The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#17751
Margery C. Carlson
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Margery Claire Carlson was an American botanist and a professor at Northwestern University. After earning a Ph.D. in botany and becoming the first full-time female professor at Northwestern, she went on a number of international scientific expeditions to Central America in order to collect plant specimens and find new species. Her relationship as a research assistant at the Field Museum of Natural History meant that a majority of her plant collection was donated to the museum and a special botany collection was created for her there. Carlson had a long history of involvement in the conservati...
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Ralph Bulmer
1928 - 1988 (60 years)
Ralph Neville Hermon Bulmer was a twentieth-century ethnobiologist who worked in Papua New Guinea, particularly with the Kalam people. From 1974 he made a radical shift by changing the role of his Kalam informants and collaborators, allowing them to shape the purpose of ethnography and to make them authors rather than consultants. Bulmer's tree frog is named after him.
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Ernst Sträussler
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Ernst Sträussler was an Austrian neuropathologist born in the Moravian city of Ungarisch-Hradisch. In 1895 he earned his medical doctorate at the University of Vienna, and afterwards worked at the psychiatric clinic of Julius Wagner-Jauregg . In 1907 he was habilitated for psychiatry and neurology in Prague, where in 1915 he attained the title of professor extraordinary. In 1919 he returned to Vienna.
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Doris Holmes Blake
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Doris Holmes Blake, née Doris Mildred Holmes , was an American entomologist and scientific illustrator. She was an expert on chrysomelidae . Life Doris Holmes was raised in a middle-class family in Stoughton, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. from Boston University in 1913 and an M.A. in Zoology and Psychology from Radcliffe College in 1917. While at Boston University she became a member of Alpha Delta Pi. Marrying the botanist and plant taxonomist Sidney Fay Blake in 1918, she worked for the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1919 to 1928. From 1928 she worked at the Department of Entomology of the United States National Museum.
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John Bews
1884 - 1938 (54 years)
John William Bews was a Scottish born South African botanist. Early life Bews was born in Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands of Scotland. His parents were farmers. He did his schooling in Kirkwall and later studied mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, geology, Latin, English and logic at Edinburgh University. He took a second degree in botany, chemistry and geology in 1907.
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Roberto Dabbene
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Roberto Raul Dabbene was an Italian-Argentine ornithologist. Born in Turin, he studied at the University of Turin and received a doctorate in 1884 from the University of Genoa and moved to Argentina in 1887. After teaching chemistry at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, he moved to Buenos Aires in 1890 where he was inspired to study birds by Dr. E. L. Homberg who made him a member of the zoo staff. He studied the Argentine birds for over 40 years, and became curator of birds at the National Museum and writing many of the most important books on the subject. He was a founder of the journal E...
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Harry E. Ahles
1924 - 1981 (57 years)
Harry E. Ahles was an American botanist. Biography Harry Ahles was born in 1924. Although he had no formal education beyond high school, his profound botanical knowledge allowed him to enter the botanical profession as an herbarium curator at the University of Illinois.
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Rolf Ling Bolin
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Rolf Ling Bolin was an American academic ichthyologist. A genus of lanternfish, Bolinichthys, is named for him. Biography Bolin was born on 22 March 1901 in New York City to Scandinavian American parents. He initially pursued a career in graphic arts, but then took courses in marine biology. Bolin was awarded a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1934, and worked at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove of Monterey County, California. There he was sought for information on fishes from Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck. He was appointed Professor of Marine Biology and Oceanography in 1949 at Stanford, where he worked until his retirement in 1967.
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Hisayoshi Takeda
1883 - 1972 (89 years)
Hisayoshi Takeda was a Japanese botanist whose father was the British diplomat Sir Ernest Satow. He was a founder of the Japanese Natural History Society, and is known for his campaign to preserve the environment at Oze, which is now Oze National Park.
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Othenio Abel
1875 - 1946 (71 years)
Othenio Lothar Franz Anton Louis Abel was an Austrian paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. Together with Louis Dollo, he was the founder of "paleobiology" and studied the life and environment of fossilized organisms.
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Mary Pocock
1886 - 1977 (91 years)
Mary Agard Pocock was a South African phycologist. Biography Born in Rondebosch in 1886 to William Pocock and Elizabeth Dacomb, Mary Pocock attended Bedford High School and Cheltenham Ladies' College. Pocock then attended the University of London where she studied botany, receiving her degree in 1908. Following her degree Pocock taught at girls schools in London and the Cape before continuing her study in 1919; completing an additional honors degree in botany at Cambridge. She was a lecturer at Rhodes University for a year in 1924, a position which she took up occasionally again during her career.
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Hans Edmund Nicola Burgeff
1883 - 1976 (93 years)
Hans Edmund Nicola Burgeff was a German botanist. He was father of the sculptor and medal engraver Hans Karl Burgeff.
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Edith Marion Patch
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Edith Marion Patch was an American entomologist and writer. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she received a degree from the University of Minnesota in 1901 and originally embarked on a career as an English teacher before receiving the opportunity to organize the entomology department at the University of Maine. She became the head of the entomology department in 1904, and, despite misgivings from several male colleagues about having a female department head, she remained in this post until her retirement in 1937. Edith Patch is recognized as the first truly successful professional woman ento...
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Dorothy Day
1896 - Present (130 years)
Dorothy Day was an American plant physiologist. Education and career Dorothy Day received an A.B. degree from Wellesley College in 1919; an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin in 1925; and her Ph.D. in plant physiology from that institution in 1927. She also attended the University of Chicago in 1929 and Cornell University in 1942–1943.
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Johannes Max Proskauer
1923 - 1970 (47 years)
Johannes Max Proskauer was born in Göttingen, Germany. He travelled to England via a Kindertransport. His mother died in 1943 and his father was murdered in Auschwitz. He attended the University of London, which awarded him a B.Sc. in 1944, a Ph.D. in 1947, and a D.Sc. in 1964, all in the field of botany.
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James Greenway
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
James Cowan Greenway was an American ornithologist. An eccentric, shy, and often reclusive man, his survey of extinct and vanishing birds provided the base for much subsequent work on bird conservation.
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Jan Żabiński
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Jan Żabiński and his wife Antonina Żabińska were a Polish couple from Warsaw, recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for their heroic rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in Poland. Jan Żabiński was a zoologist and zootechnician by profession, a scientist, and organizer and director of the renowned Warsaw Zoo before and during World War II. He became director of the Zoo before the outbreak of war but during the occupation of Poland also held a prestigious function of the Superintendent of the city's public parks in 1939–1945. A street in Warsaw is named after him.
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Ove Arbo Høeg
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Ove Fredrik Arbo Høeg was a Norwegian botanist. Personal life Høeg was born in Larvik as a son of consul Thomas Arbo Høeg and Sigrid Bugge . His first marriage was to physician's daughter Elisabeth Cathrine Blom from July 1923. After her death Høeg married dean's daughter Ellen Susanne Fridrichsen in April 1934. During this marriage he was a brother-in-law of Anton Fridrichsen. After his second wife's death, Høeg married Hjørdis Holm in 1962.
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Kazimierz Wodzicki
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Count Kazimierz Antoni von Granöw Wodzicki was a Polish-born New Zealand mammalogist and ornithologist. He served as a Consul-General to the Polish government-in-exile in New Zealand towards the end of the Second World War and aided numerous Polish refugees to settle there.
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Tyge W. Böcher
1909 - 1983 (74 years)
Tyge Wittrock Böcher was a Danish botanist, evolutionary biologist, plant ecologist and phytogeographer. He was born in Copenhagen to physician Einar Böcher and wife Cathinca née Andersen. Steen B. Böcher, professor of geography, was his brother.
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Gustav Hegi
1876 - 1932 (56 years)
Gustav Hegi was a Swiss botanist. His name is particularly associated with editing the multi-volume work Illustrierte Flora von Mittel-Europa , which is one of the most comprehensive floras in the World. It contains extensive morphological, ecological and phytogeographical of all plant species occurring in Central Europe.
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John T. MacCurdy
1886 - 1947 (61 years)
John Thompson MacCurdy or John Thomson MacCurdy was a Canadian psychiatrist. He was the co-founder and first secretary of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He taught at Cornell University from 1913 to 1922, and in 1923 became a lecturer in psychopathology at Cambridge University.
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Theodore Thomson Flynn
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Theodore Thomson Flynn was an Australian zoologist and marine biologist and a professor in both Tasmania and the United Kingdom. He was the father of the actor Errol Flynn. Biography Theodore Thomson Flynn was born in Coraki, New South Wales, Australia, the son of Jessie B. and John Flynn. He became a biology lecturer at the University of Tasmania in 1909, becoming professor in 1911 and teaching there until 1930.
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Adah Elizabeth Verder
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Adah Elizabeth Verder was an American medical bacteriologist and science administrator. She was a researcher in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' intramural research program specialized in gastrointestinal flora and staphylococci, pseudomonas, and pleuropneumonia organisms. Verder later served as chief of the bacteriology and mycology branch in the extramural division of NIAID. She was a fellow of several societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Public Health Association, American Academy of Microbiology, and the New York ...
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Walter J. Dilling
1886 - 1950 (64 years)
Walter James Dilling was a Scottish pharmacologist and physiologist. Life His father was William Dilling. Dilling was married and had children. Scientific career In 1907 Dilling gained the M.B. , and he was a Phillips Scholar. Walter James Dilling, who has been Lecturer in Pharmacology in the University since 1910, has been appointed to the Dr. Robert Pollok Lectureship in Materia Medica and Pharmacology in Glasgow University. Dr. Dilling, after graduating, was for a year junior assistant in physiology. He then proceeded to Germany as Carnegie Scholar and Fellow, and studied and taught at the University of Rostock under Dr.
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Hermenegild Santapau
1903 - 1970 (67 years)
Hermenegild Santapau was a Spanish born naturalized Indian Jesuit priest and botanist, known for his taxonomical research on Indian flora. He was credited with the Latin nomenclature of several Indian plant species. A recipient of the Order of Alphonsus X the Wise and the Birbal Sahni Medal, he was honoured by the Government of India in 1967, with the award of Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award for his contributions to the society.
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Wilfred Eade Agar
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Wilfred Eade Agar OBE FRS was an Anglo-Australian zoologist. Agar was born in Wimbledon, England. He was educated at Sedbergh School, Yorkshire, and at King's College, Cambridge, where he read zoology. He served at Gallipoli in World War I.
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Hans Zinsser
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Hans Zinsser was an American physician, bacteriologist, and prolific author. The author of over 200 books and medical articles, he was also a published poet. Some of his verses were published in The Atlantic Monthly. His 1940 publication, As I Remember Him: the Biography of R.S., won one of the early National Book Awards, the sixth and last annual award for Nonfiction voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.
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Maulsby Willett Blackman
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Maulsby Willett Blackman was an American entomologist. Biography Blackman was born in 1876. In 1905, he received the Ph.D. degree in entomology from Harvard University. Starting from 1907 to 1929, he was on the faculty of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse. He was appointed as senior entomologist in 1929 at the Bureau of Entomology, a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture. Blackman worked there until his death in 1943. His speciality was forest entomology, during which career he spent time researching the biology and taxonomy of Scolytidae.
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William S. Sadler
1875 - 1969 (94 years)
William Samuel Sadler was an American surgeon, self-trained psychiatrist, and author who helped publish The Urantia Book. The book is said to have resulted from Sadler's relationship with a man through whom he believed celestial beings spoke at night. It drew a following of people who studied its teachings.
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Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
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Johannes Mildbraed
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Gottfried Wilhelm Johannes Mildbraed was a German botanist who specialized in mosses, ferns, and various spermatophytes. He is well known for authoring the most current monograph and taxonomic treatment of the family Stylidiaceae in 1908 as part of the unfinished Das Pflanzenreich series. The genus Mildbraediodendron was named in honor of him.
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Ivey Foreman Lewis
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Ivey Foreman Lewis was an American botanist and geneticist who served for two decades as dean of the University of Virginia and helped found the Virginia Academy of Science. A proponent of eugenics throughout his career, in his final years, Lewis and his sister Nell Battle Lewis gained national attention for their opposition to racial desegregation in public education, especially the United States Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education.
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Leo Koch
1916 - 1982 (66 years)
Leo Francis Koch was an American academic. An Assistant Professor of biology at the University of Illinois, he was fired for promoting premarital sex. Early life Leo Francis Koch was born on February 8, 1916, in Dickinson, North Dakota. He received a master's degree and a PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan.
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José Bleger
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
José Bleger was an Argentine psychoanalyst. He sought a rapprochement of psychoanalysis and Marxism in works such as Psychoanalysis and materialist dialectics . He also contributed to Kleinian clinical practice and thought.
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Viktor von Weizsäcker
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Viktor Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physician and physiologist. He was the brother of Ernst von Weizsäcker, and uncle to Richard von Weizsäcker and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. He studied at Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he earned his medical degree in 1910. In 1920, he became head of the neurological department at Ludolf von Krehl's clinic in Heidelberg. In 1941, he succeeded Otfrid Foerster as professor of neurology in Breslau, and in 1945 returned to Heidelberg as a professor of clinical medicine.
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Takenoshin Nakai
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Takenoshin Nakai was a Japanese botanist. In 1919 and 1930 he published papers on the plants of Japan and Korea, including the genus Cephalotaxus. During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies Takenoshin Nakai was between 1943 and 1945 the director of 's Lands Plantentuin in Batavia
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Richard Heymons
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
Richard Heymons was a German zoologist and entomologist. He studied in Humboldt University of Berlin from 1886 to 1891 and provided overall direction of the Institute of Zoology at the higher educational farm in Berlin from 1915 to 1935.
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Jagadish Chandra Bose
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath with interests in biology, physics, botany and writing science fiction. He was a pioneer in the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the Moon was named in his honour. He founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.
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Jacob R. Schramm
1885 - 1976 (91 years)
Jacob Richard Schramm was an American botanist. He was Professor of Botany and director of the Morris Arboretum at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Cornell. Following his retirement from Pennsylvania he was appointed Research Scholar of Botany at Indiana University. He helped found the abstracting journal Botanical Abstracts, and served as editor-in-chief of it and of its successor, Biological Abstracts. He served as vice-president and president of the Botanical Society of America and as vice-president of the American Philosophi...
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Kiichi Miyake
1876 - 1964 (88 years)
was a Japanese botanist and professor at the University of Tokyo. His research focus was bryology and pteridology. His undergraduate studies were at Doshisha University and the University of Tokyo. His graduated studies were at Cornell University, where he received his MA in 1901 and PhD in 1902. After finishing his PhD, Miyake was appointed by the government of Taiwan to travel to Europe and perform a two-year study of plant life there.
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Drummond Rennie
Drummond Rennie is an American nephrologist and high altitude physiologist who is a contributing deputy editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association and an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Friedrich Mauz
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Friedrich Robert Mauz was a German psychiatrist who was involved with the Nazi T-4 Euthanasia Program. From 1939 until 1945, Mauz was the Professor of Psychiatry at Albertina University in Königsberg. In 1953, he became the Professor of Psychiatry at Münster.
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Eizi Matuda
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Eiji Matsuda was a Mexican botanist of Japanese origin. In scholarly works, his name is generally romanised as "Eizi Matuda" following the "Kunrei" system. Biography Matuda and his wife, Miduho Kaneko de Matuda, were naturalized Mexican citizens and had five Mexico-born children.
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Charles Edward Moss
1870 - 1930 (60 years)
Charles Edward Moss , was an English-born South African botanist, the youngest son of a nonconformist minister, and is noted for being the editor of the first two parts of The Cambridge British Flora published in 1914 and 1920. The Cambridge British Flora, under the editorship of Moss, was intended to be a ten-volume survey of the flora of Britain, with contributions by specialists in particular genera. The two volumes that saw publication were of a very high standard, but the project was subsequently abandoned.
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Collingwood Ingram
1880 - 1981 (101 years)
Collingwood "Cherry" Ingram , was a British ornithologist, plant collector and gardener, who was an authority on Japanese flowering cherries. Personal life Collingwood Ingram was a son of Sir William Ingram and Mary Eliza Collingwood , daughter of Australian politician Edward Stirling. His maternal grandfather was born in Jamaica to a Scottish planter and an unnamed woman of colour. He concealed his racial identity and later settled in South Australia, where he was elected to parliament; his sons Lancelot and Edward Charles Stirling were also members of parliament.
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Nils Svedelius
1873 - 1960 (87 years)
Prof Nils Eberhard Svedelius ForMemRS HFRSE was a Swedish botanist. He was an expert on marine algae. Biography He was born in Stockholm on 5 August 1873 the second son of Carl Svedelius LLD , a senior judge in the Supreme Court of Justice, and his wife, Ebba Katarina Skytte, from the family of Skytte of Satra. In 1914 he married Lisa Thegerstrom . He died on 2 August 1960.
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Maurice Cole Tanquary
1881 - 1944 (63 years)
Maurice Cole Tanquary was a professor of entomology, a member of the Crocker Land Expedition and is considered to be a pioneer in modern beekeeping. Early life Tanquary was the son of Thomas J. and Florence A. Tanquaary. He was born and raised in Lawrenceville, Illinois, grew up on a farm and attended local public schools. He furthered his education at Vincennes University, where he played an active role in the Tau Phi Delta society, contributing to its initial constitution and by-laws. In 1903, he graduated from Vincennes University and subsequently taught at Lawrence County's public schools for four years.
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Arthur White Greeley
1875 - 1904 (29 years)
Arthur White Greeley was an American physiologist and ichthyologist. Greeley was born in Oswego, New York, the eldest of two sons of Frank Norton Greeley, a Congregational clergyman, and Anna Cheney Greeley. His brother William would go on to become chief forester of the U.S. Forest Service. He graduated from Stanford University in 1898, and spent one year as a graduate student in zoology, during which he went to Alaska with the fur-seal expedition and to Brazil with the Banner-Agassiz expedition, where he made most of the biological collections. The following year he was an instructor at San Diego Normal School , leaving there to enter the University of Chicago as fellow in physiology.
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Thomas Borgmeier
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Thomas Borgmeier was a German-Brazilian priest and entomologist and became a specialist on the ants of Brazil and on the flies in the family Phoridae. He was also the founder of the journals Revista de Entomologia edited it from 1931 to 1951 and the Studia Entomologica from 1958.
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