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,
#18101
Harold E. Moore
1917 - 1980 (63 years)
Harold Emery Moore, Jr. was an American botanist especially known for his work on the systematics of the palm family. He served as Director of the L. H. Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University, and was appointed Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Botany in 1978. He was an important contributor to Hortus Third and was editor of Principes , the journal of the International Palm Society. He also edited Gentes Herbarum and provided the foundation for the first edition of Genera Palmarum, a seminal work on palm taxonomy which was later completed by Natalie Uhl and John Dransfield.
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Marie Stopes
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse.
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Douglas Kelley
1912 - 1958 (46 years)
Lt. Colonel Douglas McGlashan Kelley was a United States Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who served as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison during the Nuremberg War Trials. He worked to ascertain defendants' competency before they stood trial.
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Raffaele Ciferri
1897 - 1964 (67 years)
Raffaele Ciferri was an Italian botanist, agriculturalist and mycologist. He studied agricultural sciences at the University of Bologna. From 1925 to 1932, he was based in the Dominican Republic, where he helped establish an experimental agricultural station in Santiago de los Caballeros for studies of cassava. While in Latin America, he also conducted research of diseases affecting cacao in Ecuador. In 1934–35 he was stationed in Italian Somaliland, performing organizational work involving agrarian services.
Go to Profile#18105
Friedrich von Huene
1875 - 1969 (94 years)
Friedrich von Huene, born Friedrich Richard von Hoinigen, was a German paleontologist who renamed more dinosaurs in the early 20th century than anyone else in Europe. He also made key contributions about various Permo-Carboniferous limbed vertebrates.
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Alan Mozley
1904 - 1971 (67 years)
Walter Alan Mozley FRSE was an English zoologist who was known for his knowledge of freshwater snails, water insects and mollusca, and their impact on tropical disease. Life He was born on 20 June 1904 in Chingford in Essex.
Go to Profile#18107
Arthur M. Chickering
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Arthur Merton Chickering was a U.S. arachnologist. Biography He was born on March 23, 1887, in North Danville, Vermont. He studied in Yale University under Alexander Petrunkevitch until 1913. In 1916 he earned a Master of Science degree in cytology and in 1927 a Ph.D. for cytological studies on the spermatogenesis of insects. He taught at Beloit College from 1913 to 1918 and at Albion College from 1918 to 1957. From 1953 to 1971 he was Research Associate in Arachnology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
Go to Profile#18108
Richard Woltereck
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
Richard Woltereck was a German zoologist best known for developing the concept of reaction norm . He also conducted some of the first research that provided evidence for the process of cytoplasmic inheritance. He proposed the concept in a 1909 paper that he presented to the German Zoological Society, based on his own research on the Daphnia water flea. According to historian Raphael Falk, the concept of the reaction norm was later revived by Richard Lewontin.
Go to Profile#18109
Rolf Dahlgren
1932 - 1987 (55 years)
Rolf Martin Theodor Dahlgren was a Swedish-Danish botanist and professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1973 to his death. Life Dahlgren was born in Örebro on 7 July 1932 to apothecary Rudolf Dahlgren and wife Greta née Dahlstrand. He took his MSc degree in Biology in and PhD degree in Botany in at Lund University. He was killed in a car crash in Scania, Sweden on 14 February 1987.
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Ruth Bleier
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Ruth Harriet Bleier was an American neurophysiologist who is also one of the first feminist scholars to explore how gender biases have shaped biology. Her career consisted of combining her academic interests with her commitment to social justice for women and the lower-class.
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Jacob Goodale Lipman
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Jacob Goodale Lipman was a professor of agricultural chemistry and researcher in the fields of soil chemistry and bacteriology. Lipman was born in Friedrichstadt on November 18, 1874. Attending school in Moscow, he later attended the gymnasium in Orenburg. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1888, quickly settling on a farm in Woodbine, New Jersey, where he learned about agriculture. His brother Charles Bernard Lipman would later become a professor of plant physiology. In 1894, he enrolled into Rutgers College to study agricultural science and its founding principles, coming under the influence of E.
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Anthony Bartholomay
1919 - 1975 (56 years)
Anthony Francis Bartholomay was a mathematician who introduced molecular set theory, a topic on which he wrote books. Life Bartholomay was born on August 11, 1919. He would receive degrees from Hamilton College, Syracuse University, and Harvard University. Bartholomay would work at Harvard Medical School, Medical School of Ohio, Brown University, Keuka College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Rutgers University. He died on March 21, 1975, at 55 years old. A resident of the Somerset section of Franklin Township, Somerset County, New Jersey, he died at a New Brunswick, New Jersey hospital...
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Ivan Schmalhausen
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen was a Ukrainian, Russian and later Soviet zoologist and evolutionary biologist of German descent. He developed the theory of stabilizing selection, and took part in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
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Ferguson Rodger
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Thomas Ferguson Rodger CBE FRCP Glas FRCP Ed FRCPsych was a Scottish physician who was Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Glasgow from 1948 to 1973, and Emeritus Professor thereafter. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War and rose to become a consultant psychiatrist with the rank of Brigadier.
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Leopold von Ubisch
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Leopold von Ubisch was a German paleontologist who in 1954 surgically removed the nucleus from sea urchin eggs, to confirm an 1899 experiment by Theodor Boveri. He was an early supporter of the theory of continental drift.
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Fritz von Wettstein
1895 - 1945 (50 years)
Friedrich Wettstein, Ritter von Westersheim was an Austrian botanist. Academic career Fritz Wettstein was the son of Richard Wettstein. From 1925 he was professor at Göttingen, in 1931 in Munich and in 1934 director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem.
Go to Profile#18117
Roger Arliner Young
1889 - 1964 (75 years)
Roger Arliner Young was an American scientist of zoology, biology, and marine biology. She was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology. Early years Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1899, Young soon moved with her family to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania where she graduated from Burgettstown High School. Her father labored as a coal miner, and her mother initially worked as a housekeeper before disability left her unable to work. The family was poor and most of the time resources were expended in the care of her disabled mother.
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Nansie S. Sharpless
1932 - 1987 (55 years)
Nansie S. Sharpless was an American biochemist. She was an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology and Chief of the Clinical Neuropsychopharmacology Laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Deaf from the age of fourteen, Sharpless encouraged deaf people to consider careers in scientific research. She also served as the president of the Foundation for Science and the Handicapped.
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Oskar Kuhn
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Oskar Kuhn was a German palaeontologist. Life and career Kuhn was educated in Dinkelsbühl and Bamberg and then studied natural science, specialising in geology and paleontology, at the University of Munich, from which he received his D. Phil. in 1932.
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Walter H. Burkholder
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Walter Hagemeyer Burkholder was an American plant pathologist who helped establish the role of bacteria as plant pathogens. He was awarded a Ph.D. by Cornell University in 1917 and subsequently appointed as professor of plant pathology.
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Irene Baker
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Irene Baker was an American botanist who collaborated with her husband Herbert G. Baker to research pollination biology, the composition of nectar and study its ecological, evolutionary and taxonomic qualities.
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Kono Yasui
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Kono Yasui was a Japanese biologist and cytologist. In 1927, she became the first Japanese woman to receive a doctoral degree in science. She received a Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon and was awarded as an Order of the Precious Crown Third Class for her academic accomplishments and leadership in women’s education in Japan.
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William Macnae
1914 - 1975 (61 years)
William Macnae, 1914-1975, was a South African zoologist and malacologist. He was a Scottish born-and-educated marine ecologist and moved to South Africa in 1948. Career Macnae wrote the Crustacea section of the report entitled "Natural History of Canna and Sanday, Inner Hebrides: a report upon the Glasgow University Canna Expeditions, 1936 and 1937" published by the University of Glasgow in 1939 detailing the two visits by members of Glasgow University to Canna, Scotland, in June and July 1936 and 1937. In this report is the only British record of Chydorus gibbus , belonging to the sub-order ...
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Carl H. Lindroth
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Carl Hildebrand Lindroth was a Swedish entomologist and a professor at Lund University. He was a specialist in carabidology , with a special interest in biogeography. He was a strong proponent of the glacial refugium hypothesis and made use of the framework to explain the distribution patterns of Scandinavian beetles.
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Mary Shaw Shorb
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Mary Shaw Shorb , a research scientist, was best known for the development of a bacteriological assay procedure for the chemical compound now known as Vitamin B12. Early years Mary Shaw was born on January 7, 1907, in Wahpeton, North Dakota, about forty miles south of Fargo. Her parents were Mary McKean and Ernest Shaw. The family moved to Caldwell, Idaho when Mary was three years old. She developed an early interest in biology through a neighbor and family friend, Dr. William Judson Boone. Founder and first President of the College of Idaho, Dr. Boone was a well-known botanist, and taught biology at the College.
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Georg Haas
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Georg Haas was an Austrian-born Israeli herpetologist, malacologist and paleontologist, one of the founders of zoological research in Israel. Haas studied zoology in the University of Vienna. In 1932 he joined the Hebrew University staff and during the next four decades influenced several generations of young Israeli scientists.
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Yaichirō Okada
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
was a Japanese zoologist. He was born in Ishikawa Prefecture. Okada studied at the Imperial Fisheries Institute . He was a professor at Tokyo Higher Normal School , and after World War II he taught at Mie University from 1950, where he was dean of Fisheries. After retirement he served as a professor at Tokai University.
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Trevor Ian Shaw
1928 - 1972 (44 years)
Trevor Ian Shaw was an English experimental biologist who pioneered studies in physiology and biochemistry contributing to the understanding of transport across cell membranes against concentration gradients through active metabolism and the exchange of sodium and potassium ions. He also examined the mechanism by which the seaweed Laminaria digitata accumulated iodine and was known for his innovative experimental techniques.
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J. L. B. Smith
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
James Leonard Brierley Smith was a South African ichthyologist, organic chemist, and university professor. He was the first to identify a taxidermied fish as a coelacanth, at the time thought to be long extinct.
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George Hughes Kirby
1875 - 1935 (60 years)
George Hughes Kirby was an American physician and psychiatrist, administrator, and educator, who contributed to the advancement of psychiatry in the United States. Kirby was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the son of a physician who was superintendent of the state mental hospital in Goldsboro. He attended the public schools of Goldsboro, then enrolled in the University of North Carolina, earned his nomination to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated with a B.A. in 1896. His medical training was at the Long Island College Hospital in New York, and he earned his M.D. in 1899. He worked under Adolph Meyer at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts.
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James Couper Brash
1886 - 1958 (72 years)
James Couper Brash, MC, FRCSE, FRSE was a leading anatomist and embryologist in Britain. Early life and family James Couper Brash was born in Cathcart in Scotland, the son of James Brash, J.P. He was educated at George Watson's College and the University of Edinburgh. Brash graduated B.Sc. in 1908 and M.B., Ch.B. in 1910.
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Filippo Silvestri
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Filippo Silvestri was an Italian entomologist. He specialised in world Protura, Thysanura, Diplura and Isoptera, but also worked on Hymenoptera, Myriapoda and Italian Diptera. He is also noted for describing and naming the previously unknown order Zoraptera. In 1938 he was nominated to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the scientific academy of the Vatican.
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Helen Lee Gruehl
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Helen Lee Gruehl Aikman was an American immunologist. Early life and education Gruehl was born in Passaic, New Jersey, the daughter of Edward Charles Gruehl and Susan Ramsay Mason Gruehl. Her father was manager of a rubber factory; her mother was a teacher and clubwoman. Gruehl graduated from Passaic High School in 1920, and from Mount Holyoke College in 1924. Her major was chemistry, and her minor was in mathematics; she was also known as a dancer during her college years.
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Edwin Chapin Starks
1867 - 1932 (65 years)
Edwin Chapin Starks was an ichthyologist most associated with Stanford University. He was known as an authority on the osteology of fish. He also did studies of fish of the Puget Sound. His wife and daughter were also both involved in either science or natural history.
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Mabel Rayner
1890 - 1948 (58 years)
Mabel Mary Cheveley Rayner was an English botanist specialising in mycology. She published books and articles on plant physiology and was one of the first researchers to propose that mycorrhizal interactions could both help and harm plants.
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Howard K. Gloyd
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Howard Kay Gloyd was an American herpetologist who is credited with describing several new species and subspecies of reptiles, such as the Florida cottonmouth, Agkistrodon piscivorus conanti. He is honored by having named after him the following taxa: a genus of Asian pit viperss, Gloydius; three species of nonvenomous snakes, Pantherophis gloydi , Agkistrodon howardgloydi, Heterodon nasicus gloydi ; and a subspecies of Central American pit viper, Crotalus intermedius gloydi.
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Arthur A. Allen
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Arthur Augustus Allen was an American professor of ornithology at Cornell University. Allen was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of Daniel Williams Allen and Anna née Moore. He studied at Cornell University, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1907, his Master of Arts in 1908 and his Ph.D. in 1911. His thesis is entitled "The Red-Winged Blackbird: A Study in the Ecology of a Cattail Marsh".
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Margaret Mary Smith
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Margaret Mary Smith was born on 26 September 1916 in Indwe, Cape Province, South Africa, a small village on the border of the Transkei. She was an ichthyologist, accomplished fish illustrator, and an academic.
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Janaki Ammal
1897 - 1984 (87 years)
Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal was an Indian botanist who worked on plant breeding, cytogenetics and phytogeography. Her most notable work involved studies on sugarcane and the eggplant . She also worked on the cytogenetics of a range of plants and co-authored the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants with C.D. Darlington. She took an interest in ethnobotany and plants of medicinal and economic value from the rain forests of Kerala, India. She was awarded Padma Shri by the then prime minister of India in 1977.
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Elizabeth B. Bryant
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Elizabeth Bangs Bryant was an American arachnologist. She worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was a close acquaintance of James Henry Emerton. She is best known for her studies of the spiders of New England and the Caribbean.
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John Dennis Carthy
1923 - 1972 (49 years)
John Dennis Carthy was a British zoologist and ethologist whose primary study subjects were the sensory systems and behaviour of invertebrates. He published 11 books and numerous scientific articles.
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Abby Howe Turner
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Abby Howe Turner was a noted professor of physiology and zoology who founded the department of physiology at Mount Holyoke College. She specialized in colloid osmotic pressure and circulatory reactions to gravity.
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Giuseppe Montalenti
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Giuseppe Montalenti was an Italian geneticist and zoologist. He was a genetics professor at the University of Naples and at the Sapienza University of Rome . He was elected a member of Accademia dei Lincei .
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Guy D. Smith
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Guy Donald Smith was a distinguished international soil scientist, who was born in Atlantic, Iowa. Biography Guy graduated from the University of Illinois circa 1929, earned his master's degree from the University of Missouri in 1934, and received his PhD in 1940 from the University of Illinois.
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Henri Heim de Balsac
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Henri Heim de Balsac was a French zoologist. In 1937 Henri Heim de Balsac was awarded the Prix Savigny de l'Académie des sciences. In the following year, 1938, he was awarded the Prix Gadeau de Kerville de la Société zoologique de France and he became a Council Member of the Société zoologique de France in February, 1938. He became a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Institute for Ornithology and he was also responsible for the foundation of l’Institut chérifien de recherche scientifique :fr:Institut scientifique de Rabat.
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Rhoda Erdmann
1870 - 1935 (65 years)
Rhoda Erdmann was a German cell biologist. Working in the early 1900s, Erdmann was a pioneer of cellular biology and one of few women in her field at the time. Erdmann's work centered around the reproduction of protozoa, with a particular interest in tissue culture and in vitro cellular reproduction. Her work as a protozoologist earned her a graduate student lecturing position at Yale University, though her time in America was cut short by anti-German sentiment surrounding World War I. After a forcible incarceration and then deportation in 1919, Erdmann took a research position at the Institute for Cancer Research at the Charité Hospital of the Friedrich‐Wilhelms University of Berlin.
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Ann Haven Morgan
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Ann Haven Morgan was an American zoologist and ecologist. Biography One of three children of Stanley G. Morgan and Julia A. Douglass Morgan, Anna Morgan was born in Waterford, Connecticut and attended Williams Memorial Institute in New London, Connecticut. In 1902, Anna joined Wellesley College then transferred to Cornell University. After receiving a B.A in 1906, she worked as an assistant and instructor for the Mount Holyoke College department of zoology until 1909. At Cornell University, she was awarded a Ph.D. in 1912 with a dissertation titled, A Contribution to the Biology of the May-fly, after which she became a professor at Mount Holyoke College.
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Cornelius van der Horst
1889 - 1951 (62 years)
Cornelius Jan van der Horst was a Dutch biologist who worked mainly on marine biology and embryology in both the Netherlands and South Africa. As an undergraduate he studied botany and zoology at the University of Amsterdam where he was appointed assistant in the Botany Department under Professor Dr Hugo de Vries before moving on to assist Max Wilhelm Carl Weber at the University's Zoological Museum and in 1917 he became the principal assistant for general Zoology. In 1916 he published his thesis De motorische kernen en banen in de hersenen der visschen. Hare taxonomische waarde en neurobiotactische beteekenis .
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James Chester Bradley
1884 - 1975 (91 years)
James Chester Bradley was an American entomologist who specialised in Hymenoptera. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of California . He was an assistant professor of entomology at Cornell from 1911 to 1920, and professor and curator of invertebrate zoology from 1920 to 1952.
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K. A. Pyefinch
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Kenneth Arthur Pyefinch, MA, FRSE was a 20th-century British zoologist and freshwater biologist. As its first Officer in Charge, he led the development of the Brown Trout Research Laboratory in Pitlochry into its establishment as the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory with a national and international reputation for research.
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