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.
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#16701
Alexandre Yersin
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin was a Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis. Another bacteriologist, the Japanese physician Kitasato Shibasaburō, is often credited with independently identifying the bacterium a few days earlier. Yersin also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.
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Jacques Loeb
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Jacques Loeb was a German-born American physiologist and biologist. Biography Jacques Loeb, firstborn son of a Jewish family from the German Eifel region, was educated at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Strasburg . He took postgraduate courses at the universities of Strasburg and Berlin, and in 1886 became assistant at the physiological institute of the University of Würzburg, remaining there until 1888. In a similar capacity, he then went to Strasburg University. During his vacations he pursued biological research, at Kiel in 1888, and at Naples in 1889 and 1890.
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Walter Bradford Cannon
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Walter Bradford Cannon was an American physiologist, professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School. He coined the term "fight or flight response", and developed the theory of homeostasis. He popularized his theories in his book The Wisdom of the Body, first published in 1932.
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George Robert Gray
1808 - 1872 (64 years)
George Robert Gray was an English zoologist and author, and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, in London for forty-one years. He was the younger brother of the zoologist John Edward Gray and the son of the botanist Samuel Frederick Gray.
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Edouard Van Beneden
1846 - 1910 (64 years)
Édouard Joseph Louis Marie Van Beneden was a Belgian embryologist, cytologist and marine biologist. He was professor of zoology at the University of Liège. He contributed to cytogenetics by his works on the roundworm Ascaris. In this work he discovered how chromosomes organized meiosis .
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Alexander Agassiz
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz , son of Louis Agassiz and stepson of Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, was an American scientist and engineer. Biography Agassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and immigrated to the United States with his parents, Louis and Cecile Agassiz, in 1846. He graduated from Harvard University in 1855, subsequently studying engineering and chemistry, and taking the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Lawrence Scientific School of the same institution in 1857; in 1859 became an assistant in the United States Coast Survey. Thenceforward he became a specialist in marine ichthyology.
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Karl Möbius
1825 - 1908 (83 years)
Karl August Möbius was a German zoologist who was a pioneer in the field of ecology and a former director of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Early life Möbius was born in Eilenburg in Saxony. At the age of four he attended primary school at the Bergschule Eilenburg, and at the age of 12 he was sent by his father to train as a teacher. In 1844 he passed the exams with distinction and began working as teacher in Seesen, on the northwest edge of the Harz mountain range. In 1849, and encouraged by Alexander von Humboldt, he began studying natural science and philosophy at Natural History Museum of Berlin.
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Henry Gray
1827 - 1861 (34 years)
Henry Gray was a British anatomist and surgeon most notable for publishing the book Gray's Anatomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25. Biography Gray was born in Belgravia, London, in 1827 and lived most of his life in London. In 1842, he entered as a student at St. George's Hospital, London , and he is described by those who knew him as a most painstaking and methodical worker, and one who learned his anatomy by the slow but invaluable method of making dissections for himself.
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Carl Ludwig Blume
1796 - 1862 (66 years)
Charles Ludwig de Blume or Karl Ludwig von Blume was a German-Dutch botanist. He was born at Braunschweig in Germany, but studied at Leiden University and spent his professional life working in the Dutch East Indies and in the Netherlands, where he was Director of the Rijksherbarium at Leiden. His name is sometimes given in the Dutch language form Karel Lodewijk Blume, but the original German spelling is the one most widely used in botanical texts: even then there is confusion, as he is sometimes referred to as K.L. Blume .
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Albert Szent-Györgyi
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Albert Imre Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with first isolating vitamin C and discovering the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II, and entered Hungarian politics after the war.
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Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
1656 - 1708 (52 years)
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants. Botanist Charles Plumier was his pupil and accompanied him on his voyages.
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Ross Granville Harrison
1870 - 1959 (89 years)
Ross Granville Harrison was an American biologist and anatomist credited for his pioneering work on animal tissue culture. His work also contributed to the understanding of embryonic development. Harrison studied in many places around the world and made a career as a university professor. He was also a member of many learned societies and received several awards for his contributions to anatomy and biology.
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Anton Dohrn
1840 - 1909 (69 years)
Felix Anton Dohrn FRS FRSE was a prominent German Darwinist and the founder and first director of the first zoological research station in the world, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy. He worked on embryology and examined vertebrate origins in terms of functional phylogeny and proposed a principle of succession of functions in 1875 on how one organ could become the basis for the evolution of another of an entirely different function.
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Ernest Jones
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.
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Columella
4 - 70 (66 years)
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella was a prominent writer on agriculture in the Roman Empire. His in twelve volumes has been completely preserved and forms an important source on Roman agriculture, together with the works of Cato the Elder and Marcus Terentius Varro, both of which he occasionally cites. A smaller book on trees, , is usually attributed to him.
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William H. Welch
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Henry Welch was an American physician, pathologist, bacteriologist, and medical-school administrator. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and was also the founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country. Welch was more known for his cogent summations of current scientific work, than his own scientific research. The Johns Hopkins medical school library is also named after Welch. In his lifetime, he was called the "...
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Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg
1795 - 1876 (81 years)
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg was a German naturalist, zoologist, comparative anatomist, geologist, and microscopist. Ehrenberg was an evangelist and was considered to be one of the most famous and productive scientists of his time.
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Hans Sloane
1660 - 1753 (93 years)
Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet , was an Anglo-Irish physician, naturalist, and collector, with a collection of 71,000 items which he bequeathed to the British nation, thus providing the foundation of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London. He was elected to the Royal Society at the age of 24. Sloane travelled to the Caribbean in 1687 and documented his travels and findings with extensive publications years later. Sloane was a renowned medical doctor among the aristocracy, and was elected to the Royal College of Physicians at age 27. Though he is credited...
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Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Claus
1835 - 1899 (64 years)
Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Claus was a German zoologist and anatomist. He was an opponent of the ideas of Ernst Haeckel. Biography Claus studied at the University of Marburg and the University of Gießen with Rudolf Leuckart. He worked at the university of Würzburg. In 1863, he became professor of zoölogy at Marburg, in 1870 at Göttingen and in 1873 at Vienna. He was head of the oceanographic research station in Trieste and was specialized on marine zoology and there his interest was focused on crustaceans. During his research on cell biology he coined the word phagocyte.
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Jean Cabanis
1816 - 1906 (90 years)
Jean Louis Cabanis was a German ornithologist. Cabanis was born in Berlin to an old Huguenot family who had moved from France. Little is known of his early life. He studied at the University of Berlin from 1835 to 1839, and then travelled to North America, returning in 1841 with a large natural history collection. He was assistant and later director of the Natural History Museum of Berlin , taking over from Martin Lichtenstein. He founded the Journal für Ornithologie in 1853, editing it for the next forty-one years, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law Anton Reichenow.
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Camillo Rondani
1808 - 1879 (71 years)
Camillo Rondani was an Italian entomologist noted for his studies of Diptera. Early life, family and education Camillo Rondani was born in Parma when the city was part of the French Empire Napoleon having crowned himself King of Italy. The Rondani family were wealthy landowners and of "rich and of ancient origins" with ecclesiastical connections preliminary.
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Lourens Baas Becking
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Lourens Gerhard Marinus Baas Becking was a Dutch botanist and microbiologist. He is known for the Baas Becking hypothesis, which he originally formulated as "Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects".
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Johann Friedrich Meckel
1781 - 1833 (52 years)
Johann Friedrich Meckel , often referred to as Johann Friedrich Meckel, the Younger, was a German anatomist born in Halle. He worked as a professor of anatomy, pathology and zoology at the University of Halle, Germany.
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Alexander Kovalevsky
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
Alexander Onufrievich Kovalevsky was an Imperial Russian embryologist, who studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and became professor at the University of St Petersburg. He was the brother of the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, and the brother-in-law of the mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya.
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Ernest Edward Austen
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Ernest Edward Austen DSO was an English entomologist specialising in Diptera and Hymenoptera. His collection of Amazonian and Sierra Leonian insects is in the Natural History Museum, London. He wrote Illustrations of British Blood-Sucking Flies illustrated by Amedeo John Engel Terzi.
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Nicholas Culpeper
1616 - 1654 (38 years)
Nicholas Culpeper was an English botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer. His book The English Physitian is a source of pharmaceutical and herbal lore of the time, and Astrological Judgement of Diseases from the Decumbiture of the Sick one of the most detailed works on medical astrology in Early Modern Europe. Culpeper catalogued hundreds of outdoor medicinal herbs. He scolded contemporaries for some of the methods they used in herbal medicine: "This not being pleasing, and less profitable to me, I consulted with my two brothers, and , and took a voyage to visit my mother , by whose ...
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Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann
1843 - 1909 (66 years)
Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann was a German botanist, physiologist, microbiologist, university professor, and musician whose 1882 experiment measured the effects of different colors of light on photosynthetic activity and showed that the conversion of light energy to chemical energy took place in the chloroplast.
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Luther Burbank
1849 - 1926 (77 years)
Luther Burbank was an American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science. He developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55-year career. Burbank's developments included those of fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, and vegetables. He developed a spineless cactus and the plumcot.
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Arthur Roy Clapham
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Arthur Roy Clapham , was a British botanist. Born in Norwich and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, Clapham worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station as a crop physiologist , and then took a teaching post in the botany department at Oxford University. He was Professor of Botany at Sheffield University 1944–69 and vice chancellor of the university during the 1960s. He coauthored the Flora of the British Isles, which was the first, and for several decades the only, comprehensive flora of the British Isles published in 1952 and followed by new editions in 1962 and 1987. In response to a req...
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Edward S. Morse
1838 - 1925 (87 years)
Edward Sylvester Morse was an American zoologist, archaeologist, and orientalist. He is considered the "Father of Japanese archaeology." Early life Morse was born in Portland, Maine to Jonathan Kimball Morse and Jane Seymour Morse. His father was a Congregationalist deacon who held strict Calvinist beliefs. His mother, who did not share her husband's religious beliefs, encouraged her son's interest in the sciences. An unruly student, Morse was expelled from all but one of the schools he attended in his youth — the Portland village school, the academy at Conway, New Hampshire, in 1851, and Bridgton Academy in 1854 .
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Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius
1794 - 1868 (74 years)
Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was a German botanist and explorer. Life Martius was born at Erlangen, the son of Prof Ernst Wilhelm Martius, court apothecary. He graduated PhD from Erlangen University in 1814, publishing as his thesis a critical catalogue of plants in the university's botanical garden. After that he continued to devote himself to botanical study, and in 1817 he and Johann Baptist von Spix were sent to Brazil by Maximilian I Joseph, the king of Bavaria. They travelled from Rio de Janeiro through several of the southern and eastern provinces of Brazil and travelled up the ...
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Christian Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann
1770 - 1840 (70 years)
Christian Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann was a German physician, historian, naturalist and entomologist. He is best known for his studies of world Diptera, but he also studied Hymenoptera and Coleoptera, although far less expertly.
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John Torrey
1796 - 1873 (77 years)
John Torrey was an American botanist, chemist, and physician. Throughout much of his career, he was a teacher of chemistry, often at multiple universities, while he also pursued botanical work, focusing on the flora of North America. His most renowned works include studies of the New York flora, the Mexican Boundary, the Pacific railroad surveys, and the uncompleted Flora of North America.
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Joseph Nelson Rose
1862 - 1928 (66 years)
Joseph Nelson Rose was an American botanist. He was born in Union County, Indiana. His father died serving during the Civil War when Joseph Rose was a young boy. He later graduated from high school in Liberty, Indiana.
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Johann Jakob Kaup
1803 - 1873 (70 years)
Johann Jakob von Kaup was a German naturalist. A proponent of natural philosophy, he believed in an innate mathematical order in nature and he attempted biological classifications based on the Quinarian system. Kaup is also known for having coined popular prehistoric taxa like Pterosauria, Machairodus, Deinotherium, Dorcatherium, and Chalicotherium.
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Grafton Elliot Smith
1871 - 1937 (66 years)
Sir Grafton Elliot Smith was an Australian-British anatomist, Egyptologist and a proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory. He believed in the idea that cultural innovations occur only once and that they spread geographically. Based on this, he traced the origins of many cultural and traditional practices across the world, including the New World, to ideas that he believed came from Egypt and in some instances from Asia. An expert on brain anatomy, he was one of the first to study Egyptian mummies using radiological techniques. He took an interest in extinct humanoids and was emb...
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Gaspard Bauhin
1560 - 1624 (64 years)
Gaspard Bauhin or Caspar Bauhin , was a Swiss botanist whose Pinax theatri botanici described thousands of plants and classified them in a manner that draws comparisons to the later binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus. He was a disciple of the famous Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale and he also worked on human anatomical nomenclature.
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Thomas Say
1787 - 1834 (47 years)
Thomas Say was an American entomologist, conchologist, and herpetologist. His studies of insects and shells, numerous contributions to scientific journals, and scientific expeditions to Florida, Georgia, the Rocky Mountains, Mexico, and elsewhere made him an internationally known naturalist. Say has been called the father of American descriptive entomology and American conchology. He served as librarian for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, curator at the American Philosophical Society , and professor of natural history at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Allan Octavian Hume
1829 - 1912 (83 years)
Allan Octavian Hume, CB ICS was a British political reformer, ornithologist, civil servant and botanist who worked in British India. He supported the idea of self-governance by Indians and founded the Indian National Congress. A notable ornithologist, Hume has been called "the Father of Indian Ornithology" and, by those who found him dogmatic, "the Pope of Indian Ornithology".
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Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring
1755 - 1830 (75 years)
Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring was a German physician, anatomist, anthropologist, paleontologist and inventor. Sömmerring discovered the macula in the retina of the human eye. His investigations on the brain and the nervous system, on the sensory organs, on the embryo and its malformations, on the structure of the lungss, etc., made him one of the most important German anatomists.
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Filippo Pacini
1812 - 1883 (71 years)
Filippo Pacini was an Italian anatomist, posthumously famous for isolating the cholera bacterium Vibrio cholerae in 1854, well before Robert Koch's more widely accepted discoveries 30 years later. Pacini was born in Pistoia, Tuscany, to Francesco, a humble cobbler, and Umiltà Dolfi, but was given a religious education in hopes that he would become a bishop. However, in 1830, he was given a scholarship to the most venerable medical school in Pistoia. He learned his job as a doctor and how to examine and dissect dead bodies under a microscope.
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David Fairchild
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
David Grandison Fairchild was an American botanist and plant explorer. Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 200,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including soybeans, pistachios, mangos, nectarines, dates, bamboos, and flowering cherries. Certain varieties of wheat, cotton, and rice became especially economically important.
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Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson was one of the most prominent Soviet geneticists, a former student of Nikolai Koltsov, who was among the scientists who had to struggle against the persecution of geneticists in the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. He studied mutations and human genetics and was among the first to estimate the rate of spontaneous mutations in human genes in 1932 although this was published first by J.B.S. Haldane.
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Joseph von Gerlach
1820 - 1896 (76 years)
Joseph von Gerlach was a German professor of anatomy at the University of Erlangen. He was a native of Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. Gerlach was a pioneer of histological staining and anatomical micrography. In 1858 Gerlach introduced carmine mixed with gelatin as a histological stain.
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Constantin von Economo
1876 - 1931 (55 years)
Constantin Freiherr von Economo was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. He is mostly known for his discovery of encephalitis lethargica and his atlas of cytoarchitectonics of the cerebral cortex.
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St. George Jackson Mivart
1827 - 1900 (73 years)
St. George Jackson Mivart was an English biologist. He is famous for starting as an ardent believer in natural selection and later becoming one of its fiercest critics. Mivart attempted to reconcile the theory of evolution as propounded by Charles Darwin with the beliefs of the Catholic Church but was condemned by both Darwin and the Church. His belief in a soul created by God and insistence that evolutionism was not incompatible with the existence of such a God brought him into conflict with other evolutionists, while his theological theories on hell and on the compatibility between science...
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Robert Ridgway
1850 - 1929 (79 years)
Robert Ridgway was an American ornithologist specializing in systematics. He was appointed in 1880 by Spencer Fullerton Baird, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to be the first full-time curator of birds at the United States National Museum, a title he held until his death. In 1883, he helped found the American Ornithologists' Union, where he served as officer and journal editor. Ridgway was an outstanding descriptive taxonomist, capping his life work with The Birds of North and Middle America . In his lifetime, he was unmatched in the number of North American bird species that he described for science.
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Frederick Wallace Edwards
1888 - 1940 (52 years)
Frederick Wallace Edwards FRS , was an English entomologist. Edwards was known in the field of entomology for his work on Diptera. Edwards worked in the British Museum which contains his collections made on his expeditions to Norway and Sweden , Switzerland and Austria , Argentina and Chile , with Raymond Corbett Shannon, Corsica and USA , the Baltic , Kenya and Uganda , with Ernest Gibbins, and the Pyrenees . He was able to oversee publication of Alwyn M. Evan's monograph on The Mosquitoes of the Ethiopian Region after her death in 1937.
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Adolfo Lutz
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Adolfo Lutz was a Brazilian physician, father of tropical medicine and medical zoology in Brazil, and a pioneer epidemiologist and researcher in infectious diseases. Life Lutz was born in Rio de Janeiro, on December 18, 1855, son of Gustav Lutz and Mathilde Oberteuffer, a family of Bern. He studied medicine in Switzerland, graduating in 1879 at the University of Bern. After graduation he went on to study experimental medicine techniques in London, England , Leipzig, Germany, Vienna, Austria, Prague and Paris, France .
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Simon Schwendener
1829 - 1919 (90 years)
Simon Schwendener was a Swiss botanist who was a native of Buchs in the Canton of St. Gallen. In 1856 he received his doctorate at the University of Zurich, where afterwards he was an assistant to Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli . In 1860 he became a professor of botany at the University of Munich, and in 1867 a professor of botany and director of the Botanical Gardens in Basel. In 1877 he succeeded Wilhelm Hofmeister as professor of botany at the University of Tübingen, and from 1878 until his retirement in 1910, Schwendener was a professor at the University of Berlin.
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