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.
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#17401
E. F. Phillips
1878 - 1951 (73 years)
Everett Franklin Phillips was an American apiculturist, scholar, and innovator in the beekeeping field. Phillips’ interest in honey bees began during his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1900s, after which he took on a position with the United States Department of Agriculture where he spearheaded efforts to bring the U.S. beekeeping industry to modern scientific standards. Not only did this work help beekeeping practitioners and scholars, it also played a part in the 400% increase in commercial honey production that Phillips oversaw during World War I.
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Maud Slye
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Maud Caroline Slye was an American pathologist who was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A historian of women and science wrote that Slye "'invented' genetically uniform mice as a research tool." Her work focused on the heritability of cancer in mice. She was also an advocate for the comprehensive archiving of human medical records, believing that proper mate selection would help eradicate cancer. During her career, she received multiple awards and honors, including the gold medal of the American Medical Association in 1914, in 1915 the Ricketts Prize, and the gold medal of the American Radiological Society in 1922.
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Erwin Janchen
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Emil Erwin Alfred Ritter von Janchen-Michel was an Austrian botanist. Life and work He earned his doctorate in 1923 at the University of Vienna. He was scientifically active at the Botanical Institute of the University. He made several research trips. Among the plants first described by Janchen is the native Austrian wild form of Brassica rapa subsp. silvestris.
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Frank N. Blanchard
1888 - 1937 (49 years)
Frank Nelson Blanchard was an American herpetologist, and professor of zoology at the University of Michigan from which institution he received his Ph.D. He is credited with describing several new subspecies, including the broad-banded water snake, Nerodia fasciata confluens, and the Florida king snake, Lampropeltis getula floridana. As well, he has been honored by having reptiles and amphibians named after him, including the western smooth green snake, ecies | Opheodrys vernalis blanchardi, and Blanchard's cricket frog, Acris crepitans blanchardi.
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Sven Furberg
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Sven Verner Furberg was a Norwegian chemist, biologist, and crystallographer who first proposed a helical structure for DNA. Furberg suggested a single-chain helical structure in 1949, which he referred to as a "zig-zag" chain. In 1952, his structure of DNA was published in the journal Acta Chemica Scandinavica. In this paper, he deduced that DNA forms a helix from the crystal structure and density value of nucleosides and other related molecules. A year later , this paper was cited by James Watson and Francis Crick in Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic ...
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Ruth Lyttle Satter
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Ruth Lyttle Satter was an American botanist best known for her work on circadian leaf movement. Biography Ruth Lyttle Satter was born March 8, 1923, in New York City as Ruth Lyttle. Satter received a B.A. in mathematics and physics from Barnard College in 1944. After graduating, she worked at Bell Laboratories and Maxson Company. In 1946 she married Robert Satter and in 1947 she became a homemaker, devoting herself to raising her and Robert's four children, Mimi, Shoshana, Jane and Dick. While raising her children, her love of plants led her to complete the New York Botanical Garden's horticu...
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William Bowen Sarles
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
William Bowen Sarles was an American microbiologist. He was the president of the American Society for Microbiology in 1967. Biography He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1925 with a B.S., in 1927 with an M.S., and in 1931 with a Ph.D. in agricultural bacteriology. His Ph.D. thesis The production of volatile acids by the fermentation of cellulose at high temperatures was supervised by Edwin Broun Fred. From 1927 to 1929 Sarles was an instructor in bacteriology at Kansas State University. From 1930 to 1932 he held an instructorship in bacteriology at Iowa State University....
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Emmanuel Fauré-Fremiet
1883 - 1971 (88 years)
Emmanuel Fauré-Fremiet, ForMemRS, was a French biologist. Early life Fauré-Fremiet was born on 29 December 1883 to the composer Gabriel Fauré and Marie Fremiet, the daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet. As a child he had poor health and was privately tutored at home. He was appointed an assistant lecturer in the Museum d'histoire naturelle in 1910, and then lecturer in Comparative embryology at the Collège de France in 1911, working under Louis-Félix Henneguy.
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Floyd Alonzo McClure
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Floyd Alonzo McClure was an American botanist and plant collector. He was one of the world's leading experts on bamboo and worked in China for 24 years. Biography McClure was educated at Otterbein College from 1914 to 1916. He transferred to Ohio State University, where he graduated with A.B. in 1918 and B.S. in agriculture in 1919. At Canton Christian College in Guangzhou, China, he was an instructor in horticulture from 1919 to 1923, an assistant professor of botany from 1923 to 1927, and curator of the herbarium from 1923 to 1927.
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Helen Spurway
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Helen Spurway was a British biologist and the second wife of J. B. S. Haldane. She emigrated to India in 1957 along with him and conducted research in field biology with Krishna Dronamraju, Suresh Jayakar, and others. Sometimes known as Helen Spurway-Haldane.
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Deborah Rabinowitz
1947 - 1987 (40 years)
Deborah Rabinowitz was an ecologist who coined the seven meanings of rarity in the field of plant ecology,. She was a professor in the Section of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University. Early life and education Rabinowitz was born and raised in Willimantic, Connecticut, to Louis and Margaret Rabinowitz. She attended public schools and later received her undergraduate degree in biology from New College of Florida in Sarasota. In 1975, she received her Ph.D. in theoretical population biology from the University of Chicago.
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Miriam Augusta Palmer
1878 - 1977 (99 years)
Miriam Augusta Palmer was an American professor of entomology and zoology, scientific artist and sculptor. Biography Miriam Augusta Palmer was born on August 28, 1878, in Mont Clare, United States of America. She graduated from the University of Kansas. After completing her master's degree in 1904, she joined as a scientific illustrator at the experiment station of the Colorado Agricultural College, now known as Colorado State University, and continued until 1928.
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Ken-Ichi Kojima
1930 - 1971 (41 years)
Ken-Ichi Kojima was a Japanese-American population geneticist. Career Ken-ichi Kojima graduated from Kyoto University with a B.S. degree in 1953; he went on to attend graduate school there, where he studied plant genetics under the supervision of Hitoshi Kihara. In 1955, Kojima, then a Fulbright Fellow, moved to North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to begin studying for his Ph.D. in statistics and genetics. During this time, he was one of several major contributors to NCSU's Rockefeller Foundation-funded Quantitative Genetics Program. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 1958, where he was a graduate student of Ralph E.
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Cyrus R. Crosby
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Cyrus Richard Crosby was an entomologist and arachnologist who taught at Cornell University. Along with Sherman C. Bishop he gave the scientific name to the Spruce-fir moss spider. Crosbycus, a genus of harvestmen in the family Ceratolasmatidae is also named for him.
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Josselyn Van Tyne
1902 - 1957 (55 years)
Josselyn Van Tyne was an American ornithologist and museum curator of birds. A son of the historian Claude H. Van Tyne, Josselyn Van Tyne received his A.B. from Harvard University in 1925 and his Ph.D. in 1928 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He became Assistant Curator of Birds at the U. of Michigan's Museum of Zoology and in 1931 Curator of Birds, a position he held until his death; his successor as the Museum's Curator of Birds was Harrison B. Tordoff. In 1930 Van Tyne became an instructor in the U. of Michigan's Department of Zoology, then assistant professor, associate profe...
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Naohide Yatsu
1877 - 1947 (70 years)
Naohide Yatsu was a Japanese biologist, geneticist, and embryologist. Yatsu received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and was a pioneer in embryonic induction and laid the foundations for zoology research in Japan.
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Mary Jane Guthrie
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Mary Jane Guthrie was an American zoologist and cytologist known for her studies of cytoplasm in reproductive and endocrine cells. Early life and education Guthrie was born in New Bloomfield, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor's degree in 1916 and a master's degree in 1918, then earned her Ph.D. in zoology at Bryn Mawr College in 1922. While working towards her Ph.D., Guthrie served as a zoology instructor and demonstrator.
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Erwin Baur
1875 - 1933 (58 years)
Erwin Baur was a German geneticist and botanist. Baur worked primarily on plant genetics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research . Baur is considered to be the father of plant virology. He discovered the inheritance of plastids.
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Sarah Bedichek Pipkin
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Sarah Craven Bedichek Pipkin was an American geneticist. Education Pipkin earned her B.A. in Zoology and Ph.D in Genetics from the University of Texas, where she studied with J. T. Patterson and H. J. Muller. She was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship to King's College, London and studied under J. B. S. Haldane.
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Ernest Lyman Scott
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
Ernest Lyman Scott was an American physiologist and diabetes researcher who spent much of his career on the faculty at Columbia University. Scott's early work contributed to the modern understanding of the biology of insulin and its use in diabetes management, though the exact role and significance of his research in this context has been a subject of controversy. Later, Scott developed a standard blood test for diabetes. After retiring from Columbia in 1942, Scott went on to become a noted horticulturist.
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Vera Danchakoff
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Vera Mikhaĭlovna Danchakoff was an anatomist, cell biologist and embryologist from the Russian Empire. In 1908 she was the first woman in Russian Empire to be appointed as a professor and she became a pioneer in stem cell research. She emigrated to the United States in 1915 where she was a leading exponent of the idea that all types of blood cell develop from a single type of cell. She has sometimes been called "the mother of stem cells". She later returned to Europe to continue with her research.
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Ernst Friedberger
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Ernst Friedberger was a German immunologist and hygienist born in Giessen. He was of Jewish ancestry. In 1899 he received his medical doctorate at the University of Giessen, and in 1901 became an assistant at the University of Königsberg, where in 1903 he was habilitated as a lecturer in hygiene. In 1908 he attained the directorship of experimental therapy at the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Berlin. From 1915 to 1926 he was professor of hygiene at the University of Greifswald, and afterwards director of the Preußischen Forschungsinstituts für Hygiene und Immunitätslehre in ...
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Oskar Augustus Johannsen
1870 - 1961 (91 years)
Oskar Augustus Johannsen , was an American entomologist who specialised in Diptera. Johannsen earned degrees from the University of Illinois and Cornell University. He taught civil engineering at Cornell from 1899 to 1909, entomology at the University of Maine from 1909 to 1912, and entomology at Cornell from 1912 to 1938.
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O'Neil Ray Collins
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
O'Neil Ray Collins was an American botanist, mycologist, and specialist in slime-mold genetics. Early life Collins was born in Plaisance, Louisiana in 1931, and graduated from the local high school in 1948. After serving the United States Army in Europe, he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in botany in January 1957 from Southern University. His interest in mycology was cultivated by Lafayette Frederick, a professor at Southern. Collins later attended the University of Iowa and studied under Constantine J. Alexopoulos, receiving his master's in 1959 and doctorate in 1961. His thesis invo...
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Philip Hunter Timberlake
1883 - 1981 (98 years)
Philip Hunter Timberlake was one of the most prolific American entomologists of the 20th century. He was born on June 5, 1883, in Bethel, Maine, and died in 1981 in Riverside, California, where he had served as an Associate Entomologist in the Department of Entomology of the University of California, Riverside.
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Wayne Eyer Manning
1899 - 2004 (105 years)
Wayne Eyer Manning was an American horticulturist and botanist. Biography In 1920, Manning obtained his Bachelor of Sciences from Oberlin College. In 1926 he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. His dissertation research was based on the study of the floral anatomy of Juglandaceae.
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Hally Jolivette Sax
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Hally Delilia Mary Jolivette Sax , was an American botanist known for her work on the chromosomal structure of plant species and how it is affected by radiation and other mutagens. Biography Hally Jolivette received her A.B. in 1906 and her A.M. in 1909 — both from the University of Wisconsin — and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1912. She taught at the University of Wisconsin , Stanford , and Washington State College . While at the latter institution, she met and in 1915 married the botanist Karl Sax, one of her cytology students. They later had three sons.
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William Harding Longley
1881 - 1937 (56 years)
William Harding Longley was an American botanist. Longley was born in 1881 in Nova Scotia. He attended Acadia and Yale. From 1911 to 1937, he spent as a professor of biology and botany, at Goucher College in Baltimore. His biggest work in science was a study of roles of color and pattern in the tropical reef fishes, which was done with the assistance of Dry Tortugas Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, where he worked as a director from 1922 to 1937. He studied distribution and evolution of the species as well. He studied a lot of plants in places like Hawaii, Samoa, Tortugas, and the Pacific, and examining some in European and American museums.
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Margaret Altmann
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Margaret Altmann was a German-American biologist focusing on animal husbandry and psychobiology. She was one of the first women to work in the psychobiology, ethology and animal husbandry fields, with a focus on livestock.
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Alfred Hauptmann
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Alfred Hauptmann was a German-Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist. His most important contribution remained the article written in 1912 on the effectiveness of the phenobarbital as an anti-epileptic. After his emigration, he and the internist Siegfried Thannhauser, who had also emigrated, described an autosomal dominant inherited myopathy for the first time in 1941, which is now known as Hauptmann-Thannhauser muscular dystrophy.
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Gerald Augustus Harold Bedford
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Gerald Augustus Harold Bedford was a British entomologist of the 20th century who specialised in ticks from South Africa. He first worked at the British Museum of Natural History with F.V. Theobald and then was nominated as entomologist at the Division of Veterinary Services of the University of Pretoria in Onderstepoort on the 20. There, he studied vertebrate parasites . He started to collect species of ticks for the National Tick Collection in 1912, with nymphs of Aponomma exornatum collected in Onderstepoort. In 1920, he was promoted Research Officer in Onderstepoort. He died in 1938 at th...
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Joachim Hämmerling
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Dr. Joachim Hämmerling was a pioneering Danish-German biologist funded by Nazi Germany who determined that the nucleus of a cell controls the development of organisms. His experimentation with the green algae Acetabularia provided a model subject for modern cell biological research, and proved the existence of morphogenetic substances, or mRNP.
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Eleanor Carothers
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Estrella Eleanor Carothers , known primarily as Eleanor Carothers, was an American zoologist, geneticist, and cytologist known for her work with grasshoppers. She discovered important physical evidence for the concept of independent assortment, vital to modern understanding of genetics.
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Walter Max Zimmermann
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Walter Max Zimmermann was a German botanist and systematist. Zimmernann’s notions of classifying life objectively based on phylogenetic methods and on evolutionarily important characters were foundational for modern phylogenetics. Though they were later implemented by Willi Hennig in his fundamental work on phylogenetic systematics, Zimmermann's contributions to this field have largely been overlooked. Zimmermann also made several significant developments in the field of plant systematics such as the discovery of the telome theory. The standard botanical author abbreviation W.Zimm. is applied...
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Carleton Roy Ball
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
Carleton Roy Ball was an American botanist and cerealist in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry. During his life he described 45 species in the genus Salix and was also a founder of American Society of Agronomy as well as its journal editor.
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René Jeannel
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
René Jeannel was a French entomologist. He was director of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle from 1945 to 1951. Jeannel's most important work was on the insect fauna of caves in the Pyrenees, France and in the Carpathians, Romania. He also worked in Africa. Jeannel specialised in Leiodidae but authored a large number of papers and works on other Coleoptera. He was a member of the Romanian Academy.
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Alan Gemmell
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Alan Robertson Gemmell FRSE OBE JP was Professor of Biology at Keele University and a regular member of the panel on the BBC Radio Home Service programme Gardeners' Question Time from 1950 for some 30 years. Disagreements on the programme between Gemmell and fellow panel member Bill Sowerbutts became legendary.
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Charles Gordon Hewitt
1885 - 1920 (35 years)
Charles Gordon Hewitt was a Canadian economic entomologist and pioneer of conservation biology. He was appointed dominion entomologist of Canada in 1909. He helped in the development of the Destructive Insect and Pest Act of 1910, and implemented significant changes in the Department of Agriculture. He published several books on the subjects of biology and entomology, and helped to further the 1916 treaty between Canada and the United States for the protection of migratory birds.
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William Cecil Dampier
1867 - 1952 (85 years)
Sir William Cecil Dampier FRS was a British scientist, agriculturist, and science historian who developed a method of extracting lactose from whey. He was born in London, the son of Charles Langley and Mary Whetham and the grandson of Sir Charles Whetham, a former Lord Mayor of London. In 1886, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and in 1889 commenced his varied researches in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1891 was elected a Fellow of Trinity.
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Frederik Børgesen
1866 - 1956 (90 years)
Fredrik Christian Emil Børgesen was a Danish botanist and phycologist. He graduated in botany from the University of Copenhagen and was subsequently employed as an assistant at the Botanical Museum . His doctoral thesis dealt with the marine algae of the Faroe Islands . Later, he became librarian at the Library of the Botanical Garden .
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Carl Wesenberg-Lund
1867 - 1955 (88 years)
Carl Jørgen Wesenberg-Lund , D.Phil, professor of limnology 1922-1939 at the University of Copenhagen, was a Danish zoologist and freshwater ecologist. He was a pioneer in Danish nature conservation early in the 20th century. He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters from 1918. He was a member of many foreign academies and learned societies, e.g. honorary fellow of the Royal Society in London, corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London and of the Quekett Microscopical Club in London. He became honorary doctor at Uppsala University in 1932 and Commander 1...
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LaDema Langdon
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
LaDema Mary Langdon was an American botanist known for her work on floral anatomy, taxonomy, embryology, and morphology of Juglandaceae, Fagaceae, Cycas, and Dioon spinulosum. She was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a professor at Baltimore Junior College and Goucher College. She earned her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and her graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.
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Fritz Peus
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Fritz Peus full name Friedrich Ferdinand Christian Peus was a German entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera, Diptera and Siphonaptera. From 1923 to 1927 Peus studied zoology, botany and physics at the University of Münster. During the second world war, Peus was engaged as an Army entomologist and employed in malaria research. He had joined the NSDAP party in 1940. Peus was later Director of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Professor for special zoology at the Humboldt University of Berlin and from 1962 up to his retirement in 1969 Professor of applied zoology at the Freie Universitä...
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Dane Prugh
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Dane Gaskill Prugh was a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, whose work demonstrated the necessity for wider knowledge, understanding, and experience in the evaluation of such programs.
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Frank Peabody
1914 - 1958 (44 years)
Frank Elmer Peabody , was an American palaeontologist noted for his research on fossil trackways and reptile and amphibian skeletal structure. He attended high school and junior college in the San Francisco Bay Area. His undergraduate studies were completed at the University of California in 1938 and in 1940 he was awarded an M.A. in paleontology. While working at the University of California, Berkeley he came under the tutelage of Professor Charles Lewis Camp from whom he inherited a passion for vertebrate phylogenetic problems. Peabody and fellow student Sam P. Welles helped Camp with his re...
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Franz Alfred Schilder
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Franz Xaver Alfred Johann Schilder was an Austrian-born German biologist, taxonomist, malacologist and honorary professor of animal geography. Life Franz Alfred Schilder was born on 13 April 1896 in Prague suburbs. In 1908, Schilder moved to Vienna. Having graduated from school in 1914, he studied medicine, but the next year his studies were interrupted by war. After the war, he continued studies in ethnography, geography and paleontology. In 1921, he became a Doctor of Philosophy.
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Haaken Hasberg Gran
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Haaken Hasberg Gran was a Norwegian botanist. Personal life Gran was born in Tønsberg as the son of naval captain August Kriegsmann Gran and his wife Agnes Hasberg . He was the paternal grandson of politician Jens Gran, nephew of businessperson Jens Gran, Jr., first cousin of aviator Tryggve Gran and second cousin of writer Gerhard Gran. He married Margrethe Kristofa Holm in August 1897.
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Wanda Kirkbride Farr
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Wanda K. Farr was an American botanist known for her discovery of the mechanism by which cellulose is formed in the walls of plant cells. Early life Wanda Farr was born near New Matamoras, Ohio on January 9, 1895, to parents Frederick Alonzo Kirkbride and Clara M Nikolaus. When she was four years old, her father died and she and her mother went to live with Wanda's grandparents in New Matamoras. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Samuel Richardson, was a physician who lived in the same town. He helped cultivate her interest in science, in particular in plants and growing things.
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Betty Batham
1917 - 1974 (57 years)
Elizabeth Joan Batham was a New Zealand marine biologist and university lecturer. A past president of the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Batham directed the Portobello Marine Biological Station at the University of Otago for more than 23 years.
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T. Bhaskara Menon
1898 - 1948 (50 years)
Professor Thotakat Bhaskara Menon shortly T. Bhaskara Menon M.D., D.Sc., M.R.C.P. was Professor of Pathology and Principal of Andhra Medical College. He has done M.D. from Madras. He was Principal of Andhra Medical College from 1945 to 1948. He was the second Indian to hold this position after Dr. T. S. Tirumurti in 1930.
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