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,
#17701
August von Hayek
1871 - 1928 (57 years)
August von Hayek was an Austrian physician and botanist born in Vienna. He was the son of naturalist Gustav von Hayek and the father of economist Friedrich Hayek . Biography In 1895 he obtained his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna. Soon, he was employed by the municipal ministry of health. He obtained his PhD in 1905. Beginning in 1922, he taught classes at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna, and from 1926, he was an associate professor at the university. He died in 1928 in Vienna.
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Luigi Fenaroli
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Luigi Fenaroli was an Italian botanist and agronomist. Luigi Fenaroli graduated in agriculture at the Higher School of Agronomy at the University of Milan in 1921. He performed several naturalistic expeditions, on behalf of the Reale società geografica italiana . In 1930 he was in Angola and spent 1932 and 1933 in the Brazilian Amazon.
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Henry Farnham Perkins
1877 - 1956 (79 years)
Henry Farnham Perkins was an American zoologist and eugenicist. Biography Early life and ancestry He was born at 205 South Prospect Street in Burlington, Chittenden County, Vermont, in the house where he spent his entire life in the affluent "Burlington Hill" neighborhood next to the University of Vermont on May 10, 1877. He was born into a family with Midwestern roots that trace back to Mayflower passengers, Love Brewster, a founder of the town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts; Elder William Brewster, the Pilgrim colonist leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony; and William Bradford...
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Ezra Brainerd
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
Ezra Brainerd was president of Middlebury College, Vermont, United States, from 1885 until 1908. Born in St. Albans, Vermont, Brainerd was a graduate of the college in 1864. Brainerd assumed the presidency at a time when the college was recovering from an extended period of hardship. Brainerd remained president for 23 years, during which time the student body doubled, Starr Library and Warner Hall were constructed, and the college changed from an almost exclusively local college into a more regionally oriented institution. Brainerd was an educator with diverse interests, teaching in almost every subject, from physics to mathematics, to English and rhetoric.
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Liivia Laasimer
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Liivia-Maria Laasimer was an Estonian botanist, geobotanist, bryologist and plant systematist. Life and work Laasimer was born in Tartu, Estonia, and in 1941 she graduated from Tartu University. From 1941 to 1947 she worked in Tartu University's Department of Plant Systematics and Geobotany at the Institute of Botany. From 1947 to 1988 she worked at the Estonian Institute of Zoology and Botany and was head of its botanical section from 1952 to 1986 and chief scientist from 1986 to 1988. There she researched geobotany and plant geography and ecology. She also prepared Estonian vegetation maps...
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Evgeni Babsky
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Evgeni Babsky was a Soviet physiologist, D.Sc., Member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Biography Evgeni Babsky was graduated from Moscow State University in 1924. During the period of 1932—1949 he works as professor at Moscow State V. I. Lenin Pedagogical Institute. In the 1950s, he became head of the Laboratory of Clinical Physiology in the Institute of Physiology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. He had contributed much to the study of mediators and the physiology of the heart, and developed a number of physiological methods of studying the human organism. Evgeni Babsky had published over 300 scientific works, including a number of monographs.
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Karl Hermann Zahn
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Karl Hermann Zahn was a German botanist who was a leading authority regarding the genus Hieracium . He received his education in Karlsruhe , and beginning in 1891, worked as a high school teacher in Heidelberg. He later taught high school classes in Freiburg im Breisgau and in Donaueschingen. In 1923 he was appointed professor of geometry, chemistry and material technology at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences.
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James D. Anderson
1930 - 1976 (46 years)
James Donald Anderson, Jr. was an American herpetologist with the American Museum of Natural History and professor of zoology at Rutgers University who did extensive fieldwork studying Ambystoma and other salamander species in Mexico. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 16, 1930, and grew up in the nearby town of Belleville. He attended the Rutgers University–Newark College of Arts and Sciences and earned a B.A. in zoology in 1954. From 1954 to 1960 he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, working under Robert C. Stebbins. Anderson returned to Rutgers University–Newark as a faculty member in 1960, and died from injuries sustained in a car accident on November 20, 1976.
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Rachel Carson
1907 - 1964 (57 years)
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
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Emil Kraepelin
1856 - 1926 (70 years)
Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin was a German psychiatrist. H. J. Eysenck's Encyclopedia of Psychology identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics.
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Johan Christian Fabricius
1745 - 1808 (63 years)
Johan Christian Fabricius was a Danish zoologist, specialising in "Insecta", which at that time included all arthropods: insects, arachnids, crustaceans and others. He was a student of Carl Linnaeus, and is considered one of the most important entomologists of the 18th century, having named nearly 10,000 species of animals, and established the basis for the modern insect classification.
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Hans Spemann
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
Hans Spemann was a German embryologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1935 for his student Hilde Mangold's discovery of the effect now known as embryonic induction, an influence, exercised by various parts of the embryo, that directs the development of groups of cells into particular tissues and organs. Spemann added his name as an author to Hilde Mangold's dissertation and won a Nobel Prize for her work.
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George Albert Boulenger
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
George Albert Boulenger was a Belgian-British zoologist who described and gave scientific names to over 2,000 new animal species, chiefly fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Boulenger was also an active botanist during the last 30 years of his life, especially in the study of roses.
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Howard Florey
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey, was an Australian pharmacologist and pathologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the development of penicillin.
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Matthias Jakob Schleiden
1804 - 1881 (77 years)
Matthias Jakob Schleiden was a German botanist and co-founder of cell theory, along with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow. He published some poems and non-scientific work under the pseudonym Ernst.
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Peter Medawar
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Sir Peter Brian Medawar was a Brazilian-British biologist and writer, whose works on graft rejection and the discovery of acquired immune tolerance have been fundamental to the medical practice of tissue and organ transplants. For his scientific works, he is regarded as the "father of transplantation". He is remembered for his wit both in person and in popular writings. Richard Dawkins referred to him as "the wittiest of all scientific writers"; Stephen Jay Gould as "the cleverest man I have ever known".
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Carl Correns
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Carl Erich Correns was a German botanist and geneticist notable primarily for his independent discovery of the principles of heredity, which he achieved simultaneously but independently of the botanist Hugo de Vries, and for his acknowledgment of Gregor Mendel's earlier paper on that subject.
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Frederick Gowland Hopkins
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins was an English biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929, with Christiaan Eijkman, for the discovery of vitamins. He also discovered the amino acid tryptophan, in 1901. He was President of the Royal Society from 1930 to 1935.
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David Starr Jordan
1851 - 1931 (80 years)
David Starr Jordan was the founding president of Stanford University, serving from 1891 to 1913. He was an ichthyologist during his research career. Prior to serving as president of Stanford University, he had served as president of Indiana University from 1884 to 1891.
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Xavier Bichat
1771 - 1802 (31 years)
Marie François Xavier Bichat was a French anatomist and pathologist, known as the father of modern histology. Although he worked without a microscope, Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of the human body are composed. He was also "the first to propose that tissue is a central element in human anatomy, and he considered organss as collections of often disparate tissues, rather than as entities in themselves".
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Francesco Redi
1626 - 1699 (73 years)
Francesco Redi was an Italian physician, naturalist, biologist, and poet. He is referred to as the "founder of experimental biology", and as the "father of modern parasitology". He was the first person to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies.
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Ferdinand Cohn
1828 - 1898 (70 years)
Ferdinand Julius Cohn was a German-Polish biologist. He is one of the founders of modern bacteriology and microbiology. Biography Ferdinand Julius Cohn was born in the Jewish quarter of Breslau in the Prussian Province of Silesia . His father, Issak Cohn, was a successful merchant and manufacturer who for some time held the post of Austro-Hungarian consul. He was the elder brother of humorist and playwright Oskar Justinus Cohn and of historian and jurist .
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Carl Nägeli
1817 - 1891 (74 years)
Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli was a Swiss botanist. He studied cell division and pollination but became known as the man who discouraged Gregor Mendel from further work on genetics. He rejected natural selection as a mechanism of evolution, favouring orthogenesis driven by a supposed "inner perfecting principle".
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William Jackson Hooker
1785 - 1865 (80 years)
Sir William Jackson Hooker was an English botanist and botanical illustrator, who became the first director of Kew when in 1841 it was recommended to be placed under state ownership as a botanic garden. At Kew he founded the Herbarium and enlarged the gardens and arboretum.
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Gavin de Beer
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer was a British evolutionary embryologist, known for his work on heterochrony as recorded in his 1930 book Embryos and Ancestors. He was director of the Natural History Museum, London, president of the Linnean Society of London, and a winner of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal for his studies on evolution.
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Gerty Cori
1896 - 1957 (61 years)
Gerty Theresa Cori was an Austrian-American biochemist who in 1947 was the third woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, and the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for her role in the "discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen".
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Robert Knox
1791 - 1862 (71 years)
Robert Knox was a Scottish anatomist and ethnologist best known for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Knox eventually partnered with anatomist and former teacher John Barclay and became a lecturer on anatomy in the city, where he introduced the theory of transcendental anatomy. However, Knox's incautious methods of obtaining cadavers for dissection before the passage of the Anatomy Act 1832 and disagreements with professional colleagues ruined his career in Scotland. Following these developments, he moved to London, though this did not revive his car...
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Augustin Pyramus de Candolle
1778 - 1841 (63 years)
Augustin Pyramus de Candolle was a Swiss botanist. René Louiche Desfontaines launched de Candolle's botanical career by recommending him at a herbarium. Within a couple of years de Candolle had established a new genus, and he went on to document hundreds of plant families and create a new natural plant classification system. Although de Candolle's main focus was botany, he also contributed to related fields such as phytogeography, agronomy, paleontology, medical botany, and economic botany.
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Ernst Hartert
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Ernst Johann Otto Hartert was a widely published German ornithologist. Life and career Hartert was born in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg on 29 October 1859. In July 1891, he married the illustrator Claudia Bernadine Elisabeth Hartert in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, with whom he had a son named Joachim Karl Hartert, , who was killed as an English soldier on the Somme.
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Aldo Leopold
1887 - 1948 (61 years)
Aldo Leopold was an American writer, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac , which has been translated into fourteen languages and has sold more than two million copies.
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George Bentham
1800 - 1884 (84 years)
George Bentham was an English botanist, described by the weed botanist Duane Isely as "the premier systematic botanist of the nineteenth century". Born into a distinguished family, he initially studied law, but had a fascination with botany from an early age, which he soon pursued, becoming president of the Linnaean Society in 1861, and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1862. He was the author of a number of important botanical works, particularly flora. He is best known for his taxonomic classification of plants in collaboration with Joseph Dalton Hooker, his Genera Plantarum . He died in Lo...
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Hermann Joseph Muller
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Hermann Joseph Muller was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation , as well as his outspoken political beliefs. Muller frequently warned of long-term dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear war and nuclear testing, which resulted in greater public scrutiny of these practices.
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Joseph Leidy
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Joseph Mellick Leidy was an American paleontologist, parasitologist and anatomist. Leidy was professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, later becoming a professor of natural history at Swarthmore College and the director of scientific and educational programs at the Wagner Free Institute of Science. His book Extinct Fauna of Dakota and Nebraska contained many species not previously described and many previously unknown on the North American continent. At the time, scientific investigation was largely the province of wealthy amateurs.
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Hans Driesch
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He has also been credited with performing the first artificial 'cloning' of an animal in the 1880s, although this claim is dependent on how one defines cloning.
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Henry Walter Bates
1825 - 1892 (67 years)
Henry Walter Bates was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the rainforests of the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace, starting in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection on the return voyage when his ship caught fire. When Bates arrived home in 1859 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,712 species of which 8,000 were new to science. Bates wrote up his findings in his best-known work, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
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Mathurin Jacques Brisson
1723 - 1806 (83 years)
Mathurin Jacques Brisson was a French zoologist and natural philosopher. Brisson was born at Fontenay-le-Comte. The earlier part of his life was spent in the pursuit of natural history; his published works in this field included Le Règne animal and the highly regarded Ornithologie .
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Raymond Dart
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Raymond Arthur Dart was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924 discovery of the first fossil ever found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa in the Northwest province.
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Paul Broca
1824 - 1880 (56 years)
Pierre Paul Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that is named after him. Broca's area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients with aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical proof of localization of brain function.
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Philip Sclater
1829 - 1913 (84 years)
Philip Lutley Sclater was an English lawyer and zoologist. In zoology, he was an expert ornithologist, and identified the main zoogeographic regions of the world. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London for 42 years, from 1860 to 1902.
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Carl Ludwig
1816 - 1895 (79 years)
Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig was a German physician and physiologist. His work as both a researcher and teacher had a major influence on the understanding, methods and apparatus used in almost all branches of physiology.
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Gerhard Domagk
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk was a German pathologist and bacteriologist. He is credited with the discovery of sulfonamidochrysoidine as an antibiotic for which he received the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The drug became the first commercially available antibiotic and marketed under the brand name Prontosil.
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Albert Günther
1830 - 1914 (84 years)
Albert Karl Ludwig Gotthilf Günther , also Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther , was a German-born British zoologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. Günther is ranked the second-most productive reptile taxonomist with more than 340 reptile species described.
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Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle
1809 - 1885 (76 years)
Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle was a German physician, pathologist, and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. His essay, "On Miasma and Contagia," was an early argument for the germ theory of disease. He was an important figure in the development of modern medicine.
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Liberty Hyde Bailey
1858 - 1954 (96 years)
Liberty Hyde Bailey was an American horticulturist and reformer of rural life. He was cofounder of the American Society for Horticultural Science. As an energetic reformer during the Progressive Era, he was instrumental in starting agricultural extension services, the 4-H movement, the nature study movement, parcel post and rural electrification. He was considered the father of rural sociology and rural journalism.
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Eugenius Warming
1840 - 1924 (84 years)
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming , known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish botanist and a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology. Warming wrote the first textbook on plant ecology, taught the first university course in ecology and gave the concept its meaning and content. Scholar R. J. Goodland wrote in 1975: “If one individual can be singled out to be honoured as the founder of ecology, Warming should gain precedence”.
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Marcus Terentius Varro
116 BC - 27 BC (89 years)
Marcus Terentius Varro was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" . He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.
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Hans Christian Gram
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Hans Christian Joachim Gram was a Danish bacteriologist noted for his development of the Gram stain, still a standard technique to classify bacteria and make them more visible under a microscope. Early life and education Gram was the son of Frederik Terkel Julius Gram, a professor of jurisprudence, and Louise Christiane Roulund.
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Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot
1748 - 1830 (82 years)
#17749
Samuel Wendell Williston
1851 - 1918 (67 years)
Samuel Wendell Williston was an American educator, entomologist, and paleontologist who was the first to propose that birds developed flight cursorially , rather than arboreally . He was a specialist on the flies, Diptera.
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Emil du Bois-Reymond
1818 - 1896 (78 years)
Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond was a German physiologist, the co-discoverer of nerve action potential, and the developer of experimental electrophysiology. His lectures on science and culture earned him great esteem during the latter half of the 19th century.
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