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,
#16901
Ernst Teichmann
1869 - 1919 (50 years)
Ernst Gustav Georg Teichmann was a German theologian and zoologist known for his investigations in the field of the tsetse fly and for his books on birth, fertilisation, heredity and death. Life and work He studied theology in Lausanne, Giessen, Berlin and Marburg, obtaining his license in theology at Bonn in 1896. From 1898 to 1900, he studied zoology at the University of Würzburg, afterwards continuing his education in zoology at Naples and Marburg. In 1909–10 he worked at the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg, and from 1911 onward, served as a hydrozoologist and departmental head at the institute for hygiene in Frankfurt.
Go to Profile#16902
Anton Nuhn
1814 - 1889 (75 years)
Anton Nuhn was a German anatomist. He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he was a student of Friedrich Tiedemann . In 1842 he was a lecturer at Heidelberg, and shortly afterwards worked as prosector. In 1849 he became an associate professor at the institute of anatomy in Heidelberg, and in 1872 received the title of honorary professor.
Go to Profile#16903
William Burns Paterson
1850 - 1915 (65 years)
William Burns Paterson was an educator and horticulturist. He is chiefly known as an educational provider, being involved in establishing Alabama State University. He was a Democrat, a Presbyterian, and a charter member of the Alabama State horticultural society.
Go to Profile#16904
Bernhard Solger
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
Bernhard Solger was a German anatomist. He studied medicine at the Universities of Erlangen, Würzburg, Tübingen and Munich. During the Franco-Prussian War, he served as a doctor in a field hospital. In 1872 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Würzburg, later working as an assistant at the University of Breslau . Beginning in 1877, he worked as a prosector at the University of Halle, where in 1882 he gained an associate professorship. In 1886, he was appointed professor of anatomy at the University of Greifswald. In 1904 he settled in the city of Neisse as a dermatologist.
Go to Profile#16905
Donald Devereux Woods
1912 - 1964 (52 years)
Donald Devereux Woods was a British microbiologist. He was born in Ipswich, the son of Walter and Violet Woods, and educated at Northgate School, Ipswich. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1933 and gaining a PhD there in 1937.
Go to Profile#16906
Hugo Merton
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Hugo Merton was a German zoologist. He studied sciences at the University of Heidelberg. From October 1907 to August 1908, with herpetologist Jean Roux, he conducted scientific investigations in the Aru and Kei Islands. In 1913 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the flatworm genus Temnocephala. Because of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws imposed by the Nazis, he was forced to relinquish his position as deputy director at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt as well as his professorship at the University of Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#16907
George Duryea Hulst
1846 - 1900 (54 years)
George Duryea Hulst was an American clergyman, botanist and entomologist. Biography He graduated from Rutgers University in 1866 and received a degree from New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1869, finally receiving his degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Rutgers in 1891.
Go to Profile#16908
Howard A. Pearson
#16909
Frederick George Novy
1864 - 1957 (93 years)
Frederick George Novy was an American bacteriologist, organic chemist, and instructor. Born in Chicago, Illinois, the third son of Joseph Novy and his wife Frances, grew up on the West Side, near the site where the Great Chicago Fire started in 1871. After attending the local public schools, Novy matriculated to the University of Michigan where he studied chemistry, graduating with a B.S. in 1886. He performed his graduate studies at the same institution, receiving his master's degree in 1887 with a thesis on "Cocaine and its derivatives". At this time he became an instructor at the University, teaching a course in bacteriology, then was awarded an Sc.D.
Go to Profile#16910
Ludwig Jungermann
1572 - 1653 (81 years)
Ludwig Jungermann was a German botanist and physician. Biography His father Caspar Jungermann was a professor of law in Leipzig, his mother Ursula Camerarius the daughter of the humanist Joachim Camerarius the Elder , a colleague and friend of Philipp Melanchthon. After studying medicine, Jungermann first lived in Nuremberg and then became professor of anatomy and botany in Giessen from 1614 to 1625. In 1616 he refused an appointment to the renowned Chair of Botany in London as successor to Matthias Lobelius, just as he had not followed previous appointments to the Universities of Rostock a...
Go to Profile#16911
Sergey Paramonov
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Sergey Jacques Paramonov was a Soviet and Australian entomologist, specializing on flies , of which described about 700 species and subspecies. Paramonov published over 185 scientific articles, some of which were published posthumously.
Go to Profile#16912
Georges Colomb
1856 - 1945 (89 years)
Marie-Louis-Georges Colomb was a French botanist, science populariser, and a pioneer of French comics, known as bandes dessinées. Under the pseudonym Christophe , Colomb created comics that were popular among the French intelligentsia, yet were published in Le Petit Français illustré, a children's paper. His popular L'idée fixe du savant Cosinus featured a brilliant, absent-minded scientist. His other comics included La Famille Fenouillard ; Le Sapeur Camember ; Les Malices de Plick et Plock ; and Le Baron de Cramoisy .
Go to Profile#16913
Warfield Theobald Longcope
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Warfield Theobald Longcope was an American pathologist. He served as physician-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and president of the American Association of Immunologists, Association of American Physicians, and American Society for Clinical Investigation.
Go to Profile#16914
Charles Willison Johnson
1863 - 1932 (69 years)
Charles Willison Johnson was an American naturalist who specialized in entomology and malacology, making significant contributions in both fields. He was a mentor and inspiration to many students and young scientists such as William J. Clench . Johnson was Curator of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, 1888–1903, then was Principal Curator at the Boston Society of Natural History, 1903–1932.
Go to Profile#16915
Adam Maurizio
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
Adam Maurizio was a Swiss botanist, specialist of food technology and cultural history, born 26 September 1862 in Kraków and died 4 March 1941 in Liebefeld near Bern. He gained international recognition for his works on the history of plant food.
Go to Profile#16916
Rudolf Höber
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Rudolf Otto Anselm Höber was a German physician and physiologist who was forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany. Life and work Höber was born in Stettin to businessman Anselm Emil and his wife Elise née Köhlau. Educated at the gymnasium at Stettin, he went to study medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1892. He completed studies at the University of Erlangen in 1897 and worked with his uncle Isidor Rosenthal where he became interested in physiology. He then studied the work of Walther Nernst on biological membranes. He received a degree in medicine in 1898 and joined the physiological institute at Zurich under Justus Gaule.
Go to Profile#16917
George A. Walker Arnott
1799 - 1868 (69 years)
George Arnott Walker Arnott of Arlary was a Scottish botanist. He collaborated with botanists from around the world and served as a regius professor of botany at the University of Glasgow. An orchid genus Arnottia was named in his honour in 1828.
Go to Profile#16918
Giovanni Battista de Toni
1864 - 1924 (60 years)
Giovanni Battista de Toni was an Italian botanist, mycologist and phycologist. In 1885 he graduated from the University of Padua, where he studied natural sciences and chemistry with Pier Andrea Saccardo and Francesco Filippuzzi . For several years, he worked as a librarian in the museum of Padua, afterwards teaching botany at the University of Camerino . Following duties as a professor of botany in Sassari, he relocated to Modena, where from 1903, he served as a professor of botany and as associate director of the botanical garden. During his career, he took numerous scientific trips throug...
Go to Profile#16919
Georg Wüst
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Georg Adolf Otto Wüst was a German oceanographer. His pioneering work on the Atlantic Ocean provided a new view of the motions of water masses between the northern and southern hemispheres and the first evidence of the concentration of water mass spreading in western boundary currents.
Go to Profile#16920
Loye H. Miller
1874 - 1970 (96 years)
Loye Holmes Miller , was an American paleontologist and zoologist who served as professor of zoology at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#16921
George Schoener
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
George Schoener, or Georg Schöner was a German-born Roman Catholic priest who became known in the United States as the "Padre of the Roses" for his experiments in rose breeding, especially in the use of wild species. Only two of his creations survive today, however: 'Arrilaga' and 'Schoener's Nutkana'.
Go to Profile#16922
Paul B. Szanto
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Paul B. Szanto was a Hungarian-born Jewish pathologist who spent most of his career in Chicago. Szanto's wartime service was covered in Michael J. Lepore's book Life of the Clinician. Szanto was one of the pioneering researchers at the Hektoen Institute.
Go to Profile#16923
James Arthur Oliver
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
James Arthur Oliver was an American zoologist, herpetologist and educator who served as the Director of the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Park and the New York Aquarium.
Go to Profile#16924
Mary Alice Willcox
1856 - 1953 (97 years)
Mary Alice Willcox was an American zoologist and professor at Wellesley College. Early life and education In 1856, Mary was born in Kennebunk, Maine, the eldest of three children of the congregational minister William H. Willcox and his wife Annie Holmes née Goodenow. Theirs was a distinguished family in Maine; her great grandfather, John Holmes, was one of the state's first senators, while her grandfather, Daniel Goodenow, was justice of the Supreme Court of Maine. Her brother, Walter Francis Willcox, became professor of economics and statistics at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#16925
Chiara Cirelli
#16926
Hermann Voss
1894 - 1987 (93 years)
Christian Heinrich Emil Hermann Voss was a German anatomist. Well known as a medical academic and textbook author he was also notorious for his experiments during the Third Reich. Early life The son of a manor lessee, Voss was born in Berlin but raised in Warnkenhagen and Malchin. He studied variously at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Heidelberg University and the University of Rostock before completing his doctorate in 1919, including a spell away from study in the army during the First World War as an army doctor.
Go to Profile#16927
James Eric Smith
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Sir James Eric Smith, CBE, FRS was a British zoologist. He was educated at Hull Grammar School and King's College London where he read zoology. He was Professor of Zoology at Queen Mary University of London from 1950 to 1965. He was awarded the Linnean Gold Medal in 1971. He was awarded the Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958. He was made a CBE in 1972 and knighted in 1977.
Go to Profile#16928
Karl McKay Wiegand
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Karl McKay Wiegand was an American botanist who headed the Department of Botany at Cornell University for 28 years. He was a member of the Botanical Society of America and served as its president in 1939.
Go to Profile#16929
Joseph Dalton Sir Hooker
#16930
Jean Feldmann
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Jean Feldmann was a French biologist, specialising in marine algae. Biography Jean Feldmann was born on 25 June 1905 in Paris. He initially studied pharmacy, gaining his first degree in 1929, before turning his attentions to marine algae. In 1933, he took up a position as an assistant at the University of Algiers, where he also completed his doctorate in 1937, married his assistant, Geneviève Mazoyer, in 1938, and rose to professor in 1948. The couple moved to Paris when Jean took up a position at the institution that became the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, where they remained until his retirement in 1976.
Go to Profile#16931
D. Avid G. Ainley
#16932
Francis Balfour-Browne
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
William Alexander Francis Balfour-Browne FRSE FZS FLS PRMS , known as Frank, was an English entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera, especially Dytiscidae . Life and work Balfour-Browne was born at 16 Ebury Street in London to John Hutton Balfour-Browne KC and Caroline Lush.
Go to Profile#16933
Hermann Weyland
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Hermann Gerhard Weyland was a German chemist and botanist. In collaboration with Richard Kräusel, he carried out significant paleobotanical investigations of Devonian flora. He obtained his education at the University of Jena, receiving his doctorate in 1912 under the direction of Christian Ernst Stahl. Following graduation, he worked as assistant to Wilhelm Pfeffer at the University of Leipzig and under Ludwig Knorr in Jena. From 1915 to 1952 he worked as a chemist at Bayer in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, being named head of its physiology laboratory in 1924. In 1931 he became an honorary professor ...
Go to Profile#16934
Robert E. Schmidt
#16935
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell was an American entomologist and high school biology teacher who discovered and collected a large number of insect specimens and other organisms. She participated in numerous research and collecting field trips including the Cockerell-Mackie-Ogilvie expedition. She wrote several scientific articles in her own right, co-authored more with her husband, Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, and assisted him with his prolific scientific output. She discovered and cultivated red sunflowers, eventually selling the seeds to commercial seed companies. Her husband and her entomologi...
Go to Profile#16936
Jack Lamont Mclachlan
#16937
Jules-Auguste Béclard
1817 - 1887 (70 years)
Jules–Auguste Béclard was a French physiologist born in Paris. He was the son of anatomist Pierre Augustin Béclard . In 1842 he earned his doctorate in Paris, where he later became a professor of physiology to the Faculté de Médecine. From 1862 to 1872 he was secrétaire annuel to the Académie Nationale de Médecine, where from 1873 to 1887 he served as secrétaire perpétuel.
Go to Profile#16938
George Golding. Kennedy
#16939
Heneage Gibbes
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Heneage Gibbes was a British pathologist known for his histological studies. He moved to the United States where he served as a professor of pathology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gibbes was born in Berrow, Somerset, where his namesake father was a minister while his mother Margaretta was the daughter of John Murray, an admiral in the Royal Navy. His paternal great-grandfather, Sir George Smith Gibbes was physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte while his maternal grandfather John Murray was an Admiral in the Royal Navy. At the age of fourteen, he rebelled against his father's...
Go to Profile#16940
Elmar Leppik
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Elmar Emil Leppik, earlier Lepik was an Estonian mycologist and theoretical biologist. He established a mycological herbarium and library at the University of Tartu. His birth date in 1898 has been given variously as 3 or 4 October or as 3 December, he died 4 November 1978 in Maryland.
Go to Profile#16941
Arthur Meyer
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Arthur Meyer was a German botanist, cell biologist, and pharmacognosist. Meyer is known for his pioneering work describing the structure of chloroplasts and other plastids. He was the first to name and describe the chlorophyll-containing structures in chloroplasts known as grana.
Go to Profile#16942
Thomas F. Goreau
1924 - 1970 (46 years)
Thomas Fritz Goreau was a marine biologist who worked extensively on the coral reefs of Jamaica, and many other reefs in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Red Sea. Career Goreau moved from Germany to Austria at the age of 8, and lived in France and the United States, where he studied at Clark University, The University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and received his Ph.D in ecology from Yale University. In 1951 he went to lecture at the medical school at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and in 1956 he founded a long-term research project exploring the coral reefs of Jamaica.
Go to Profile#16943
Friedrich Siegmund Voigt
1781 - 1850 (69 years)
Friedrich Siegmund Voigt was a German zoologist and botanist, with a special interest in spermatophytes. He taught at Jena, where he translated Georges Cuvier's Le Règne Animal , and was the director of the Jena Botanical Gardens and the Museum of Zoology.
Go to Profile#16944
Katherine a. Siminovitch
#16945
Norah Lillian Penston
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Norah Lillian Penston was a British botanist and academic administrator. She was principal of Bedford College, University of London, from 1951 to 1964. Early life and education Nora Penston was the daughter of A. J. Penston. She was educated at the Bolton School and St Anne's College, Oxford where she obtained a BA in botany in 1927. She studied under W. O. James, researching the potassium nutrition of potatoes for her DPhil, which she gained in 1930.
Go to Profile#16946
W. Anthony Mason
#16947
Joseph Swain
1857 - 1927 (70 years)
Joseph Swain served as the ninth president of Indiana University and also as the sixth president of Swarthmore College. Summary Education Indiana University Wabash College Career Professor of mathematics and biology at Indiana University Professor of mathematics at Stanford University President of Indiana University President of Swarthmore College
Go to Profile#16948
Joseph Schröter
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Joseph Schröter was a noted German mycologist, doctor and scientist. He wrote several books and texts, and discovered and described many species of flora and fungi. He also spent around fifteen years, from 1871 to 1886, as a military doctor, particularly in the Franco-Prussian War, in places such as Spandau, Rastatt and Breslau, and rising to the rank of colonel.
Go to Profile#16949
Peter Fredrik Wahlberg
1800 - 1877 (77 years)
Peter Fredrik Wahlberg was a Swedish entomologist and professor at the University College of Stockholm. Wahlberg was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1830, and served as the academy's secretary from 1848 to 1866.
Go to Profile#16950
Heinrich Wilhelm von Pabst
1798 - 1868 (70 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm von Pabst was a German agriculturalist. In his teens, he served as an agricultural apprentice on the estates of Freiherrn von Riedesel, and afterwards, spent a few years engaged in study trips throughout Germany. In 1823 he became a teacher and accountant at the agricultural academy of Hohenheim. In 1831 he received the title of Ökonomierat and was named perennial secretary of agricultural organizations in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. Subsequently, he opened an agricultural school in Kranichstein, near Darmstadt.
Go to Profile