
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Karl Friedrich Meyer was an American scientist of Swiss origin. He was one of the most prodigious scientists in many areas of infectious diseases in man and animals, the ecology of pathogens, epidemiology and public health.[1-6] Some called him the “Pasteur of the 20th century”.
Go to Profile#16749
David Bruce Dill
1891 - 1986 (95 years)
David Bruce Dill was an American physiologist specializing in exercise science and environmental physiology. He served as president of the American Physiological Society and was a founding director of Harvard's Fatigue Laboratory, where he remained as Director of Research until it closed in 1947.
Go to Profile#16750
Alfred Romer
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Alfred Sherwood Romer was an American paleontologist and biologist and a specialist in vertebrate evolution. Biography Alfred Romer was born in White Plains, New York, the son of Harry Houston Romer and his wife, Evalyn Sherwood. He was educated at White Plains High School.
Go to Profile