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,
#16751
Isabel Clifton Cookson
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Isabel Clifton Cookson was an Australian botanist who specialised in palaeobotany and palynology. Early years and education Cookson was born at Hawthorn, Victoria, and attended the Methodist Ladies' College at Kew where she gained honours in anatomy, physiology and botany in the senior public examination. Cookson went on to study for her BSc at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1916 with majors in botany and zoology.
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Francis Ernest Lloyd
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Francis Ernest Lloyd was an American botanist. Life Lloyd was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Princeton University , in New Jersey, and in Europe at Munich and Bonn, in Germany. He was employed at various institutions of higher learning from 1891 onward. He served on the faculties of Williams College, Pacific University, Teachers College , Harvard Summer School, Alabama Polytechnic Institute , and at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada after 1912.
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Gabriel Andral
1797 - 1876 (79 years)
Gabriel Andral was a distinguished French pathologist and a professor at the University of Paris. Early life Born in Paris in 1797 to a family, originally from Espédaillac, deeply rooted in the medical profession. His grandfather, father, and uncle were all physicians. His father, Guillaume Andral , held an honorary membership in the Academy of Medicine and had a career as a surgeon in the French Revolutionary Armies.
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Georg Franz Hoffmann
1760 - 1826 (66 years)
Georg Franz Hoffmann was a German botanist and lichenologist. He was born on 13 January 1760 in Marktbreit, Germany, and died on 17 March 1826 in Moscow, Russia. Professional career After graduating from the University of Erlangen in 1786, he worked there between 1787 and 1792 as a professor of botany. Between 1792 and 1803 he was Head of the Botany Department and Director of the Botanical Garden of Göttingen University. Already a famous botanist, in particular for his work on lichens, he settled in Moscow in January 1804 and directed the Department of Botany at University of Moscow, as well a...
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Ryukichi Inada
1874 - 1950 (76 years)
Ryukichi Inada was a Japanese physician, a prominent academic, and bacteriologist researcher. He was the discoverer of the Weil's disease pathogen. In addition to his life's work in early 20th-century Japanese medical education, he was a pioneer in Japanese clinical cardiology and oncology.
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Filippo Parlatore
1816 - 1877 (61 years)
Filippo Parlatore was an Italian botanist. He studied medicine at Palermo, but practiced only for a short time, his chief activity being during the cholera epidemic of 1837. Although at that time he had been an assistant professor of anatomy, a subject on which he had already written , he soon gave up all other interests to devote his entire attention to botany. He first made a study of the flora of Sicily, publishing in 1838 Flora panormitana ; he also dealt with the Sicilian flora in later works. In 1840 he left home to begin his extended botanical expeditions. He travelled all through Italy, then into Switzerland , to France and to England, his longest stay being at Kew.
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Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin
1744 - 1774 (30 years)
Samuel George Gottlieb Gmelin was a German physician, botanist, and explorer. Background Gmelin was born at Tübingen as part of a well-known family of naturalists. His father was Johann Conrad Gmelin, an apothecary and surgeon. His uncle was Johann Georg Gmelin, who was also uncle to Johann Friedrich Gmelin . Samuel earned his medical degree in 1763 from the University of Leiden at the young age of 18. While living in the Dutch Republic, Gmelin developed a keen interest in marine algae. In 1766 he was appointed professor of botany at St Petersburg. In the following year he was sent on an expedition to study the natural history of the Russian Empire.
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Georg Baur
1859 - 1898 (39 years)
Georg Baur was a German vertebrate paleontologist and Neo-Lamarckian who studied reptiles of the Galapagos Islands, particularly the Galápagos tortoises, in the 1890s. He is perhaps best known for his subsidence theory of the origin of the Galapagos Islands, where he postulated the islands were the remains of a former landmass, connected to South America via Cocos Island.
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Joseph Franz von Jacquin
1766 - 1839 (73 years)
Joseph "Krystel" Franz Freiherr von Jacquin or Baron Joseph von Jacquin was an Austrian scientist who studied medicine, chemistry, zoology and botany. The son of Nikolaus von Jacquin, he graduated from the University of Vienna as a doctor of medicine in 1788.
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Hermann Müller
1829 - 1883 (54 years)
Heinrich Ludwig Hermann Müller was a German botanist who provided important evidence for Darwin's theory of evolution. Career Müller was an early investigator of coevolution.p27 He was the author in 1873 of Die Befruchtung der Blumen durch Insekten, a book translated at the suggestion of Darwin in 1883 as The Fertilisation of Flowers. He and Darwin corresponded; 36 letters between the two, or from Darwin concerning Müller, are recorded. Darwin cited him extensively in The Descent of Man for his information relating to the behavior of bees.
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Carlo Allioni
1728 - 1804 (76 years)
Carlo Allioni was an Italian physician and professor of botany at the University of Turin. His most important work was Flora Pedemontana, sive enumeratio methodica stirpium indigenarum Pedemontii 1755, a study of the plant world in Piedmont, in which he listed 2813 species of plants, of which 237 were previously unknown. In 1766, he published the Manipulus Insectorum Tauriniensium.
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Oskar Boettger
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Oskar Boettger was a German zoologist who was a native of Frankfurt am Main. He was an uncle of the noted malacologist Caesar Rudolf Boettger . From 1863 to 1866 he studied at the Bergakademie Freiberg, then worked for a year in a chemical factory in Frankfurt am Main. In 1869 he received his doctorate from the University of Würzburg. The following year , he became a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, where in 1875 he became the curator of the museum's department of herpetology. He is credited for making Senckenberg's herpetological collection among the best in Europe.
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John Barclay
1758 - 1826 (68 years)
John Barclay was a Scottish comparative anatomist, extramural teacher in anatomy, and director of the Highland Society of Scotland. Life He was born in Cairn, Perthshire, on 10 December 1758, the son of a farmer, and nephew of John Barclay, who established the Berean Church.
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Tamerlan Thorell
1830 - 1901 (71 years)
Tord Tamerlan Teodor Thorell was a Swedish arachnologist. Thorell studied spiders with Giacomo Doria at the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale de Genoa. He corresponded with other arachnologists, such as Octavius Pickard-Cambridge, Eugène Simon and Thomas Workman.
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Charles Janet
1849 - 1932 (83 years)
Charles Janet was a French engineer, company director, inventor and biologist. He is also known for his innovative left-step presentation of the periodic table of chemical elements. Life and work Janet graduated from the École Centrale Paris in 1872, and worked for some years as a chemist and engineer in a few factories in Puteaux , Rouen , and Saint-Ouen . He was then employed by Philippe Alphonse Dupont, at Société A. Dupont & Cie, a factory that produced bone buttons and fine brushes. He married Berthe Marie Antonia Dupont, the daughter of the owner, in November 1877, and worked there for the rest of his life, finding time for research in various branches of science.
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Dietrich Barfurth
1849 - 1927 (78 years)
Karl Dietrich Gerhard Barfurth was a German anatomist and embryologist born in Dinslaken. He studied mathematics and sciences at the University of Göttingen, and medicine at the University of Bonn. In 1882 he earned his medical doctorate, and in 1883 received his habilitation in anatomy. In 1888 he worked as prosector under Friedrich Sigmund Merkel in Göttingen. From 1889 to 1896 he was a professor of anatomy, embryology and histology at the University of Dorpat, and afterwards was professor of anatomy at the University of Rostock and director of the institute of anatomy.
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Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann
1801 - 1877 (76 years)
Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann was a German physiologist, anatomist, and philosopher. He specialized in the study of the nervous and optic system. Biography Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann was born in Leipzig, and enrolled in medicine there in 1821. Together with Gustav Theodor Fechner, who got his degree in medicine in 1822, and Rudolph Hermann Lotze , they formed a small intellectual group which dissolved only in 1837 when Volkmann received his professorship in Dorpat . In 1826 he obtained his doctorate and in 1828 he was habilitated as Privatdozent at the University of Leipzig. It was there that he became professor extraordinary of zootomy in 1834.
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Odoardo Beccari
1843 - 1920 (77 years)
Odoardo Beccari was an Italian botanist famous for his discoveries in Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia. He has been called the greatest botanist to ever study Malesia. His author abbreviation is Becc. when citing a botanical name.
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Alessandra Giliani
1307 - 1326 (19 years)
Alessandra Giliani was thought to be an Italian natural historian, best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology. However, the historical evidence for her existence is limited. Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented by Alessandro Machiavelli . whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time was so shocking that she has been edited out of history.
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Alexander Watt
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Alexander Stuart Watt FRS was a Scottish botanist and plant ecologist. Life Watt was born on an Aberdeenshire farm and went to school at Turriff Secondary School and Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen. He graduated as MA and BSc from the University of Aberdeen in 1913. He then went to University of Cambridge to work on beech forest under Arthur Tansley and obtained a MS in 1919 . From working with Tansley, Watt became part of an academic lineage descended from Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin. Tansley had studied with Francis W. Oliver at University College, London, who in turn had been mentored by E.
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Reiji Okazaki
1930 - 1975 (45 years)
Reiji Okazaki was a pioneer Japanese molecular biologist, known for his research on DNA replication and especially for describing the role of Okazaki fragments along with his wife Tsuneko. Okazaki was born in Hiroshima, Japan. He graduated in 1953 from Nagoya University, and worked as a professor there after 1963. He died of leukemia in 1975 at the age of 44 while traveling to the United States; he had been heavily irradiated in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was dropped.
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Harley Harris Bartlett
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Harley Harris Bartlett was an American botanist, biochemist, and anthropologist. He was an expert in tropical botany and an authority on Batak language and culture. Early life Bartlett was born in Anaconda, Montana on March 9, 1886. His family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1899, and he was enrolled in Shortridge High School. It was here where he cultivated his interests in botany, geology, and chemistry. After his graduation, he remained at the school as an assistant in botany and chemistry. Bartlett studied chemistry at Harvard University, receiving his A.B. in 1908. He was brought on a...
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William Orville Ayres
1817 - 1887 (70 years)
William Orville Ayres was an American physician and ichthyologist. Born in Connecticut, he studied to become a doctor at Yale University School of Medicine. Life and career Ayers, the son of Jared and Dinah Ayres, was born in New Canaan, Conn, September 11, 1817. He graduated from Yale College in 1837. For fifteen years after graduation he was employed as a teacher as follows in Berlin, Conn. , Miller's Place, L. I. , East Hartford, Conn. , Sag Harbor, L. I. , and Boston, Mass . He began the study of medicine in Boston, and in 1854 received the degree of M.D. from Yale College. He then moved to San Francisco, Cal., where he remained for nearly twenty years, engaged in practice.
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Helen Dean King
1869 - 1955 (86 years)
Helen Dean King was an American biologist. She was involved in breeding the Wistar lab rat, a strain of rats genetically homogeneous albinos intended for use in biological and medical research. Life and work Born at Owego, New York, she graduated from Vassar College in 1892, and in 1899 she received her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, with a thesis supervised by embryologist and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. She had majored in morphology. She remained at the College after graduation as a fellow and student assistant in biology from 1897 to 1904.
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Franz Josef Ruprecht
1814 - 1870 (56 years)
Franz Josef Ruprecht was an Austrian-born physician and botanist active in the Russian Empire, where he was known as Frants Ivanovič Ruprekht . He was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, and grew up in Prague, where he studied, and graduated as Doctor of Medicine in 1836. After a short stint in medical practice in Prague, he was appointed curator of the herbarium of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg in 1839, then assistant director of the Saint Petersburg Botanical Garden between 1851 and 1855, and professor of botany in 1855 at the University of Saint Petersburg. He died in Saint...
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Henry Pickering Bowditch
1840 - 1911 (71 years)
Henry Pickering Bowditch was an American soldier, physician, physiologist, and dean of the Harvard Medical School. Following his teacher Carl Ludwig, he promoted the training of medical practitioners in a context of physiological research. His teaching career at Harvard spanned 35 years.
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Thorvald Sørensen
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Thorvald Julius Sørensen was a Danish botanist and evolutionary biologist. Biography Sørensen was professor at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University 1953–1955 and at the University of Copenhagen 1955–1972. He was director of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum during the same period.
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Alexander Winchell
1824 - 1891 (67 years)
Alexander Winchell was a United States geologist who contributed to this field mainly as an educator and a popular lecturer and author. His views on evolution aroused controversy among his contemporaries; today the racism of these views is more cause for comment.
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Johann Jacob Roemer
1763 - 1819 (56 years)
Johann Jacob Roemer was a physician and professor of botany in Zurich, Switzerland. He was also an entomologist. With Austrian botanist Joseph August Schultes, he published the 16th edition of Carl Linnaeus' Systema Vegetabilium.
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Władysław Taczanowski
1819 - 1890 (71 years)
Władysław Taczanowski was a Polish zoologist and collector of natural history who explored the Russian Far East and northern Africa. He specialized mainly in ornithology but also described numerous other taxa including reptiles and arachnids.
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Félix de Avelar Brotero
1744 - 1828 (84 years)
Félix de Avelar Brotero was a Portuguese botanist and professor. He fled to France in 1788 to escape persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition, and there published his Compendio de Botanica in order to earn his living. It immediately established his reputation as a botanist, and upon his return to Portugal in 1790 he was given the chair of botany and agriculture at the University of Coimbra. His two best known works, Flora lusitanica, 1804, and Phytographia Lusitaniae selectior, 1816–1827, were the first lengthy descriptions of native Portuguese plants. As director of the botanical gardens at...
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Willey Glover Denis
1879 - 1929 (50 years)
Willey Glover Denis was an American biochemist and physiologist. She was noted particularly for her collaborations with Otto Folin, including studies of protein metabolism. She was a pioneer in the field of clinical chemistry and the measurement of protein in biological fluids
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Israel Aharoni
1882 - 1946 (64 years)
Israel Aharoni was a zoologist in Ottoman and British Palestine widely known as the "first Hebrew zoologist." Aharoni is best known for collecting a litter of Syrian hamsters on an expedition to Aleppo, Syria. The hamsters were bred as laboratory animals in Jerusalem, but some escaped through a hole in the floor. The majority of hamsters in Israel today are thus said to be descended from this one litter.
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Anders Dahl
1751 - 1789 (38 years)
Anders Dahl was a Swedish botanist and student of Carl Linnaeus. The dahlia flower is named after him. Early life and education Andreas Dahl was the son of Christoffer Dahl, a preacher, and his wife, Johanna Helena Enegren. He was probably christened "Andreas" but was known as "Anders". He had an older brother Erik who was born in 1749, also in Varnhem.
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Juan Ignacio Molina
1737 - 1829 (92 years)
Fr. Juan Ignacio Molina He was one of the precursors of the theory of the gradual evolution of species, 44 years before Darwin, who repeatedly quoted him in "The Origin of Species". Biography Early years Molina was born at Guaraculén, a big farm located near Villa Alegre , where he lived until he was 5 years old. In the current province of Linares, in the Maule Region of Chile. His parents were Agustín Molina and Francisca González Bruna. From an early age he was attracted to the nature of his environment, and in addition to his school work, he enjoyed observing nature on the family farm, which he visited periodically, alternating with his studies.
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Alvar Palmgren
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Alvar Palmgren was a Finnish botanist and plant ecologist. Palmgren studied botany at the University of Helsinki under professor J.P. Norrlin. He graduated in 1906 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1914. He became docent of botany at the University of Helsinki 1916 and professor of botany at the same university in 1928 . He retired in 1950.
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Caspar Bartholin the Younger
1655 - 1738 (83 years)
Caspar Bartholin the Younger , was a Danish anatomist who first described the "Bartholin's gland" in the 17th century. The discovery of the Bartholin's gland is sometimes mistakenly credited to his grandfather.
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Arthur Kronfeld
1886 - 1941 (55 years)
Arthur Kronfeld was a German psychiatrist of Jewish origin, and eventually a professor at the University of Berlin. His sister Maria Dronke found fame as an actor in New Zealand. Later in life, Kronfeld took up an important position in Moscow. On 10 October 1936, an exchange between Kronfeld and fellow exiled German-Jewish psychiatrist, James Lewin, was recorded in the proceedings of a meeting of the Moscow Society of Neuropathology and Psychiatry.
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Tadeusz Vetulani
1897 - 1952 (55 years)
Tadeusz Bolesław Vetulani was a Polish agriculturalist and biologist, associate professor of Adam Mickiewicz University in animal husbandry. He was a pioneer of biodiversity research in Poland and conducted notable research into forest tarpan and the Polish koniks, launching restoration and breeding schemes.
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Wilfred Bion
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965. Early life and military service Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England. After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order , and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917, and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 ...
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David P. Penhallow
1854 - 1910 (56 years)
David Pearce Penhallow was a Canadian-American botanist, paleobotanist and educator. Born in Kittery Point, Maine, Penhallow graduated from Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1873 . When his former professor, William S. Clark was asked by the Japanese government to assist in the founding of Sapporo Agricultural College , Penhallow accompanied Clark and another MAC graduate, William Wheeler, to teach botany and chemistry. When Clark departed the Sapporo in 1877, Penhallow served as acting President from 1879 to 1880. During his stay in Japan, Penhallow travelled across the archipelago and ...
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Édouard Laguesse
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Gustave-Édouard Laguesse was a French pathologist and histologist born in Dijon. In 1885 he received his medical doctorate in Paris and from 1891 performed scientific research in Lille. In 1896 he became a professor of histology.
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John Otterbein Snyder
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
John Otterbein Snyder was an American ichthyologist and professor of zoology at Stanford University. History As a student he met David Starr Jordan who inspired him to enter zoology. He eventually became a zoology instructor at Stanford University and served there from 1899 until 1943.
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Johann Bernhard Wilbrand
1779 - 1846 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Wilbrand was a German anatomist and naturalist. He was a proponent of Naturphilosophie. In 1806 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Würzburg, then continued his education in Paris, where he attended lectures given by Georges Cuvier, André Marie Constant Duméril and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Afterwards, he served as a lecturer at the University of Münster, and in 1808 relocated to the University of Giessen as a professor of anatomy and physiology.
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Wilhelm Philippe Schimper
1808 - 1880 (72 years)
Wilhelm Philippe Schimper was an Alsatian botanist with French, later German citizenship. He was born in Dossenheim-sur-Zinsel, but spent his youth in Offwiller, a village at the foot of the Vosges mountain range in Alsace. He was the father of botanist Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper , and a cousin to naturalist Karl Friedrich Schimper and botanist Georg Heinrich Wilhelm Schimper .
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Hans Melchior
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Hans Melchior was a German botanist. Melchior was born in Berlin. He studied botany at Berlin University, became assistant to G. Haberlandt at the Institute for plant physiology and took his doctor's degree with him in 1920.
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Hugh McCormick Smith
1865 - 1941 (76 years)
Hugh McCormick Smith, also H. M. Smith was an American ichthyologist and administrator in the United States Bureau of Fisheries. Biography Smith was born in Washington, D.C. In 1888, he received a Doctor of Medicine from Georgetown University; then, in 1908, a Doctor of Law from the Dickinson School of Law at Dickinson College. He began working for the United States Fish Commission in 1886 as an assistant. He directed the scientific research center there from 1897 to 1903. From 1901 to 1902, he directed the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At the same time, he was o...
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Bartolomeo Eustachi
1500 - 1574 (74 years)
Bartolomeo Eustachi , also known by his Latin name of Bartholomaeus Eustachius , was an Italian anatomist and one of the founders of the science of human anatomy. Biography Bartolomeo was born in San Severino in the province of Ancona, where his father, Marinao Eustachius, was a wealthy and prominent physician. Bartolomeo received the required, broad humanistic education typical for that time, and then studied Medicine at the Archiginnasio della Sapienza in Rome. He was also well versed in Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek languages, which gave him access to the original medical treatises written in those languages.
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Lauritz Kolderup Rosenvinge
1858 - 1939 (81 years)
Janus Lauritz Andreas Kolderup Rosenvinge, generally cited as Lauritz Kolderup Rosenvinge was a Danish botanist and phycologist. Kolderup Rosenvinge received his Ph.D. in 1888 from the University of Copenhagen. He was docent of botany at the polytechnic from 1900; and professor of botany at the University of Copenhagen from 1916, focusing on spore plants . He undertook investigations of algae in Danish waters and in the North Atlantic.
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Christian Eduard Langethal
1806 - 1878 (72 years)
Christian Eduard Langethal was a German botanist and agronomist. He is known for his writings involving agricultural botany and agricultural history. Beginning in 1827 he studied natural sciences at the University of Jena. During the winter term of 1834/35 he began teaching classes in natural history at the recently built scientific academy at Eldena , where he worked closely with his former teacher, Friedrich Gottlob Schulze . In 1839, with Schulze, he returned to the University of Jena as an associate professor of botany. At Jena he distinguished himself in studies of botany as it applied ...
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