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,
#18251
Björn Kurtén
1924 - 1988 (64 years)
Björn Olof Lennartson Kurtén was a Finnish vertebrate paleontologist, belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority of his country. Early life and education Kurtén was born in Vaasa. Career He was a professor in paleontology at the University of Helsinki from 1972 up to his death in 1988. He also spent a year as lecturing guest professor at Harvard University in 1971.
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William Speirs Bruce
1867 - 1921 (54 years)
William Speirs Bruce was a British naturalist, polar scientist and oceanographer who organized and led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition to the South Orkney Islands and the Weddell Sea. Among other achievements, the expedition established the first permanent weather station in Antarctica. Bruce later founded the Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory in Edinburgh, but his plans for a transcontinental Antarctic march via the South Pole were abandoned because of lack of public and financial support.
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Ethelwynn Trewavas
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Ethelwynn Trewavas was an ichthyologist at the British Museum of Natural History. She was known for her work on the families Cichlidae and Sciaenidae. She worked with Charles Tate Regan, another ichthyologist and taxonomist.
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Ignaz Döllinger
1770 - 1841 (71 years)
Ignaz Döllinger was a German doctor, anatomist and physiologist and one of the first professors to understand and treat medicine as a natural science. Biography Ignaz Döllinger was born in 1770 in Bamberg, where his father was a professor at the university and physician to the Prince-Bishop. He commenced his studies in his native town , continuing them in Würzburg, Pavia and Vienna before returning to Bamberg. Soon after gaining his doctorate in 1794, he became professor for physiology and general pathology in Bamberg, but was called to a professorship of anatomy and physiology at University ...
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Louis Pierre Gratiolet
1815 - 1865 (50 years)
Louis Pierre Gratiolet was a French anatomist and zoologist who was a native of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Gironde. He succeeded Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire as professor of zoology to the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris.
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Eugène Séguy
1890 - 1985 (95 years)
Eugène Séguy was a French entomologist and artist who specialised in Diptera. He held a chair of entomology at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris from 1956 to 1960. He is also known for establishing the Diptera section at that museum. This entomologist is often confused with a French artist with a similar name: Émile-Allain Séguy . The latter is known for his pochoir artworks representing plants.
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Pieter De Somer
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Pieter De Somer was a Belgian physician and biologist. He studied medicine from 1935 up to 1942 at the Catholic University of Leuven . He did research and later became a professor at the Department of medicine, where he specialised in microbiology and immunology. In 1968, he became the first rector of the Flemish Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and he remained rector until his death in 1985.
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George Francis Atkinson
1854 - 1918 (64 years)
George Francis Atkinson was an American botanist and mycologist. He was born on January 26, 1854, in Raisinville, Michigan, and died on November 14, 1918. He was the son of Joseph and Josephine Atkinson . He studied at Olivet College from 1878 to 1883 and obtained his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1885. He is best known for his contributions to the fields of mycology and botany.
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Alpheus Spring Packard
1839 - 1905 (66 years)
Alpheus Spring Packard Jr. LL.D. was an American entomologist and palaeontologist. He described over 500 new animal species – especially butterflies and moths – and was one of the founders of The American Naturalist.
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Theodor Becker
1840 - 1928 (88 years)
Theodor Becker was a Danish-born German civil engineer and entomologist primarily known for studies on the taxonomy of flies. He worked with Paul Stein, Mario Bezzi, and Kálmán Kertész on Katalog der Paläarktischen dipteren published in Budapest from 1903.
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Günther Enderlein
1872 - 1968 (96 years)
Günther Enderlein was a German zoologist, entomologist, microbiologist, researcher, physician for 60 years, and later a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products. Enderlein received international renown for his insect research, and in Germany became famous due to his concept of the pleomorphism of microorganisms and his hypotheses about the origins of cancer, based on the work of other scientists. His hypotheses about pleomorphism and cancer have now been disproved by science and have only some historical importance today . Some of his concepts, however, are still popular in alternative medicine.
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Carl Sigismund Kunth
1788 - 1850 (62 years)
Carl Sigismund Kunth was a German botanist. He was also known as Karl Sigismund Kunth or anglicized as Charles Sigismund Kunth. He was one of the early systematic botanists who focused on studying the plants of the Americas. Kunth's notable contributions include the publication of Nova genera et species plantarum quas in peregrinatione ad plagam aequinoctialem orbis novi collegerunt Bonpland et Humboldt. This work spanned seven volumes and was published between 1815 and 1825.
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Aldred Scott Warthin
1867 - 1931 (64 years)
Aldred Scott Warthin was an American pathologist whose research laid the foundation for understanding the heritability of certain cancers. He has been described as "the father of cancer genetics." Early life and education He was born October 21, 1866, in Greensburg, Indiana. His parents were Edward Mason Warthin and Eliza Margaret Warthin. As a young man he studied piano and earned a teacher's diploma from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in 1877. In 1888 he received an A.B. in science from Indiana University.
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Gustaf Retzius
1842 - 1919 (77 years)
Prof Magnus Gustaf Retzius FRSFor HFRSE MSA was a Swedish physician and anatomist who dedicated a large part of his life to researching the histology of the sense organs and nervous system. Life Retzius was born in Stockholm, son of the anatomist Anders Retzius . He enrolled at Uppsala University in 1860, and received his medicine kandidat degree there in 1866, transferred to the Karolinska Institute, where he received a Licentiate of Medical Science degree in 1869 and completed his doctorate in medicine in 1871 at Lund University. Retzius worked as an assistant under pathologist Axel Key;...
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Amédée Borrel
1867 - 1936 (69 years)
Amédée Marie Vincent Borrel was a French physician and microbiologist born in Cazouls-lès-Béziers, Hérault. Biography Borrel studied natural sciences and medicine at the University of Montpellier, where he earned his degree in 1890. From 1892 to 1895, Borrel worked in the laboratory of Ilya Ilyich Metchnikoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Here he performed research of tuberculosis, and with Alexandre Yersin and Léon Charles Albert Calmette , he worked on a vaccine against bubonic plague. With Yersin and Calmette, he co-published the treatise Le microbe de la peste à bubons concerning the plague bacillus.
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Friedrich Anton Wilhelm Miquel
1811 - 1871 (60 years)
Friedrich Anton Wilhelm Miquel was a Dutch botanist, whose main focus of study was on the flora of the Dutch East Indies. Early life Miquel was born in Neuenhaus and studied medicine at the University of Groningen, where, in 1833, he received his doctorate. After starting work as a doctor at the Buitengasthuis Hospital in Amsterdam, in 1835, he taught medicine at the clinical school in Rotterdam. In 1838 he became correspondent of the Royal Institute, which later became the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1846 he became member. He was professor of botany at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University .
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Benjamin Castleman
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Benjamin Castleman was an American physician and pathologist best known for describing Castleman's disease , which is named after him. He was also one of the authors of the first case series on pulmonary alveolar proteinosis in a 1958 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Castleman undertook clinicopathologic investigations of parathyroid disease and wrote several important papers on diseases of the thymus and mediastinum. He wrote, or collaborated in writing, over 100 scholarly papers on a variety of disorders.
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Franz Weidenreich
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Franz Weidenreich was a Jewish German anatomist and physical anthropologist who studied evolution. Life and career Weidenreich studied at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität in Strasbourg where he earned a medical degree in 1899. From 1921 to 1924 he served as a Professor of anthropology at the University of Heidelberg and was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1934. In 1935 he succeeded Canadian paleoanthropologist Davidson Black as honorary director of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China. Weidenreich was among the scientists to claim that Piltdown...
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August Grisebach
1814 - 1879 (65 years)
August Heinrich Rudolf Grisebach was a German botanist and phytogeographer. Biography Grisebach studied at the Lyceum in Hanover, the cloister-school at Ilfeld, and the University of Göttingen. He graduated in medicine from the University of Berlin in 1836. He undertook expeditions to Provence, Turkey, the Balkans, and Norway. In 1837 he became associate professor and in 1847 full professor at the medical faculty in Göttingen and was named director of the botanical garden there in 1875. While his main fields of interest were phytogeography and systematics, especially the Gentianaceae and Malpighiaceae, he considered his Flora of the British West Indian Islands his most important work.
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Joseph Barcroft
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
Sir Joseph Barcroft was a British physiologist best known for his studies of the oxygenation of blood. Life Born in Newry, County Down into a Quaker family, he was the son of Henry Barcroft DL and Anna Richardson Malcomson of The Glen, Newry – a property purchased for his parents by his mother's uncle, John Grubb Richardson and adjoining his own estate in Bessbrook. He was initially educated at Bootham School, York and later at The Leys School, Cambridge. He married Mary Agnetta Ball, daughter of Sir Robert S. Ball, in 1903.
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Edwin Klebs
1834 - 1913 (79 years)
Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs was a German-Swiss microbiologist. He is mainly known for his work on infectious diseases. His works paved the way for the beginning of modern bacteriology, and inspired Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. He was the first to identify a bacterium that causes diphtheria, which was called Klebs–Loeffler bacterium . He was the father of physician Arnold Klebs.
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John Struthers
1823 - 1899 (76 years)
Sir John Struthers MD FRCSE FRSE was the first Regius Professor of Anatomy at the University of Aberdeen. He was a dynamic teacher and administrator, transforming the status of the institutions in which he worked. He was equally passionate about anatomy, enthusiastically seeking out and dissecting the largest and finest specimens, including whales, and troubling his colleagues with his single-minded quest for money and space for his collection. His collection was donated to Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh.
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Frans Alfons Janssens
1865 - 1924 (59 years)
Frans Alfons Ignace Maria Janssens was Catholic priest and the discoverer of crossing-over of genes during meiosis, which he called "chiasmatypie". His work was continued by the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Hunt Morgan to develop the theory of genetic linkage.
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Carlos Berg
1843 - 1902 (59 years)
Carlos Berg or Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Berg was an Argentinian naturalist and entomologist of Latvian and Baltic German origin. Having worked a few years in trade, he moved to Riga in 1865 and became curator of the entomological department of the Riga Museum, and then at the Riga Technical University.
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George Beauchamp Knowles
1790 - 1862 (72 years)
George Beauchamp Knowles was an English botanist and a professor at the Royal School of Medicine and Surgery of Birmingham. He worked in close cooperation with Frederic Westcott on the taxonomy of orchids.
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Georg Christian Oeder
1728 - 1791 (63 years)
Georg Christian Edler von Oldenburg Oeder was a German-Danish botanist, medical doctor, economist and social reformer. His name is particularly associated with the initiation of the plate work Flora Danica.
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Franz von Paula Schrank
1747 - 1835 (88 years)
Franz von Paula Schrank was a German priest, botanist and entomologist. Biography He was ordained as a priest in Vienna in 1784, gaining his doctorate in theology two years later. In 1786 he was named chair of mathematics and physics at the lyceum in Amberg, and in 1784 became a professor of botany and zoology at the University of Ingolstadt . Schrank was the first director of the botanical gardens in Munich from 1809 to 1832.
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Władysław Szafer
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Prof Władysław Szafer PAS HFRSE was a Polish botanist, palaeobotanist, quaternary geologist and professor of botany at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He was a world pioneer in nature conservation.
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Julius Kühn
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
Julius Gotthelf Kühn was a German academic and agronomist and he was one of the pioneers of plant pathology. Kuhn's father was a land owner and he gained experience in agriculture and botany on his father's land. He was trained in Bonn, starting at age 30 and was awarded his doctorate, which focused on diseases of beet and canola at Leipzig. In 1862, he became a professor of agriculture at the University of Halle. Kuhn published more than 70 papers on mycology and plant pathology over the course of his career.
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Arthur Shipley
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Sir Arthur Everett Shipley GBE FRS was an English zoologist and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Biography Shipley was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey on 10 March 1861. He was brought up in Datchet, Buckinghamshire , and educated at University College School. He enrolled at St Bartholomew's Hospital as a medical student in 1879, but in the following year transferred to Christ's College, Cambridge to read natural sciences, specialising in zoology.
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Jantina Tammes
1871 - 1947 (76 years)
Jantina "Tine" Tammes was a Dutch botanist and geneticist and the first professor of genetics in the Netherlands. Early life and education Tammes was born on 23 June 1871 in Groningen in the Netherlands. She was the daughter of cocoa manufacturer Beerend Tammes and Swaantje Pot. She had a sister and four brothers, and was the aunt of the international lawyer Arnold Tammes and the botanist Pieter Merkus Lambertus Tammes, namesake of the Tammes problem in mathematics.
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Achille Richard
1794 - 1852 (58 years)
Achille Richard was a French botanist, botanical illustrator and physician . Biography Achille was the son of the botanist Louis-Claude Marie Richard . He was a pharmacist in the French navy, and a member of several well-known societies of that time. He became a botanical leader, and his books remain valued for their clarity and precision.
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Hermann Vöchting
1847 - 1917 (70 years)
Hermann Vöchting was a German botanist. He studied botany in Berlin, where he was influenced by Alexander Braun , Leopold Kny , and Nathaniel Pringsheim , earning his doctorate in 1873 at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on Rhipsalideae. From 1874 he worked as a lecturer at the University of Bonn, distinguishing himself with experimental studies involving plant morphology.
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James Douglas Ogilby
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
James Douglas Ogilby was an Australian ichthyologist and herpetologist. Ogilby was born in Belfast, Ireland, and was the son of zoologist William Ogilby and his wife Adelaide, née Douglas. He received his education at Winchester College, England, and Trinity College, Dublin.
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Frederick DuCane Godman
1834 - 1919 (85 years)
Frederick DuCane Godman was an English lepidopterist, entomologist and ornithologist. He was one of the twenty founding members of the British Ornithologists' Union. Along with Osbert Salvin, he is remembered for studying the fauna and flora of Central America.
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Garcia de Orta
1499 - 1568 (69 years)
Garcia de Orta was a Portuguese physician, herbalist, and naturalist, who worked primarily in Goa and Bombay in Portuguese India. A pioneer of tropical medicine, pharmacognosy, and ethnobotany, Garcia used an experimental approach to the identification and the use of herbal medicines, rather than the older approach of received knowledge.
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Carl Wedl
1815 - 1891 (76 years)
Carl Wedl was a pathologist who was a native of Vienna, Austrian Empire. In 1841 he obtained his doctorate in Vienna, and subsequently practiced medicine in Ischl and Salzburg. In 1844 he took a scientific journey to France and England, afterwards returning to Vienna, where he performed histological research. With assistance from Karl Rokitansky , he received his habilitation in 1849. In 1853 he became an associate professor, and in 1872 was appointed professor of histology at the University of Vienna. Some of his well-known students were Heinrich Auspitz , Moritz Kaposi and Salomon Stricker...
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John Sibthorp
1758 - 1796 (38 years)
John Sibthorp was an English botanist. Education Sibthorp graduated from the University of Oxford in 1777 where he was an undergraduate student at Lincoln College, Oxford. He subsequently studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and University of Montpellier.
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Adrien-Henri de Jussieu
1797 - 1853 (56 years)
Adrien-Henri de Jussieu was a French botanist. Born in Paris as the son of botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1824 with a treatise of the plant family Euphorbiaceae. When his father retired in 1826, he succeeded him at the Jardin des Plantes; in 1845 he became professor of organography of plants. He was also president of the French Academy of Sciences. De Jussieu was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1850.
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Julius Nieuwland
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Julius Aloysius Arthur Nieuwland, CSC, was a Belgian-born Holy Cross priest and professor of chemistry and botany at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is known for his contributions to acetylene research and its use as the basis for one type of synthetic rubber, which eventually led to the invention of neoprene by DuPont.
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William Gardner Smith
1866 - 1928 (62 years)
William Gardner Smith was a Scottish botanist and ecologist who pioneered the study and mapping of the vegetation of the United Kingdom. He was a founding member of the British Ecological Society. Early life and education Smith was born in Dundee, Scotland, and educated at the University College of Dundee, where he obtained a BSc in botany and zoology, and at the University of Munich, where he obtained a PhD. At Munich, Smith studied plant pathology and translated Carl von Tubeuf's Pflanzenkrankheiten.
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Jean Théodore Lacordaire
1801 - 1870 (69 years)
Théodore Lacordaire or Jean Théodore Lacordaire was a Belgian entomologist of French extraction. In spite of his obvious interest in natural history, his family sent him to Le Havre to study "le droit", or the law. In 1824, he embarked for Buenos Aires where he became a commercial salesman. He traveled widely in South America using every opportunity to carry out many observations on local fauna.
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Karl Wilhelm von Dalla Torre
1850 - 1928 (78 years)
Karl Wilhelm von Dalla Torre was an Austrian taxonomist, entomologist and botanist. Dalla Torre was born in Kitzbühel, Tyrol. He studied natural sciences at the University of Innsbruck. He then worked in the University as an entomologist and in 1895 became professor of zoology at the University of Innsbruck. He died in Innsbruck, aged 77.
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R. D. Laing
1927 - 1989 (62 years)
Ronald David Laing , usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illnessin particular, psychosis and schizophrenia. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. Though associated in the public mind with the anti-psychiatry movement, he rejected the label.
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Ulysses S. Grant IV
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
Ulysses Simpson Grant IV was an American geologist and paleontologist known for his work on the fossil mollusks of the California Pacific Coast. He was the youngest son of Ulysses S. Grant Jr., and a grandson of President Ulysses S. Grant and Senator Jerome B. Chaffee. He was born at his father's farm, Merryweather Farm, in Salem Center, Westchester County, New York. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to San Diego, California.
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Seth Eugene Meek
1859 - 1914 (55 years)
Seth Eugene Meek was an American ichthyologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He was the first compiler of a book on Mexican freshwater fishes. Together with his assistant, Samuel F. Hildebrand, he produced the first book on the freshwater fishes of Panama.
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John Martyn
1699 - 1768 (69 years)
John Martyn or Joannes Martyn was an English botanist. Life Martyn was born in London, the son of a merchant. He attended a school in the vicinity of his home, and when he turned 16, worked for his father, intending to follow a business career. He married Marie Anne Fonnereau, daughter of Claude Fonnereau, a Huguenot refugee who had settled in England and became a successful merchant. He abandoned this idea in favour of medical and botanical studies. His interest in botany came from his acquaintance with an apothecary, John Wilmer, and Dr. Patrick Blair, a surgeon-apothecary from Dundee who practiced in London.
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William Henry Lang
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
William Henry Lang FRS FRSE FLS was a British botanist and served as Barker professor of cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester. He was also a specialist in paleobotany. Life The son of Thomas Bilsland Lang, a medical practitioner, and his wife Emily Smith, he was born in Groombridge in Sussex on 12 May 1874.
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Max Verworn
1863 - 1921 (58 years)
Max Richard Constantin Verworn was a German physiologist who was a native of Berlin. He studied medicine and natural sciences in Berlin, and later moved to Jena, where he furthered his studies with Ernst Haeckel and William Thierry Preyer . In 1895 he became a professor at the University of Jena, and in 1901 a professor at the physiological institute at Göttingen. Later, as successor to Eduard Pflüger , he became a professor at the University of Bonn . In 1902 he founded the journal Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Physiologie , and was its publisher until his death in 1921.
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Christian Luerssen
1843 - 1916 (73 years)
Christian Luerssen was a German botanist. He was an authority in the field of pteridology. In 1872, at Leipzig, he graduated as a university teacher of botany, and was later appointed professor of botany at the Forest Academy at Neustadt-Eberswalde . From 1888, he served as a professor at the University of Königsberg. After his death, a portion of his botanical collection was donated by Otto Bjurling to the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
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