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).
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#17301
Hans Fitting
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Johannes Theodor Gustav Ernst Fitting was a German plant physiologist. He was the son of law professor Heinrich Hermann Fitting. He studied natural sciences at the universities of Halle and Strasbourg, receiving his doctorate in 1900 as a student of Hermann zu Solms-Laubach. After graduation, he served as an assistant to Wilhelm Pfeffer at Leipzig, then worked under Hermann Vöchting at the University of Tübingen. In 1907/08 he took a study trip to Ceylon and Java, where he conducted extensive research of orchids at the botanical research center in Buitenzorg. After returning to Germany, he b...
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Sarah Hynes
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Sarah Hynes was a Kingdom of Prussia-born, Australian botanist and teacher. Sarah Hynes was born on 30 September 1859 in Danzig, Prussia to William John Hynes , a master mariner and his wife Eliza Bell. Sarah was educated at Edinburgh Ladies' College, Upton House in St John's Wood, London, and at Chichester College in Sussex. She earned a botanical certificate from South Kensington Museum, Science and Art Department.
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Maria Isabel Hylton Scott
1889 - 1990 (101 years)
María Isabel Sofia Hylton Scott y Pacheco was an Argentine zoologist, malacologist and teacher. She is known as the first woman in Argentina who obtained a doctorate in Zoology. She described at least 1 family, 47 species and 4 subspecies of Mollusca.
Go to Profile#17304
Johann Hieronymus Kniphof
1704 - 1763 (59 years)
Johann Hieronymus Kniphof was a German physician and botanist. He studied medicine at the Universities of Jena and Erfurt, becoming a professor of medicine at the latter institution in 1737. In 1745 he succeeded Andreas Elias Büchner as director of the library at Erfurt, two years later being named dean to the faculty of medicine. In 1761 he was chosen as university rector.
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Frederic Poole Gorham
1871 - 1933 (62 years)
Frederic Poole Gorham was an American bacteriologist and educator. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of businessman Samuel Gorham and his wife Abby Harding Fish, he was educated in local schools before graduating from Providence High School in 1889 and matriculating to Brown University. After graduating in 1893, he became an instructor of Biology at Brown and was awarded his A.M. in 1894 upon examination, with special studies performed at Harvard. On June 24, 1897, he was married to Emma Mary Lapham in Burrillville, Rhode Island. Thereafter he became an assistant professor in 1899, then associate professor in 1901.
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Jacob Ellsworth Reighard
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Jacob Ellsworth Reighard was an American zoologist. Reighard was born at Laporte, Indiana, after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1882, and then studied at Harvard and Freiburg. After six years as instructor and assistant in zoology, in 1892 he became a professor at the University of Michigan. He was in charge of the Michigan Fish Commission in 1890-94, and in 1898 was appointed director of the biological survey of the Great Lakes under the United States Fish Commission. He contributed to many technical journals, and in 1901 published, in collaboration with Herbert Spencer Jennin...
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Oskar Eberhard Ulbrich
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Oskar Eberhard Ulbrich was a German botanist and mycologist. Ulbrich was born in Berlin. He studied natural sciences at the University of Berlin, where his instructors included Adolf Engler and Simon Schwendener . In 1926 he became a curator and professor at the Botanical Museum in Berlin, where in 1938 he was appointed director of the Hauptpilzstelle.
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John Gilchrist
1866 - 1926 (60 years)
John Dow Fisher Gilchrist was a Scottish ichthyologist, who established ichthyology as a scientific discipline in South Africa. He was instrumental in the development of marine biology in South Africa and of a scientifically based local fishing industry.
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John Carey
1797 - 1880 (83 years)
John Carey was a British botanist who studied in North America between 1830 and 1852. Carey was a "frequent guest and invaluable companion" to Asa Gray. Carey revised Gray's proofs of the first edition of the Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, also contributing articles on Salix , Populus , and Carex . In his obituary, Gray described Carey as "a near and faithful friend, an accomplished botanist, a genial and warm-hearted and truly good man."
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T. J. Jenkin
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Thomas James Jenkin was professor of agriculture at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and director of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station from 1942 to 1950. Biography Thomas James Jenkin was born in 1885 in Maenclochog, Pembrokeshire, Wales. He was Agricultural Officer for Brecon and Radnorshire from 1914 to 1915 and advisor in agricultural botany at the University College of North Wales, Bangor from 1915 to 1920. In 1919 he was appointed by Sir George Stapledon as grass breeder at the newly formed Welsh Plant Breeding Station in Aberystwyth. He was an early pioneer of grass breeding and genetics and made some of the earliest advances in hybridisation of grass species.
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Albert M. Ten Eyck
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Albert M. Ten Eyck was an American agricultural academic and a farmer. Biography Ten Eyck was born in Green County, Wisconsin in 1869. He graduated from what is now the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1892. In 1896, Albert Ten Eyck married Wilhelmina Carolina Maveus. One year after marriage, Albert Ten Eyck took a position as an assistant professor of Agriculture at the North Dakota Agricultural College.
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Joannes Antonides van der Linden
1609 - 1664 (55 years)
Johannes Antonides van der Linden was a Dutch physician, botanist, author and librarian. He was born on 13 January 1609 in Enkhuizen. Life Johannes Antonides van der Linden was the son of the physician Antonius Hendrikszoon van der Linden , and grandson of Heinrich Anton Nerdenus . He initially attended the Latin School in his hometown, where his father taught. At 10 years of age he moved to live with his uncle Hermann Antonides in Naarden, but returned to Enkhuizen two years later to a school run by Willem van Nieuwenhuizen. In 1625 he enrolled at the University of Leiden and completed init...
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Brian Kennedy
1945 - 1990 (45 years)
Brian Kennedy was an English journalist and LGBT rights activist who helped set up the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in 1985 and the Pink Singers in 1983. He was the editor of Kennedy's Gay Guide to London and a victim of the AIDS epidemic.
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Hugo Miehe
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Hugo Robert Heinrich August Miehe was a German botanist. He studied botany at the universities of Göttingen, Munich and Bonn, and in 1903 qualified as a lecturer of botany at the University of Leipzig. From 1908 to 1916 he was an associate professor at Leipzig, during which time, he was involved in botanical research at Buitenzorg in Java , publishing "Javanische Studien" as a result. From 1916 to 1932 he was a professor of botany at the Agricultural University of Berlin, where he was also director of the Institute of Botany and Agriculture.
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Dmitry Pryanishnikov
1865 - 1948 (83 years)
Dmitry Nikolaevich Pryanishnikov was an agrochemist, biochemist and plant physiologist, founder of the Soviet scientific school in agronomic chemistry. Hero of Socialist Labor . Winner of Lenin Prize , Stalin Prize and .
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Cornelia Mitchell Downs
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
Cornelia "Cora" Mitchell Downs was an American microbiologist and journalist who completed extensive work in the areas of immunofluorescence and tularemia research. Downs was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas to parents Lily Louis Campbell Downs and Henry Mitchell Downs. She remained at the University of Kansas for much of her educational, teaching, and research careers.
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Robert Alexander Robertson
1873 - 1935 (62 years)
Robert Alexander Robertson FLS FRSE was a Scottish botanist. He was president of the Edinburgh Botanical Society from 1915 to 1917. Life He was born in Rattray in Perthshire in 1873 and educated locally before going to the University of Edinburgh study botany, and graduating with an MA BSc in 1889.
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Maurice Logan
1886 - 1977 (91 years)
Maurice Logan was an American watercolorist, commercial artist and arts educator. He was a member of the Society of Six, and a professor at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California.
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Knud Pontoppidan
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Knud Børge Pontoppidan was a Danish psychiatrist and coroner. The brother of writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Henrik Pontoppidan, Pontoppidan was educated at the University of Copenhagen, obtaining his doctorate with the dissertation "Den Kroniske Morfinisme" in 1883. While employed as a lecturer in the university and Physician Superintendent at Copenhagen Municipal Hospital's historic Ward 6, Pontoppidan was during the latter half of the 1890s involved in a notable conflict with writer and feminist Amalie Skram, which received considerable press coverage and in turn forced Pontoppidan to abandon his position.
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Alfonso Dampf Tenson
1884 - 1948 (64 years)
Alfonso Dampf Tenson was an entomologist. As an entomological authority he is cited as Dampf. Biography Early years Dampf was born on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa, the son of Michael Dampf and Maria Tenson. He obtained his doctorate degree from the University of Königsberg in 1909.
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John Abercrombie
1726 - 1806 (80 years)
#17322
Karl Fürstner
1848 - 1906 (58 years)
Karl Fürstner was a German neurologist and psychiatrist born in Strasburg, Uckermark. He studied medicine in Würzburg and Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1871. In 1872 he was an assistant at the pathological institute of the University of Greifswald, and afterwards worked under Karl Westphal in the psychiatric department at the Berlin-Charité. In 1878 he became the first physician to hold the chair of psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg. He kept this position until 1890, when he became professor of nervous and mental diseases at the University of Strasbourg. At Heidelberg his vacancy was filled by Emil Kraepelin .
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Rudolf Blasius
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Rudolf Heinrich Paul Blasius was a German physician, bacteriologist, naturalist and ornithologist.Blasius was the son of Johann Heinrich Blasius, professor of natural history at the Collegium Carolinum and director of the Ducal Museum and Luise . The family came from Sophiental and Rudolf became interested in natural history of the region while visiting his grandparents. His brother Wilhelm Blasius became an ornithologist. He later went on field trips with Adolph Nehrkorn and they published a list of the birds of the Braunschweig region. Rudolf studied at the Collegium Carolinum and then stu...
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Ferdinand Theissen
1877 - 1919 (42 years)
Ferdinand Theissen was a German-Austrian Jesuit priest and mycologist. He studied theology at the seminary in Feldkirch, then from 1902 to 1908 was stationed in São Leopoldo, Brazil. Following his return to Europe he continued his studies in Valkenburg and Innsbruck, and in 1914 returned to Feldkirch as a schoolteacher. He died in September 1919 as a result of a climbing accident during a collection excursion in the Vorarlberg Alps.
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Guelfo Cavanna
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
Guelfo Cavanna was an Italian entomologist. Biography Cavanna was a teacher at the University of Florence and secretary of the Società Entomologica Italiana from 1875 to 1892. In 1880 he worked on the insect fauna of the then unexplored regions of Vulture and Pollino in southern Italy. Many specialists worked on the insects collected and the results were published as Narrazione della escursione fatta al Vulture ed al Pollino nel luglio del 1880 da A. Biondi, C. Caroti e G. Cavanna, pp. 3–30; Parte II. Catalogo degli animali raccolti al Vulture, al Pollino ed in altri luoghi dell’Italia meri...
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Atsushi Yasuda
1868 - 1924 (56 years)
Atsushi Yasuda was a Japanese lichenologist. For a time, he was the only lichenologist in Japan. Selected publications
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Émile van Ermengem
1851 - 1932 (81 years)
Émile Pierre-Marie van Ermengem was a Belgian bacteriologist who, in 1895, isolated Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that causes botulism, from a piece of ham that had poisoned thirty-four people.
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Sergei Salazkin
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Sergei Sergeievich Salazkin was a biochemist and academic; in 1917 he served in the Russian Provisional Government. Life S.S. Salazkin was born on February 26 , 1862, in Doschatoe in the Russian Empire. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg and medicine at the University of Kiev, graduating in 1891. From 1898 to 1911 he was a professor at the Women's Medical Institute in St. Petersburg.
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Hendrik Albertus Brouwer
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Hendrik Albertus Brouwer was a Dutch geologist who specialized in petrology and explored South Africa and the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Brouwer was born in Medemblik, the son of Egbertus L. Brouwer and Hendrika Poutsma. After schooling in Haarlem he went to the Technical University in Delft to study mine engineering and obtained a diploma in 1908. He received a doctoral degree for a dissertation on South African nepheline syenites in 1910. He became a professor of geology at the Delft Technical University in 1918 and during his career he travelled to Brazil, North America, South Africa and parts of southeast Asia to conduct studies on rocks.
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Karl Gegenbaur
1826 - 1903 (77 years)
#17331
Jaques-Louis Reverdin
1842 - 1929 (87 years)
Jaques-Louis Reverdin was a Swiss surgeon who was a native of Cologny. He studied at the University of Paris, becoming an interne of hospitals in 1865. In 1869 he became an assistant to Jean Casimir Félix Guyon in the surgical department at the Hôpital Necker in Paris. Afterwards he moved to Geneva, where he eventually became chief surgeon at the Hôpital Cantonal de Geneve, and a professor at the University of Geneva.
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Walter Lee Gaines
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Walter Lee Gaines was a pioneer of dairy science and a professor of milk production at the University of Illinois. He studied factors affecting hormonal injections and their induction of milk production. In 1915 he used a pituitary gland extract from goats to demonstrate the effect, and it was later identified that the hormone was oxytocin. He noted that anaesthetic prevented this hormone from being effective and Gaines was among the first to suggest the idea of a neuroendocrine reflex involving the production of the substance in response to suckling. He was also thus a pioneer of neuroendocr...
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Richard Hugo Kaho
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Richard Hugo Kaho was an Estonian plant physiologist and politician. He was a member of VI Riigikogu . From 1938 until 1940, he was the rector of the University of Tartu.
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Horace Barber
1914 - 1971 (57 years)
Horace Newton Barber FAA FRS was an Australian botanist and geneticist, Foundation Professor of Botany at the University of Tasmania and Foundation Professor of Botany at the University of New South Wales .
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Murray Fife Buell
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Murray Fife Buell was an American ecologist and palynologist. Personal life Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Buell earned a B.S. at Cornell University in 1930. He then attended the University of Minnesota, where he earned a M.A. in 1934 and a Ph.D. in 1935. After completing his Ph.D., Buell's studies with W.S. Cooper stimulated his interest in plant ecology.
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Pearl Kendrick
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Pearl Louella Kendrick was an American bacteriologist known for co-developing the first successful whooping cough vaccine alongside fellow Michigan Department of Public Health scientist Grace Eldering and chemist Loney Gordon in the 1930s. In the decades after the initial pertussis vaccine rollout, Kendrick contributed to the promotion of international vaccine standards in Latin America and the Soviet Union. Kendrick and her colleagues also developed a 3-in-1 shot for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus called the DTP vaccine which was initially released in 1948.
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Ernest Everett Just
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Ernest Everett Just was a pioneering biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.
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Jean Weigle
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Jean-Jacques Weigle was a Swiss molecular biologist at Caltech and formerly a physicist at the University of Geneva from 1931 to 1948. He is known for his major contributions on field of bacteriophage λ research, focused on the interactions between those viruses and their E. coli hosts.
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Dorothea Leighton
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Dorothea Cross Leighton was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.
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Alexander Thomas Cameron
1882 - 1947 (65 years)
Alexander Thomas Cameron was a British-born Canadian biochemist. He was best known as Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Manitoba, and as the author of numerous popular biochemistry textbooks, including the Textbook of Biochemistry.
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Kjell Kleppe
1934 - 1988 (54 years)
Kjell Kleppe was a Norwegian biochemist and molecular biologist who was a pioneer in the polymerase chain reaction technique and built the first laboratory in the country for bio- and gene technology.
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Edward Oliver Essig
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Edward Oliver Essig was an American entomologist who specialized in the Hemiptera. Essig was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote Injurious and Beneficial Insects of California , Insects of Western North America , A History of Entomology , College Entomology and several hundred scientific works on Hemiptera.The Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley is named for him. He was also interested in horticulture and wrote A check-list of Fuchsias. American Fuchsia Society .
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Sam Ruben
1913 - 1943 (30 years)
Samuel Ruben was an American chemist who with Martin Kamen co-discovered the synthesis of the isotope carbon-14 in 1940. Early life Ruben was the son of Herschel and Frieda Penn Rubenstein – the name was officially shortened to Ruben in 1930. Young Sam developed a friendship with neighbor Jack Dempsey and became involved with a local boys' boxing club and later, when the family moved across the Bay to Berkeley, he was a successful basketball player at Berkeley High School . After achieving his B.S. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, he continued his studies there and was awarded a Ph.D.
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Malcolm J. Bennett
Malcolm Bennett, a Fellow of the Royal Society, is Professor of Plant Science at the University of Nottingham. Education and career He obtained his BSc in biochemistry with Molecular Biology from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1985 His PhD was from the University of Warwick in 1989. Bennett has held a number of prestigious fellowships including a BBSRC Professorial Research Fellowship, a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Fellowship and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellowship. In 2020 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society.
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Donald R. Whitehead
1938 - 1990 (52 years)
Donald Robert Whitehead was an American entomologist, who specialized in the study of the biogeography and systematics of weevils. Whitehead was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree in 1961, from Rutgers University, and his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1971.
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William Keeton
1933 - 1980 (47 years)
William Tinsley Keeton was an American zoologist known internationally for his work on animal behavior, especially bird migration, and for his work on millipede taxonomy. He was a well-liked professor of biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and author of a widely used introductory textbook, Biological Science.
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Jean Clark Dan
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jean Clark Dan née Clark was an American embryologist who pioneered research into the acrosomal reaction. Born in 1910 to a family of staunch Presbyterians in Westfield, New Jersey, Jean Clark Dan graduated from Wilson College in Pennsylvania in 1932 where she studied biology. She pursued her graduate studies in invertebrate zoology at the University of Pennsylvania and spent her summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At the Marine Biological Laboratory she met her future husband and scientific collaborator Katsuma Dan, the son of a prominent Japanese statesman.
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David Thoday
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
David Thoday FRS was a botanist. Career Thoday was Harry Bolus professor of botany, University of Cape Town and later professor at the University College of North Wales 1923–1949. As a botanist, his work is denoted by the author abbreviation Thoday when citing a botanical name.
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Clarence Hamilton Kennedy
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
#17350
Sterling Howard Emerson
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Sterling Howard Emerson was an American geneticist. Emerson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951. Life Sterling Howard Emerson was born on October 29, 1900 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Rollins Adams Emerson and Harriet Hardin. Emerson was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1922, and admitted as a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1928. Emerson was the professor of genetics at the California Institute of Technology from 1928 to 1971. Emerson died on May 2, 1988, in Altadena, California.
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