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.
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#17251
Julius Schaxel
1887 - 1943 (56 years)
Julius Christoph Ehregott Schaxel was a German developmental biologist and zoologist who was a native of Augsburg. He initially studied biology, philosophy and psychology at Jena under Ernst Haeckel , then continued his education in Munich with Richard Hertwig . In 1909 he obtained his PhD at the University of Jena under Ludwig Plate , where from 1918 until 1933, he worked as an associate professor of zoology. During the rise of Nazism, partly because of his Marxist views and partly owing to his wife's Jewish heritage, he was dismissed from his position at Jena, and in 1933 emigrated to Switz...
Go to Profile#17252
Helen Blackler
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Margaret Constance Helen Blackler was a British phycologist, botanical collector and museum curator. Career Blackler was Assistant Keeper of Botany at Liverpool Museum between 1933 and 1945. She also had some temporary teaching posts at colleges and the universities of Liverpool and Sheffield. In 1947 she moved to an academic post at University of St Andrews. She was a lecturer in botany until 1961 and then promoted to senior lecturer until her retirement in 1968. She continued active laboratory research at the university's Gatty Marine Laboratory until the day before her death.
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Thomas Robertson Sim
1858 - 1938 (80 years)
Thomas Robertson Sim was a botanist, bryologist, botanical artist and Conservator of Forests in Natal, best known for his monumental work The Forests and Forest Flora of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope which appeared in 1907. He was the eldest of five children of John Sim , a noted bryologist and Isabella Thomson Robertson .
Go to Profile#17254
Nathaniel Lyon Gardner
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Nathaniel Lyon Gardner , was an American phycologist and mycologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the curator of the University Herbarium. He is known for his work on seaweeds of the Pacific Coast, as well as on freshwater algae and fungi, and among his publications is the important reference work Algae of Northwestern America.
Go to Profile#17255
Ethel Zoe Bailey
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Ethel Zoe Bailey was a U.S. botanist and the first curator of the Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University from 1935 to 1957. She created the Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection and in 1912 was the first woman in Ithaca, New York to earn a driver's license.
Go to Profile#17256
Antoni Kępiński
1918 - 1972 (54 years)
Antoni Ignacy Tadeusz Kępiński was a Polish psychiatrist and philosopher. In his youth he was influenced by Carl Jung's approach. He is known as the originator of concepts of information metabolism and axiological psychiatry.
Go to Profile#17257
Muriel Wheldale Onslow
1880 - 1932 (52 years)
Muriel Wheldale Onslow was a British biochemist, born in Birmingham, England. She studied the inheritance of flower colour in the common snapdragon Antirrhinum and the biochemistry of anthocyanin pigment molecules. She attended the King Edward VI High School in Birmingham and then matriculated at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1900. At Cambridge she majored in botany. Onslow later worked within Bateson's genetic group and then Frederick Gowland Hopkins biochemical group in Cambridge, providing her with expertise in biochemical genetics for investigating the inheritance and biosynthesis of petal colour in Antirrhinum.
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Otto Porsch
1875 - 1959 (84 years)
Otto Porsch was an Austrian biologist. After his Ph.D he worked with Gottlieb Haberlandt in Graz and did his habilitation with Richard Wettstein in Vienna. He became first director of the botanical garden in Czernowitz and later professor at the University of Czernowitz . Porsch became director of the botanical institute in Vienna in 1920. He retired in 1945 and died in 1959.
Go to Profile#17259
Rose Bracher
1894 - 1941 (47 years)
Rose Bracher was a British botanist and academic. She researched the ecology of the mud flats of the River Avon at Bristol and in particular the genus Euglena. Bracher was born in Salisbury and obtained a B.Sc. in 1917, followed by an M.Sc. in 1918 and a Ph.D. in 1927, all from the University of Bristol. She worked as a demonstrator at the London School of Medicine for Women , was a lecturer at the East London College , and took up a post of lecturer at the University of Bristol in 1924 which she held until her death in 1941. Obituaries for Bracher were published in Nature and the Proceedings...
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Edith Philip Smith
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Edith Philip Smith FLS FRSE was a botanist and teacher who became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Head of the Botany Department at Queen's College, Dundee . Career She was one of the first female graduates to receive a degree at the University of Oxford when the first women's graduation ceremony was held there in 1920. She studied at Somerville College, and in June 1920 passed exams in the School of Natural Science with first-class honours, leading to a BA. She then spent a year at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, and undertook research in the plant physiology laboratory at Harvard.
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Eddie Roux
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Eddie Roux was a Transvaal Colony-born botanist, academic, writer, member of the South African Communist Party and anti-apartheid activist. Early life He was born Edward Roux to Afrikaner father Phillip R. Roux, a pharmacist and botanist, who was involved in the Labour Party and English mother, Edith May Wilson. He grew up in Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg. Roux's political view were further inspired by the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. After matriculating at Jeppe High School, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand and studied botany and zoology. At university, he joined ...
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Robert Hippolyte Chodat
1865 - 1934 (69 years)
Robert Hippolyte Chodat was a Swiss botanist and phycologist who was a professor and director of the botanical institute at the University of Geneva. He studied medicine and botany at Geneva, where he was later a lecturer of pharmacy. In 1889 he attained the title of associate professor, two years later becoming a full professor of medical and pharmaceutical botany. From 1900 onward, he taught classes in general and systematic botany. In 1908 he was appointed rector at the University of Geneva.
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Robert Elias Fries
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Robert Elias Fries , the youngest son of Theodor Magnus Fries and grandson of Elias Magnus Fries and an expert on mushrooms. A Swedish botanist who was a member of the British Mycological Society and involved with The Botanical Museum , Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Natural History Museum , the National Botanic Garden of Belgium , Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de la Ville de Genève , Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew ,the Swedish Museum of Natural History Department of Phanerogamic Botany and the United States National Herbarium, Smithsonian Institution .
Go to Profile#17264
Yrjö Reenpää
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Yrjö Reenpää was a Finnish physiologist and philosopher and professor of physiology in University of Helsinki. He developed general sensory physiology on the bases of Kantian epistemology, psycho-physics and phenomenology.
Go to Profile#17265
Emmeline Moore
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Emmeline Moore was an American biologist known for her various articles on fish diseases, as well as pioneering work in conservation and combating water pollution. She earned a PhD in biology from Cornell University in 1916. Moore supervised and edited fourteen watershed reports conducted in New York between 1926 and 1939 and these were the most comprehensive scientific surveys of any states' water resources. She died at a nursing home in Guilderland, New York at the age of 91 following an extended illness.
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Louisa E. Rhine
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Louisa Ella Rhine was an American doctor of botany and is known for her work in parapsychology. At the time of her death, she was recognized as the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences, and has been referred to as the "first lady of parapsychology."
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Wataru Ishijima
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Wataru Ishijima was a paleontologist and geologist. Ishijima was one of the most prolific researchers of fossil calcareous algae. After graduating from the Imperial Fisheries Institute in 1927, Ishijima joined the Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Faculty of Science, Tohoku Imperial University from 1927–1931. He then worked at the Institute of Geology, Taihoku Imperial University during 1942–1945 and then at the Rikkyo University from 1945–1980. His doctoral dissertation was submitted to Tohoku University and was privately published by Yūhodō . He described a total of 139 taxa of foss...
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Othmar Kühn
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Othmar Kühn was an Austrian geologist and paleontologist at the University of Vienna who was a member of the Nazi Party, serving in the Wehrmacht as a military geologist during World War II. He worked mainly on Cretaceous stratigraphy and began a catalogue of the fossils of Austria, Fossilium catalogus Austriae.
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Nicholas Sergeevich Obraztsov
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Nicholas Sergeevich Obraztsov was a Russian-American scholar, entomologist, and leading specialist of the tortricoid microlepidoptera. Early life and career Obraztsov was born on 18 August 1906 in Rostov on the Don, Russia, to Dr. Sergei Nikolaevich Obraztsov and his wife Ludmila Nikolaevna Obraztsova. From 1922 to 1934 he studied natural history, science, chemistry, and mathematics at the Institute for Pedagogy in Nikolaev. He furthermore obtained a PhD form the University of Munich in 1951. After various positions in Kiev, Konigsberg and Munich he emigrated to the US in 1951 where he became...
Go to Profile#17270
Thomas B. Symons
1880 - 1970 (90 years)
Thomas Baddeley Symons was an American academic who briefly served as President of the University of Maryland, College Park in 1954. Symons was born in Easton, Maryland and raised on a farm in Talbot County. He entered Maryland Agricultural College as a student in 1898; initially planning to study agriculture, he was introduced to entomology by Willis Grant Johnson. He earned his undergraduate degree in entomology in 1902, and his master's degree two years later. After receiving his master's, he worked as an entomology assistant at MAC, teaching zoology and entomology, and was later appointed state entomologist, a position which he held from 1905 to 1914.
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Johannes Lid
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Johannes Lid was a Norwegian botanist. He was born in Voss, and he married the illustrator Dagny Tande Lid in 1936. He is particularly known for his works on Scandinavian flora, and for his widely used handbook to plants Norsk flora, with illustrations by his wife Dagny Tande Lid. He co-founded and chaired the Norwegian Botanical Association from 1935 to 1942. From 1948 onward he served as a curator at the Botanical Museum in Oslo. After his retirement in 1956, he carried out in-depth studies of the flora of the Canary Islands. He became a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letter...
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George Matthai
1887 - 1947 (60 years)
George Matthai was an Indian zoologist who specialized in marine biology, contributing to the systematics of Madreporarian corals. He was a professor of zoology at the Panjab University in Lahore. Life and career He returned to India in 1918 and worked at the department of zoology at the Panjab University, Lahore. He received a ScD from the University of Cambridge in 1929. He succeeded Lt. Col. J. Stephenson in 1919 and his retirement in 1942 was postponed to 1945 due to the war.
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August Adriaan Pulle
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
August Adrian Pulle was a Dutch professor and botanist. He made important contributions to knowledge of the Flora of Suriname and the island of New Guinea. Personal life Education Pulle attended high school in Arnhem and studied pharmacy at the Utrecht University, in 1899 he took his bachelor's degree. He attended lectures of the plant physiologist F. A. F. C. Went and decided to continue his studies in zoology and botany. In 1900, Pulle was appointed as assistant at the botanical laboratory and herbarium, in 1904 he was appointed teacher of natural history at the Higher secondary school in Utrecht.
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Matsumoto Hikoshichirō
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
was a Japanese zoologist, palaeontologist, and archaeologist, and a recipient of the Imperial Academy Prize. Biography Born in Meiji 20 , Matsumoto graduated from the Department of Zoology, Tokyo Imperial University, in 1911. From 1914 to 1933 he taught at Tohoku Imperial University, initially as a lecturer, then from 1922 as professor. From 1955, he was professor of biology at Fukushima Medical University, where he taught basic medicine. In 1921, he was awarded the Imperial Academy Prize in recognition of his work on brittle stars . His contributions to the field of vertebrate palaeontology ...
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William Roy McGregor
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
William Roy McGregor was a New Zealand zoologist and conservationist who was successful in halting forestry in the Waipoua forest and establishing the forest as a protected sanctuary. Academic career McGregor was born in Thames, New Zealand on 8 July 1894, the son of a draper. He attended Auckland Grammar School in 1909, and then became a school teacher. In 1918 he was appointed a demonstrator in biology at Auckland University College, and in 1922 became a lecturer in zoology. In 1924 he undertook ecological research into the kauri, a giant tree species native to New Zealand. In the late 1920s he was hired by the State Forest Service as a consultant for the Waipoua forest.
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Leopold Adametz
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Leopold Adametz was an Austrian zoologist. The son of a manufacturer, he studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and at the University of Leipzig. In 1886, he was awarded his doctorate. He became an assistant of Martin Wickens and in 1888 an assistant professor of zoology. From 1891 he was a professor in Krakau, from 1898 until 1932 he was the professor of animal product studies and the morphology of house pets at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Wien. He was a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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Bunzō Hayata
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Bunzō Hayata was a Japanese botanist noted for his taxonomic work in Japan and Formosa, present day Taiwan. Early life Hayata was born to a devout Buddhist family in Kamo, Niigata on December 2, 1874. When he was 16, Hayata became interested in botany, and he joined the Botanical Society of Tokyo in 1892. His schooling was delayed by a series of family tragedies, and he graduated middle school at the age of 23. He then attended high school and began to collect botanical samples.
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Louis Roule
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Louis Roule was a French zoologist born in Marseille. In 1881 he obtained a degree in natural sciences at Marseille, followed by his doctorate of sciences at Paris with a thesis on ascidians of coastal Provence. From 1885 he worked as a lecturer at the faculty of sciences in Toulouse, where in 1892 he became a professor. During the previous year , he earned a doctorate in medicine.
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Ethel I. Sanborn
1883 - 1952 (69 years)
Ethel Ida Sanborn was an American paleobotanist and professor of botany at Oregon State College and University of Oregon. She published extensively on the flora of Oregon and the Western United States.
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Sinaida Rosenthal
1932 - 1988 (56 years)
Sinaida Rosenthal was a German biochemist and molecular biologist. She worked as a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and thereafter, until her death, as department head of the Central Institute for Microbiology at the Berlin based German Academy of Sciences.
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Arthur Looss
1861 - 1923 (62 years)
Arthur Looss was a German zoologist and parasitologist. Looss was born in 1861 in Chemnitz, and was educated both there and in Łódź, Poland. Thereafter, he studied at the University of Leipzig, where he received a doctorate for his study of trematodes.
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Percy Ireland Lathy
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
Percy Ireland Lathy was an English entomologist who specialised in butterflies. He was an acquaintance of James John Joicey and was associated with Joicey's Hill Museum in Witley, Surrey. Life and career Percy Ireland Lathy was born in Pulborough, West Sussex, in 1874. He lived for some time at Tillington.
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Félix d'Hérelle
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Félix d'Hérelle was a French microbiologist. He was co-discoverer of bacteriophages and experimented with the possibility of phage therapy. D'Hérelle has also been credited for his contributions to the larger concept of applied microbiology.
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Walther Gothan
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Walther Ulrich Eduard Friedrich Gothan was a German paleobotanist, known for his studies of Carboniferous flora. He studied mining and geology at the mining academies in Clausthal and Berlin, and botany and chemistry at the University of Berlin. In 1905 he received his doctorate from the University of Jena with the thesis, Zur Anatomie lebender und fossiler gymnospermen Hölzer.
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Hans Winkler
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Hans Karl Albert Winkler was a German botanist. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Hamburg, and a director of that university's Institute of Botany. Winkler coined the term 'heteroploidy' in 1916. He is remembered for coining the term 'genome' in 1920, by making a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. He wrote:
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Käthe Voderberg
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Käthe Voderberg née Nehls was a German botanist. She was a professor and the director of the institute for botany at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Life Voderberg studied natural sciences in Hamburg, Berlin, Innsbruck and Greifswald from 1930 to 1935. She finished her doctorate in botany at the University of Greifswald in 1936. In 1947, she habilitated at the University of Greifswald and became a lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Roberto Donoso-Barros
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
Roberto Donoso-Barros was a Chilean zoologist, naturalist, and herpetologist. Early life and education Donoso-Barros was born in Santiago, Chile. He attended the University of Chile in Santiago, earning his M.D. from the school in 1947.
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Annie May Hurd Karrer
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Annie May Hurd Karrer was an American plant physiologist who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. Biography Annie May Hurd was born in 1893 in La Conner, Washington. She received an A.B. degree from the University of Washington in 1915 and an M.S. from that institution in 1917. She received her Ph.D. in plant physiology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1918. The same year that she received her doctoral degree, Hurd joined the staff of the United States Department of Agriculture , as a researcher for the Bureau of Plant Industry. She married physicist Sebastian Karrer in 1923.
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Werner Janensch
1878 - 1969 (91 years)
Werner Ernst Martin Janensch was a German paleontologist and geologist. Biography Janensch was born at Herzberg . In addition to Friedrich von Huene, Janensch was probably Germany's most important dinosaur specialist from the early and middle twentieth century. His most famous and significant contributions stemmed from the expedition undertaken to the Tendaguru Beds in what is now Tanzania. As leader of an expedition set up by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where he worked as a curator, Janensch helped uncover an enormous quantity of fossils of late Jurassic period dinosaurs, including several complete Brachiosaurus skeletons, then the largest animal ever known.
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Irene McCulloch
1885 - 1987 (102 years)
Irene Agnes McCulloch was a marine biologist and USC biological sciences professor. McCulloch started at the University of Southern California in 1924 where the marine biology research department lacked funding and resources. To better the research being done, McCulloch convinced George Allan Hancock to fund the G. Allan Hancock Foundation for Marine Research, which was then renamed the Hancock Institute for Marine Studies. McCulloch was given her own foundation in 1969 at USC to continue marine biology research. McCulloch studied microbes within the Pacific Ocean with her main focus being fo...
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Émile Auguste Joseph De Wildeman
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Émile Auguste Joseph De Wildeman was a Belgian botanist and phycologist. He is known for his investigations of Congolese flora. From 1883 to 1887, he studied pharmacy at the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1891, he began work as a preparateur at the Botanical Garden of Brussels, an institution where he later served as director. In 1892, he received his doctorate in sciences and in 1926 attained the title of professor.
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Albert Fleischmann
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Albert Fleischmann was a German zoologist. Career Fleischmann was born in Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria. He studied comparative embryology at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1885. He became assistant professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in 1896 and professor in 1898. In 1901, he published a book Die Descendenztheorie which attacked Darwinism, evolution and theories of common descent.
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Maisie Carr
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Maisie Carr was an innovative Australian ecologist and botanist who contributed much to the understanding of the uniqueness of Australian plants and their environmental systems. Foundation years Maisie Carr was born Stella Grace Maisie Fawcett in Footscray, Melbourne. Neither of her parents had a science background but her love of plants was likely fostered by visits to nearby salt-marshes, her grandmother's garden and in nature study classes.
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Wilhelm Johannsen
1857 - 1927 (70 years)
Wilhelm Johannsen was a Danish pharmacist, botanist, plant physiologist, and geneticist. He is best known for coining the terms gene, phenotype and genotype, and for his 1903 "pure line" experiments in genetics.
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Gustav Wilhelm Müller
1857 - 1940 (83 years)
Christian Gustav Wilhelm Müller was a German zoologist specializing in Ostracoda. In 1895 he succeeded Carl Eduard Adolph Gerstaecker as director of the zoological museum at Greifswald, a position he maintained until 1923.
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Paolo Enriques
1878 - 1932 (54 years)
Paolo Enriques was an Italian zoologist of Portuguese-Jewish descent. He was the brother of mathematician Federigo Enriques and the brother-in-law of another mathematician Guido Castelnuovo who married their sister Elbina. He married Maria Clotilde Agnoletti Fusconi and was the father of Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti and Enzo Enriques Agnoletti. Enriques taught Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Sassari , then in 1922 he became Professor of Zoology in the University of Padua University, and Director of the Institute of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. He was primarily interested in comparative cytology, physiology and genetics.
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Carl Owen Dunbar
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Carl Owen Dunbar was an American paleontologist who specialized in invertebrate fossils. He was a Professor of Geology at Yale University from 1920 until 1959. He was also Director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University from 1942 until 1959. As editor of a textbook series on historical geology from the 1920s through the 1950s, his work was published and sold in over 1 million books.
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Konstanty Janicki
1876 - 1932 (56 years)
Konstanty Stanisław Janicki was a Polish zoologist who specialized in parasitology. An influential teacher and professor at the University of Warsaw, he is considered as the founder of parasitology research in Poland.
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Nils Holmgren
1877 - 1954 (77 years)
Nils Frithiof Holmgren was a Swedish zoologist and comparative anatomist. He was professor of zoology at Stockholm University from 1921 to 1944. In 1906 Holmgren defended his doctoral dissertation at Stockholm University. In 1912 he became a teacher there, and in 1919 assistant professor of zoology, and in 1921 full professor. His early work focussed on the biology, systematics and anatomy of insects, especially termites, as in and . In later work he focused on the structure of the brain in worms, arthropods and vertebrates, publishing , , , Points of view concerning forebrain morphol...
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Friedrich Zschokke
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Friedrich Zschokke was a Swiss zoologist and parasitologist. He was the grandson of writer Heinrich Zschokke. He studied zoology in Lausanne and Geneva, earning his doctorate at the latter institution in 1884. In 1889 he became an associate professor, and from 1893 to 1931 was a full professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Basel. In 1900 he was named university rector.
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