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,
#17501
Alfred Kinsey
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American sexologist, biologist, and professor of entomology and zoology who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as for the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s, and has continued to provoke controversy decades after his death.
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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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Reginald Brettauer Fisher
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Reginald Brettauer Fisher CBE FRSE was a British biochemist, specialising in the study of proteins. Life He was born on 13 February 1907 the son of Joseph Sudbury Fisher. He was educated in King Edward VII School, Sheffield. He then studied sciences at the University of Oxford. On graduation in 1933 he became a Demonstrator in Chemistry at the university. In 1939 he won a Rockefeller Travelling Scholarship.
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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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Edward Percy Stebbing
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Edward Percy Stebbing FRSE FRGS FZS was a pioneering English forester and forest entomologist in India. He was among the first to warn of desertification and desiccation and wrote on "The encroaching Sahara".
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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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Arthur M. Banta
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Arthur Mangun Banta was an American zoologist and professor known for his studies on cave animals. His 1907 publication The Fauna of Mayfield's Cave, a survey of the fauna of an Indiana cave, has become a "classic account in the annals of cave biology in the United States."
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Fritz Konrad Ernst Zumpt
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Fritz Konrad Ernst Zumpt was a German entomologist who worked mainly in Ethiopia, but also to a lesser extent in Uganda, Ghana and Mozambique. He is best known for his work on Diptera and the associations between insects and African mammals, as well as for his work on myiasis.
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John Phillips
1933 - 1987 (54 years)
Professor John Guest Phillips FRS FZS was an eminent biologist. He was born in Swansea and educated at Llanelli Boys' Grammar School and the University of Liverpool; where, after gaining his BSc, he joined the research group of Chester Jones to complete a PhD in endocrinology. Following his doctorate he took up a fellowship at the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory at Yale University with Grace E. Pickford. After a lectureship at Sheffield University Phillips was appointed to the Chair of Zoology at the University of Hong Kong. He returned to the UK to become Professor of Zoology, from 1967 t...
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Sydney Harland
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Sydney Cross Harland was a British agricultural botanist with considerable international experience. His area of expertise was especially in the growing of cotton. Early life and education Sydney Cross Harland was born in Snainton in Yorkshire on 19 June 1891, the son of Erasmus Harland and his wife Eliza. He was educated at the municipal secondary school in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
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Percy Raymond
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Percy Edward Raymond was a Harvard professor and paleontologist who specialized in the evolution of trilobites and studied fossils from the Burgess shales within which a region is named as the Raymond Quarry. He was among the careful explorers of the apparent explosion of life forms in the Cambrian period.
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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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Pierre-Paul Grassé
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Pierre-Paul Grassé was a French zoologist, writer of over 300 publications including the influential 52-volume Traité de Zoologie. He was an expert on termites and one of the last proponents of neo-Lamarckian evolution.
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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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Dorothea Rudnick
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Dorothea Rudnick was an American embryologist, who also made contributions as a scientific editor and translator. Early life and education Dorothea Rudnick was born in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin in 1907, and was raised in Chicago, Illinois. Her father Paul Rudnick was chief chemist for Armour Laboratories, and both of her brothers became physicists. As a student at Parker High School she won the $2500 grand prize in an essay contest sponsored by the Chicago Daily Tribune.
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Ralph Greenson
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Ralph R. Greenson was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Greenson is famous for being Marilyn Monroe's psychiatrist, and was the basis for Leo Rosten's 1963 novel, Captain Newman, M.D. The book was later made into a movie starring Gregory Peck as Greenson's character.
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Arda Green
1899 - 1958 (59 years)
Arda Alden Green was an American biochemist who co-discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin and discovered the reaction responsible for firefly bioluminescence. She is also known for contributing to Gerty Cori and Carl Cori's elucidation of the Cori cycle and showing how pH affects hemoglobin's ability to bind and transport oxygen. She received the Garvan-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society for her work.
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Arthur Thomas Doodson
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Arthur Thomas Doodson was a British oceanographer. Early life and education Arthur Thomas Doodson was born in 1890 at Boothstown, Salford, the son of cotton-mill manager Thomas Doodson and Eleanor Pendlebury of Radcliffe, Lancashire. He was educated at Rochdale secondary school and in 1908 entered the University of Liverpool, graduating in both chemistry and mathematics . He was profoundly deaf and found it difficult to get a job but started with Ferranti in Manchester as a meter tester.
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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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Thomas Barbour
1884 - 1946 (62 years)
Thomas Barbour was an American herpetologist. He was the first president of the Dexter School in 1926. From 1927 until 1946, he was director of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology founded in 1859 by Louis Agassiz at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Ralph Works Chaney
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Ralph Works Chaney was an American paleobotanist. Early life Chaney was born on August 24, 1890, in Brainerd, Illinois. He attended Hyde Park Academy High School, and began to cultivate his interest in ornithology. He became an avid bird watcher and collected a series of bird eggs and skins. After his graduation, Chaney briefly moved to South Dakota before enrolling at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1908. It was here where his interests shifted from ornithology to botany, and eventually paleobotany. He earned his B.S. degree in geology from the University of Chicago in 1912.
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Edgar Nelson Transeau
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Edgar Nelson Transeau was an American botanist and phycologist who served as president of the Botanical Society of America and the Ecological Society of America. Transeau was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on October 21, 1875, and graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 1897. He received a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1904, and in 1915 joined the faculty of Ohio State University where he spent the majority of his career, becoming professor emeritus in 1946.
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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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Gunnar Thorson
1906 - 1971 (65 years)
Gunnar Axel Wright Thorson was a Danish marine zoologist and ecologist, who studied at the University of Copenhagen under the professors C.G. Johannes Petersen, August Krogh, Theodor Mortensen, Ragnar Spärck and Carl Wesenberg-Lund. In 1957, Thorson was appointed professor of marine biology at the University of Copenhagen.
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Max Mapes Ellis
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Max Mapes Ellis, was an American physiologist. He was married to the American ichthyologist Marion Durbin Ellis in 1909. Early life and career Ellis, born in Lawrence, Indiana, and raised in West Lafayette, Indiana, was the son of Horace and Grace V. Ellis. He completed his undergraduate studies at Vincennes University in 1907, where he was an active member of the Sigma Pi fraternity. In 1908, he attended Sigma Pi's inaugural National Congress as a delegate. Subsequently, Ellis earned his PhD from Indiana University in 1909. Following his graduation, he assumed the role of assistant professo...
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Otto Fritz Meyerhof
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Otto Fritz Meyerhof was a German physician and biochemist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Biography Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born in Hannover, at Theaterplatz 16A , the son of wealthy Jewish parents. In 1888, his family moved to Berlin, where Otto spent most of his childhood, and where he started his study of medicine. He continued these studies in Strasbourg and Heidelberg, from which he graduated in 1909, with a work titled "Contributions to the Psychological Theory of Mental Illness".
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Thomas Alan Stephenson
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Thomas Alan Stephenson FRS was a British naturalist, and marine biologist, specialising in sea anemones. Early life Thomas Alan Stephenson, who went by his middle name, was born on 19 January 1898 in Burnham-on-Sea in Surrey, England. He was the eldest of three born to Thomas Stephenson, a Wesleyan minister and amateur botanist, and Margaret Stephenson ; a brother and sister would follow.
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Philip A. Munz
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Philip Alexander Munz was an American botanist, plant taxonomist and educator who worked at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and was a professor of botany at Pomona College, serving as dean there for three years.
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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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Ronald Fisher
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis, being the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin.
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Selman Waksman
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Selman Abraham Waksman was a Jewish Ukrainian inventor, Nobel Prize laureate, biochemist and microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil enabled the discovery of streptomycin and several other antibiotics. A professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University for four decades, he discovered several antibiotics , and he introduced procedures that have led to the development of many others. The proceeds earned from the licensing of his patents funded a foundation for microbiological research, which established the Waksman Institute of Microbiology located at the Rutgers University Busch Campus in Piscataway, New Jersey .
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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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C. H. Waddington
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Conrad Hal Waddington was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
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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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Herbert McLean Evans
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Herbert McLean Evans was an American anatomist and embryologist best known for co-discovering Vitamin E. Education He was born in Modesto, California. In 1908, he obtained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University.
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J. D. Bernal
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
John Desmond Bernal was an Irish scientist who pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography in molecular biology. He published extensively on the history of science. In addition, Bernal wrote popular books on science and society. He was a communist activist and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain .
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Nicolas Rashevsky
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Nicolas Rashevsky was an American theoretical physicist who was one of the pioneers of mathematical biology, and is also considered the father of mathematical biophysics and theoretical biology. Academic career He studied theoretical physics at the St. Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev. He left Ukraine after the October Revolution, emigrating first to Turkey, then to Poland, France, and finally to the US in 1924.
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Kenneth Mather
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Sir Kenneth Mather CBE FRS was a British geneticist and botanist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949, and won its Darwin Medal in 1964. He was the second vice chancellor of the University of Southampton, serving from 1965 to 1971. He was instrumental in persuading the University Grants Committee to establish a new Medical School at the university.
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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 J. Wiggers
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Carl J. Wiggers was a doctor and medical researcher famous for his heart and blood-pressure research. He developed the Wiggers diagram, which is commonly used in teaching of cardiovascular research.
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William Ogilvy Kermack
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
William Ogilvy Kermack FRS FRSE FRIC was a Scottish biochemist. He made mathematical studies of epidemic spread and established links between environmental factors and specified diseases. He is noteworthy for being blind for the majority of his academic career. Together with Anderson Gray McKendrick he created the Kermack-McKendrick theory of infectious diseases.
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Macfarlane Burnet
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet , usually known as Macfarlane or Mac Burnet, was an Australian virologist known for his contributions to immunology. He won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for predicting acquired immune tolerance and he developed the theory of clonal selection.
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Juda Hirsch Quastel
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Juda Hirsch Quastel, was a British-Canadian biochemist who pioneered diverse research in neurochemistry, soil metabolism, cellular metabolism, and cancer. Biography Quastel, also known as "Harry" or "Q," was born at Ecclesall Road in Sheffield the son of Jonas Quastel, a confectioner, and his wife, Flora Itcovitz. His parents had come to Britain in 1897 from Tarnopol in Galicia and were married in Britain. He was named after his grandfather, Juda Quastel, a chemist in Tarnapol.
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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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John Farquhar Fulton
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
John Farquhar Fulton was an American neurophysiologist and historian of science. He received numerous degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. He taught at Magdalen College School of Medicine at Oxford and later became the youngest Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University. His main contributions were in primate neurophysiology and history of science.
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Donald O. Hebb
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Donald Olding Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought ...
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