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,
#17601
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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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.
Go to Profile#17603
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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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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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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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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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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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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Paul Alfred Weiss
1898 - 1989 (91 years)
Paul Alfred Weiss was an Austrian biologist who specialised in morphogenesis, development, differentiation and neurobiology. A teacher, experimenter and theorist, he made a lasting contribution to science in his lengthy career, throughout which he sought to encourage specialists in different fields to meet and share insights.
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Choh Hao Li
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Choh Hao Li was a Chinese-born American biochemist who discovered, in 1966, that human pituitary growth hormone consists of a chain of 256 amino acids. In 1970 he succeeded in synthesizing this hormone, the largest protein molecule synthesized up to that time.
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Israel Lyon Chaikoff
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Israel Lyon Chaikoff was a Canadian-American physiologist and biochemist, known for the Wolff–Chaikoff effect. He and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of radioactive iodine to investigate thyroid function.
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Lee R. Dice
1887 - 1977 (90 years)
Lee Raymond Dice was an American ecologist and geneticist who taught at the University of Michigan for almost his entire career. He is known for independently developing the Sørensen–Dice coefficient.
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Hans Krebs
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS was a German-British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that extracts energy from food and oxygen and makes it available to drive the processes of life. He is best known for his discoveries of two important sequences of chemical reactions that take place in the cells of nearly all organisms, including humans, other than anaerobic microorganisms, namely the citric acid cycle and the urea cycle. The former, often eponymously known as the "Krebs cycle", is the sequen...
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George Gaylord Simpson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
George Gaylord Simpson was an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution , The Meaning of Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution . He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. Simpson was extraordinarily knowledgeable about Mesozoic fossil mammals and fossil mammals of North and South America. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibrium and dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus.
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Jean Piaget
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
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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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Peter Wildy
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Norman Peter Leete Wildy was a 20th-century British virologist who was an expert on the herpes simplex virus. Education and personal life He was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent on 31 March 1920 the son of Eric Lawrence Wildy an electrical engineer, and his wife, Gwendolen Leete . He was educated at Eastbourne College. He studied Medicine at Cambridge University graduating MB ChB, and completed his medical training at St Thomas Hospital, London. In 1945 he married Joan Audrey Kenion. They had a son and two daughters.
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Gordon Floyd Ferris
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Gordon Floyd Ferris was an American entomologist who served as professor of biology at Stanford University from 1912 to 1958 and earned a reputation for his teaching. He founded and edited the journal Microentomology, preferring to work on insects that could only be examined on microscopic slides. He was a specialist on the systematics of the Coccoidea.
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Carl Epling
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Carl Clawson Epling was an American botanist and taxonomist. Epling is best known for being the major authority on the Lamiaceae of the Americas from the 1920s to the 1960s. In his later years he also developed an interest in genetics.
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Joseph Proudman
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Joseph Proudman , CBE, FRS was a distinguished British mathematician and oceanographer of international repute. His theoretical studies into the oceanic tides not only "solved practically all the remaining tidal problems which are soluble within the framework of classical hydrodynamics and analytical mathematics" but laid the basis of a tidal prediction service developed with Arthur Doodson of great international importance.
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Donald J. Borror
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Donald Joyce Borror was an American entomologist and a pioneer of bioacoustics. He is famous for co-authoring a comprehensive textbook of entomology titled An Introduction to the Study of Insects which continues to be in print with newer editions. An entomologist with a specialization on the Odonata , he also took a great interest in animal sounds and published numerous studies on bird vocalization. A longtime professor of entomology at the Ohio State University, he was a fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union as well as the Entomological Society of America.
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George Packer Berry
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
George Packer Berry was an American physician and medical educator. He served as dean of Harvard Medical School for sixteen years and is credited with greatly modernizing that institution's medical education program.
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Dorothea Bennett
1929 - 1990 (61 years)
Dorothea Bennett was a geneticist, known for the genetics of early mammalian development and for research into mammalian sperm surface structures and their role in fertilization and spermatogenesis. She was "one of the major figures in mouse developmental genetics".
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William Mansfield Clark
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
William Mansfield Clark was an American chemist and professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He studied oxidation-reduction reactions and was a pioneer of medical biochemistry. Clark was born in Tivoli, New York, in a clergy family and studied at Hotchkiss School and Williams College before entering Johns Hopkins University, where he received a PhD in chemistry under H.N. Morse with a dissertation on A contribution to the investigation of the temperature coefficient of osmotic pressure: a redetermination of the osmotic pressures of cane sugar at 20°. He then worked on dairy bacteriology in ...
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Alexander H. Smith
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Alexander Hanchett Smith was an American mycologist known for his extensive contributions to the taxonomy and phylogeny of the higher fungi, especially the agarics. Early life Smith, born in Crandon, Wisconsin, was the second child of Ruth M. and Edward A. Schmidt, who later changed their name to Smith. After the death of his mother in his teens, Smith and family moved to West De Pere, Wisconsin, to live with their paternal grandparents.
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Charles Claude Guthrie
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Charles Claude Guthrie was an American physiologist. Early life and education He was born at Gilmore, Missouri. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1901 and from the University of Chicago in 1908.
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Henry Hurd Swinnerton
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Henry Hurd Swinnerton was a British geologist. He was professor of geology at University College Nottingham from 1910 to 1946. Swinnerton was educated at the Royal College of Science, and earned a doctorate in zoology from the University of London in July 1902.
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Stanhope Bayne-Jones
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Stanhope Bayne-Jones was an American physician, bacteriologist, medical historian and a United States Army medical officer with the rank of brigadier general. Early life and education Bayne-Jones was born on November 6, 1888, in New Orleans as the son of physician. His grandfather Joseph Jones was also a physician and served in the medical department of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. In this way, Bayne-Jones was influenced in his future career choice.
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Robert M. Pringle
Robert Mitchell Pringle is an American biologist and conservationist. He is professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University.
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Chester A. Arnold
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Chester Arthur Arnold was an American paleobotanist, born June 25, 1901, in Leeton, Missouri, and died on 19 November 1977. Family, education and career He was the son of farmers Elmer and Edith Arnold. Arnolds family moved to Ludlowville, New York, and he attended Cornell University with the intent to study agriculture. Interaction with Loren Petry, a Cornell professor studying Devonian plants of the region, lead to Arnold shifting his focus to paleobotany. He received his Bachelor of Science in 1924, his Ph.D. in 1929 with his thesis on Devonian megafloral paleobotany. He started working at ...
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Harold Charles Bold
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Harold Charles Bold was an American botanist. Early life Bold was born on June 16, 1909, in New York City to Edward Bold and Louise Bold. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 1929, Phi Beta Kappa., his Master of Science from the University of Vermont in 1931, and his Ph.D. in botany in 1933 at Columbia. He married Mary E. Douthit on June 8, 1943.
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Frederick Twort
1877 - 1950 (73 years)
Frederick William Twort FRS was an English bacteriologist and was the original discoverer in 1915 of bacteriophages . He studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital, London, was superintendent of the Brown Institute for Animals , and was a professor of bacteriology at the University of London. He researched into Johne's disease, a chronic intestinal infection of cattle, and also discovered that vitamin K is needed by growing leprosy bacteria.
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Ernst Klenk
1896 - 1971 (75 years)
Ernst Klenk was a German biochemist, known as a pioneer in research on biolipids, their metabolism, and diseases caused by biolipid disorders. Biography Klenk's father had a farm and a brewery in the Black Forest. However, Klenk did not want to take over his father's brewery and went to secondary school in Tübingen. After serving in WW I as a soldier from 1914 to January 1919, he studied chemistry at the University of Tübingen. At the University of Tübingen's Institut für Physiologische Chemie he in 1923, under the supervision of Percy Brigl , received his Promotion as Dr. rer. nat.; the doctoral dissertation is titled Verhalten von Dipeptiden und Elastin zu Phtalsäureanhydrid .
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Rudolf Allers
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Rudolf Allers was an Austrian psychiatrist who was a member of the first group of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Life and career Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883. He was the son of a doctor, Mark Allers and Augusta Grailich . In 1908, he married Carola Meitner .
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Chancey Juday
1871 - 1944 (73 years)
Chancey Juday together with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and his close collaborator, Edward A. Birge were pioneers of North American limnology. Birge and Juday founded an influential school of limnology on Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin. Edward Birge hired Chancey Juday through this program to help him take samples of lakes in Wisconsin. Their main sampling took place on Lake Mendota. The two, Juday and Birge, studied dissolved oxygen and temperature, leading future limnologists to a better understanding of stratification.
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Robert K. Burns
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Robert Kyle Burns was an American biologist known for his work on sexual differentiation in vertebrates. Burns was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1955. The New York Times reported in 1937 that Burns together with Thomas R. Forbes were able to change the sex of alligators by injecting them with female hormones. The National Academies Press said that Burns "pioneered the experimental manipulation of sex hormones in order to establish their roles in sex determination and differentiation".
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Maria Zambon
Maria Caterina Zambon FMedSci FRCPath, is a British virologist, director of reference microbiology for Public Health England and a professor. Her main research areas include influenza vaccination and influenza hemagglutination inhibition.
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Clarence J. Goodnight
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Clarence James Goodnight was an American zoologist who made contributions to the study of freshwater annelids and harvestmen . He was professor at Brooklyn College, Purdue University, and Western Michigan University. Goodnight was born in Gillespie, Illinois. He earned an associate degree at Blackburn College, then earned his bachelor's, master's, and PhD at the University of Illinois. He produced over 150 publications, including three textbooks. He served as president of the American Microscopical Society , secretary of the American Society of Zoologists, and secretary of the North American Benthological Society.
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George Hill Mathewson Lawrence
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
George Hill Mathewson Lawrence was an American botanist, writer and professor of botany who helped establish the 'Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium', the Hunt Botanical Library and the Huntia journal. He was also an avid book collector, including books on the history of Rhode Island, historic books and botanical art.
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G. P. Wells
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
George Philip Wells FRS was a British zoologist and author. A son of the author H. G. Wells, he co-authored, with his father and Julian Huxley, The Science of Life. A pupil at Oundle School, he was in the first class to learn Russian as a modern language in a British school. He accompanied his father to Soviet Russia in 1920, acting as his Russian translator and exchanging ideas with Russian zoology students. He won an entrance Exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became Senior Scholar in his first year of residence.
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Bernhard Rensch
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Bernhard Rensch was a German evolutionary biologist and ornithologist who did field work in Indonesia and India. Starting his scientific career with pro-Lamarckian views, he shifted to selectionism and became one of the architects of the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology, which he popularised in Germany. Besides his work on how environmental factors influenced the evolution of geographically isolated populations and on evolution above the species level, which contributed to the modern synthesis, he also worked extensively in the area of animal behavior and on philosophical aspects of biological science.
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David R. Goddard
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
David Rockwell Goddard was an American plant physiologist. Early life and education Goddard was the son of Pliny Earle Goddard, American linguist and ethnologist noted for his extensive documentation of the languages and cultures of the Athabaskan peoples of western North America. He was born in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in 1908. He attended the University of California, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1929, a master's degree in 1930, and Ph.D. in 1933.
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Lester W. Sharp
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Lester Whyland Sharp was an American botanist, a pioneer in cytogenetics. He received a BS from Alma College in 1908. After two years at Johns Hopkins University, he transferred to the University of Chicago where he received his PhD in 1912. His postdoctoral work was in association with the University of Louvain, Belgium. Subsequently, he was with Cornell University until his retirement as professor emeritus of botany in 1947.
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Hans Leo Przibram
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Hans Leo Przibram [] was an Austrian biologist who founded the biological laboratory in Vienna. Career Hans was as elder son of Gustav and Charlotte Przibram. His mother was the daughter of Friedrich Schey von Koromla.
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Nellie B. Eales
1889 - 1989 (100 years)
Nellie Barbara Eales was a British zoologist. She was a senior lecturer at the University of Reading and published research papers on a variety of zoological topics as well as a two volume catalogue on Professor F. J. Cole's extensive library.
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Donovan Stewart Correll
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Donovan "Don" Stewart Correll was an American botanist, plant collector, and plant taxonomist, specializing in orchids. Biography Correll grew up in North Carolina. For two years, before entering college, he took voice lessons and sang solos in church and on radio. He also spent a year doing various jobs in Florida. At Duke University, he graduated with A.B. in 1934, A.M. in 1936, and Ph.D. in 1939. Some of his doctoral work was done at Harvard University, where he worked under the orchidologist Oakes Ames, who introduced him to economic botany. At Harvard, Correll was financially assisted by the Anna C.
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Albert Kluyver
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Albert Jan Kluyver ForMemRS was a Dutch microbiologist and biochemist. Career In 1926, Kluyver and Hendrick Jean Louis Donker published the now classic paper, "Die Einheit in der Biochemie" . The paper helped establish Kluyver's vision that, at a biochemical level, all organisms are unified. Kluyver famously expressed the idea with the aphorism: "From elephant to butyric acid bacterium – it is all the same". The paper, and other work from Kluyver's lab, helped support both the concept of biochemical unity as well as the idea of "comparative biochemistry", which Kluyver envisioned as biochemically equivalent to comparative anatomy.
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Frederick Adolph Wolf
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Frederick Adolph Wolf was an American plant pathologist and mycologist. F.A. Wolf was known for his contributions to the understanding of fungal and bacterial diseases of tobacco, which he explored both domestically and globally. His most renowned contributions were his two-volume work “The Fungi” which served as a reference and textbook for fungal morphological and evolutionary studies for several years and his “Tobacco Disease and Decays” book.
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Everett Stanley Luttrell
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Everett Stanley Luttrell was an American mycologist and plant pathologist at the University of Georgia's Georgia Experiment Station and main campus.He served as the DW Brooks Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia from in 1978 to 1986. Luttrell was particularly known for his work on the classification of perithecial ascomycetes and Helminthosporium.
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J. F. Gates Clarke
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
John Frederick Gates Clarke was a Canadian-American entomologist and an authority on moths. He worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. External links
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