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,
#18401
Hermann Friedrich Teichmeyer
1685 - 1746 (61 years)
Hermann Friedrich Teichmeyer was a German physician and botanist born in Hannoversch Münden. He was father-in-law to Albrecht von Haller . The botanical genus Teichmeyeria is likely named after him, although etymological information is lacking. It is considered to be synonymous with the genus Gustavia.
Go to Profile#18402
John George Adami
1862 - 1926 (64 years)
Prof John George Adami was an English pathologist. He was the head of the pathological department of the Royal Victoria Hospital. From 1892, he was professor of pathology in McGill University, Montreal, Canada. During World War I, he was accorded a temporary commission in the Canadian Army Medical Corps to serve as the official historian for the medical branch. Starting in 1919, he was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool.
Go to Profile#18403
Charles Frédéric Martins
1806 - 1889 (83 years)
Charles Frédéric Martins was a French physician, botanist, geologist, naturalist, and translator. Biography Born in Paris, Martins was a Protestant of German descent. He went to school in Paris and Geneva and studied medicine at the University of Paris with medical internship at the Hôpitaux de Paris. There he obtained his doctorate in 1834 with dissertation Principes de la méthode naturelle appliqués à la classification des maladies de la peau . In 1839 he received his agrégation in natural history in Paris. He taught natural history at the Medical Faculty of the Sorbonne. At the University...
Go to Profile#18404
Adolf Loewy
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Adolf Loewy was a German physiologist. A native of Berlin, Loewy studied medicine at the University of Berlin as a student of Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hugo Kronecker, obtaining his medical doctorate in 1885. Later on, he was an assistant to physiologist Nathan Zuntz in Berlin . In 1900 he became an assistant professor, and in 1921 was a professor and in charge of the Schweizerisches Institut für Hochgebirgsphysiologie und Tuberkuloseforschung at Davos.
Go to Profile#18405
Ruth Margery Addoms
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Ruth Margery Addoms , was an American botanist at Duke University specializing in the study of plant anatomy and plant physiology. She contributed to the study of growth-promoting substances in plants.
Go to Profile#18406
John Mitchell
1711 - 1768 (57 years)
John Mitchell was a colonial American physician and botanist. He created the most comprehensive and perhaps largest 18th-century map of eastern North America, known today as the Mitchell Map. First published in 1755, in conjunction with the imminent Seven Years' War, the map was subsequently used during the Treaty of Paris to define the boundaries of the newly independent United States and has been resolving border disputes since.
Go to Profile#18407
Malcolm W. Greaves
#18408
Willet M. Hays
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Willet Martin Hays was an American plant breeder and U. S. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. Biography Hays was born 19 October 1859 on a farm near Eldora, Iowa. He graduated from Drake University in 1885 and obtained a master's degree in agriculture from the Iowa State College at Ames. In 1888 he became the first faculty member of the newly founded Minnesota Agricultural Experimental Station of the University of Minnesota at St. Paul. He served there until 1904, interrupted by a two-year stint at the North Dakota Agricultural College at Fargo 1891–1893.
Go to Profile#18409
Ernst Hallier
1831 - 1904 (73 years)
Ernst Hallier was a German botanist and mycologist. As a young man he was trained as a gardener, later studying botany at the universities of Berlin, Jena and Göttingen. From 1858 he served as an instructor at the Pharmaceutical Institute in Jena, where in 1860 he obtained his habilitation. In 1865 he became an associate professor, resigning his professorship 19 years later .
Go to Profile#18410
Charles Cleveland Nutting
1858 - 1927 (69 years)
Charles Cleveland Nutting was an American zoologist, born in Jacksonville, Illinois. He graduated from Blackburn University and received the M. A. degree from the same institution in 1882. He conducted various zoological expeditions—in Central America for the Smithsonian Institution , in Florida , on the Saskatchewan River —and was naturalist of the Albatross Hawaiian expedition in 1902. He was professor of zoology and curator of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Iowa from 1886 to 1890 and thereafter was head of his department. Nutting's most important publications are s...
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Walter C. Lowdermilk
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Walter Clay Lowdermilk was a soil conservationist who worked in countries throughout the world to help protect and reclaim lands in order to better feed their population. Lowdermilk worked with the Belgian Relief Effort after World War I, in China in the 1920s to help avert famine, with the Soil Conservation Service, in fascist Italy in the 1930s, in the United States, and in Mandatory Palestine planning land and water use.
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Lucien Plantefol
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Lucien Plantefol was a French botanist and member of the French Academy of Sciences who developed a theory of leaf helices to explain phyllotaxis. Life and Work Plantefol was born in Falaise on 24 April 1891 and spent his youth in Montbéliard. He was called up in 1914 as a second lieutenant in the 82nd Infantry Regiment, but was quickly wounded in the Battle of the Meuse and returned from the front to work in the physiology and chemistry laboratories of the National Defense. There he helped to develop the gas mask.
Go to Profile#18413
Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen
1841 - 1900 (59 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen was a German geologist and paleontologist. He was born in Munich and died in Vienna. Overview He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Munich, where he studied the rocks and fossils of the Jurassic system, and published an elaborate work on geology that was crowned by the university. In 1866, he became an instructor in palaeontology at the University of Munich and at the same time taught Princess Theresa and Prince Arnulf of Bavaria. Although an excellent teacher, and especially competent in practical work, Waagen, who was a most loyal Catholic, had little prospect of obtaining a professorship at the University of Munich.
Go to Profile#18414
Aleksandr Fomin
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
Aleksandr Vasiljevich Fomin was a botanist. He studied ferns and seed plants. He was also a director of the Kyiv University Botanical Garden; which was renamed after him, when he died. He was a subject of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union.
Go to Profile#18415
Theodoor Gerard van Lidth de Jeude
1788 - 1863 (75 years)
Theodoor Gerard van Lidth de Jeude was a Dutch physician, veterinarian, and zoologist and was the first director of the newly established Rijks Veterinary College where Veterinary medicine was first taught in the Netherlands in late 1821. His primary contribution to science was the collecting of specimens.
Go to Profile#18416
Henri Lucien Jumelle
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Henri Lucien Jumelle was a French botanist. From 1887 to 1894, he worked as a plant physiologist at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris. Afterwards, he was a professor of botany at the Faculté des Sciences in Marseille . From 1898 to 1916, he was assistant director, then director of the Musée colonial et du Jardin botanique in Marseille.
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Albert Maige
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Albert Maige was a French botanist. Among his works was on the forest flora of Algeria. A major contribution was on the synthesis, movement and storage of starch examining the role of the leucoplast, and the enzymes involved in amylolysis in the cytoplasm.
Go to Profile#18418
Norair Sisakian
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
Norair Martirosovich Sisakian was a Soviet biologist of Armenian origin who worked as an engineer in the Soviet space program, working mainly on biomechanics effects. Sisakian is also one of the founders of space biology, an outstanding organizer of science, a member of the Pugwash movement.
Go to Profile#18419
Svante Samuel Murbeck
1859 - 1946 (87 years)
Svante Samuel Murbeck was a Swedish professor, botanist, pteridologist and explorer. Biography Murbeck was born in the parish of Hardeberga in Skåne County, Sweden. While studying at Lund University, Murbeck undertook a successful field trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina before receiving his PhD in geology and botany in 1891. That same year he was made a lecturer at the university. He took up a position as curator of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and from 1897 until 1902 he worked for the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Alnarp. Murbeck returned to Lund University to become professor of botany and director of the Botaniska trädgården from 1902-24.
Go to Profile#18420
Albert Oppel
1831 - 1865 (34 years)
Carl Albert Oppel was a German paleontologist. History He was born at Hohenheim in Württemberg, on 19 December 1831. He first went to the University of Tübingen, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1853. The results of his work was published in Die Juraformation Englands, Frankreichs und des südwestlichen Deutschlands . He went to the Palaeontological Museum at Munich in 1858 and became an assistant there. It was in 1860 that he became the Professor of Palaeontology at the University of Munich. Then, a year later, he became the director of the Palaeontological Collection. Of his later works, i...
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Ludwig Imhoff
1801 - 1868 (67 years)
Ludwig Imhoff was a Swiss physician and entomologist. Imhoff was the son of a merchant Hieronymus Imhoff and his wife Johanna nee Wenk in Basel. He attended the Samuel Hopf school in Basel, which followed the educational methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. He then attended the Pädagogium in Basel. In 1820 he began law studies but switched to medicine. He studied medicine in Strasbourg, Heidelberg, Halle and Berlin. In 1826, after completing his studies, he returned to Basel. Here he worked as a doctor and naturalist. He married Maria Julia Auguste Heitz in 1829. Ludwig Imhoff habilitated at the University of Basel as a zoologist with a focus on entomology.
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Chittaranjan Andrade
#18423
Henry Suter
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Henry Suter was a Swiss-born New Zealand zoologist, naturalist, palaeontologist, and malacologist. Biography Henry Suter was born on 9 March 1841 in Riesbach, Zurich, Switzerland, and was the son of a prosperous silk-manufacturer of Zurich. He was educated at the local school and university, being trained as an analytical chemist. Suter joined his father's business, and for some years he engaged in various commercial pursuits.
Go to Profile#18424
Hans Thierfelder
1858 - 1930 (72 years)
Hans Thierfelder was a German biochemist and professor at the University of Tübingen. He studied lipids and phospholipids and was involved in isolating cerebrone, the first glycolipid in 1900. Thierfelder was born in Rostock where his father Theodor, was a professor of medicine. He graduated from the Rostock Gymnasium and studied medicine from 1876 at Rostock, moving to Tübingen, Heidelberg, Munich and finally graduated in 1881 at Freiburg. Influenced in physiology by Carl von Voit and Wilhelm Kühne he began to work under Otto Nasse at the Institute for Pharmacology and Physiological Chemistry, Rostock.
Go to Profile#18425
Gabriel Anton
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Gabriel Anton was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He is primarily remembered for his studies of psychiatric conditions arising from damage to the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia. Academic career He was a native of Saaz, Bohemia, and in 1882 received his medical doctorate at Prague. In 1887 he traveled to Vienna in order to work with Theodor Meynert , who was to become an important influence to Anton's medical career. In 1891 he moved to Innsbruck, where he served as an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the university clinic. Later , he relocated to the Universi...
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Adolphus Ypey
1749 - 1822 (73 years)
Adolphus Ypey or Adolphus Ypeus or Adolf Ypey , was a Dutch botanist and Doctor of Philosophy and Medicine who graduated at the University of Franeker and stayed on to lecture in botany. He later lectured in Medicine at the University of Leyden.
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Franz Körte
1782 - 1845 (63 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Franz Körte was a German natural and agricultural scientist, and for thirty years Professor of Natural Sciences at the Agricultural Academy in Möglin, which was founded by Albrecht Daniel Thaer.
Go to Profile#18428
Daniel Matthias Heinrich Mohr
1780 - 1808 (28 years)
Daniel Matthias Heinrich Mohr was a German botanist. As a young botanist from Schleswig-Holstein, he started his career as a pupil of Johan Christian Fabricius at Kiel and Heinrich Adolf Schrader at the University of Göttingen. He later became a professor of zoology and botany, and his research projects focused on algae and bryophytes. He named many species and was among the first to systematise algae by means of their reproduction.
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Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf
1850 - 1932 (82 years)
Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf was an American botanist who specialized in the flora of the Pacific Northwest. He was largely self-taught and is considered one of the top three self-taught botanists of his era for the Pacific Northwest, alongside Thomas Jefferson Howell and William Conklin Cusick.
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Erich Martin Hering
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Erich Martin Hering was a German entomologist who specialised in leafmining insects, He was a curator in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where his collections of Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera are conserved. His collections of Agromyzidae are shared between MfN and the Agricultural School at Portici now part of the University of Naples Federico II.
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Enzio Reuter
1867 - 1951 (84 years)
Enzio Rafael Reuter was a Finnish entomologist who specialised in Lepidoptera. He wrote Über die Palpen der Rhopalocera: Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis der verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen unter den Tagfaltern, an important work on the classification of lepidoptera in which some higher level taxa are erected.
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John M. Teal
#18433
Dominique Clos
1821 - 1908 (87 years)
Dominique Clos was a French physician and botanist. He studied medicine and sciences in Toulouse and Paris, obtaining his medical degree in 1845 and his PhD in natural sciences in 1848. In 1853 he succeeded Alfred Moquin-Tandon as professor of botany at the University of Toulouse, maintaining this position until his retirement in 1889. At Toulouse, he made major contributions to its botanical garden and herbarium. From 1881 to 1908, he was a correspondent-member of the Académie des sciences.
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Oskar von Kirchner
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Emil Otto Oskar von Kirchner was a German botanist and agronomist. He studied botany at the University of Breslau, receiving his doctorate in 1873 with a dissertation on the botanical writings of Theophrastus. After graduation, he worked as an assistant at the pomology institute of the agricultural academy in Proskau. From 1881 to 1917 he was a professor of botany at the Agricultural Academy in Hohenheim.
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Francis Gerald William Knowles
1915 - 1974 (59 years)
Sir Francis Gerald William Knowles, 6th baronet was a distinguished British research biologist and zoologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who held the chair of anatomy at King's College London where he was Dean, to which he had come by a somewhat unorthodox route. He was, as The Times put it, "a fundamental scientist of outstanding calibre".
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Friedrich Berthold Reinke
1862 - 1919 (57 years)
Friedrich Reinke was a German anatomist. Reinke crystals, Reinke's space and Reinke's edema are named after him. Childhood Friedrich was the ninth of ten children born to Mr Theodor Friedrich Julius Reinke a Lutheran Pastor, and Mrs Elisabeth Henriette Karoline Gottfriede Juliane Reinke, born Kämpffer .
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Robert Henry Perry
#18438
Royal Charles Steadman
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Royal Charles Steadman was a botanical illustrator and wax fruit modeler for the United States Department of Agriculture who also developed a patented method of strengthening wax fruit with plaster on the interior.
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Charles Alston
1685 - 1760 (75 years)
Charles Alston was a Scottish botanist. Career Alston was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and was apparently raised by the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton. In 1715 he went to Leyden to study under the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave. On his return to Scotland he became lecturer in materia medica and botany at Edinburgh and also superintendent of the botanical gardens. He was a critic of Linnaeus's system of plant classification.
Go to Profile#18440
Albert Frey-Wyssling
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
See also Albert Frey Dr Albert Friedrich Frey-Wyssling was a Swiss botanist who pioneered submicroscopic morphology and helped initiate the study of molecular biology. Life Frey-Wyssling was born Albert Frey in Küsnacht, where his father worked at the teacher training college of the Canton of Zürich teaching chemistry, geology, and anthropology. One of his grandfathers and several of his aunts were also teachers, and as a result thought that his own talent would be to teach. He entered the Realgymnasium in Zürich after six years of elementary school, and passed the graduation examination in 1919.
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Joseph Charles Aub
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Joseph Charles Aub was an American endocrinologist and professor then chair of medicine at Harvard University. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. The lead industry funded Aub's research which ignored the health effects of lead on children.
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Stanisław Smreczyński
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Stanisław Smreczyński was the founding father of the Department of Systematic Zoology and Zoogeography of the Jagiellonian University. He was known for his contributions to contemporary understanding of early embryonic development of amphibians and insects as well as his expertise in Pleistocene and extant weevils .
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Eva Mameli
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Giuliana Luigia Evelina Mameli , was an Italian botanist, and naturalist. A native of Sassari, in Sardinia, in 1906 she moved to Pavia with her brother Efisio Mameli, chemist and pharmacologist at the local university, where in 1907 she graduated in Natural Sciences. In 1915 she obtained the libera docenza. While a junior lecturer at the University of Pavia, she married agronomist Mario Calvino. In 1920 Mario offered Eva Mameli a job as Head of the Botany Department of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, where the couple went to live and where in 1923 their first child, Italo Calvino, was born.
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Yngve Zotterman
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Yngve Zotterman was a Swedish neurophysiologist who received his medical training at the Karolinska Institute. He conducted pioneering studies on nerve conduction together with Edgar Adrian. He then worked on sensory function of skin, particularly related to pain, heat and the neurochemistry of taste buds.
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Woo Jang-choon
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Woo Jang-choon, U Nagaharu in Japanese, was an agricultural scientist and botanist active in Korea under Japanese rule and later in South Korea, famous for his discoveries in the genetics and breeding of plants.
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Alexandre Salimbeni
1867 - 1942 (75 years)
Alexandre Salimbeni was an Italian physician and biologist born in Acquapendente. He studied medicine at the University of Siena, where he later became a professor of pathological anatomy. From 1895 he performed studies in the laboratory of Elie Metchnikoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he worked closely with Jules Bordet . In 1900 he served as préparateur under Amédée Borrel in the laboratory of microbiology courses.
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Charles H. Fernald
1838 - 1921 (83 years)
Charles Henry Fernald was an American entomologist, geologist, and zoologist, who is credited as the first college professor of economic entomology. Fernald grew up at Fernald Point in Mount Desert, Maine, and went on to prepare for college at Maine Wesleyan Seminary before joining the navy in 1862. After receiving a master's degree from Bowdoin College he went on to serve as principal of several academies in Maine. Throughout his career he would document and describe several species of microlepidoptera and in 1886 became the first full-time professor and chair of the natural sciences at what is now the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Marie-Victorin Kirouac
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Brother Marie-Victorin, F.S.C. , was a Canadian member of Brothers of the Christian Schools and a noted botanist in Quebec, Canada. He is known as the father of the Botanical Garden of Montreal. Biography He was born Joseph-Louis-Conrad Kirouac to Cyrille Kirouac, a flower merchant, and Philomène Luneau in Kingsey Falls, Quebec. Prior to taking religious vows and becoming Brother Marie-Victorin, he was known as Conrad.
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Philipp Stöhr
1849 - 1911 (62 years)
Philipp Stöhr was a German anatomist and histologist. His nephew, also named , was a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn. He studied medicine in Würzburg, where in 1869 he became a member of the Corps Bavaria Würzburg. As a professor at the University of Würzburg, he developed a leading school of histology and embryology.
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