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,
#18451
August Homburger
1873 - 1930 (57 years)
August Homburger was a prominent German child psychiatrist, hailed as a "pioneer" in the field. He taught as a professor at Heidelberg University, where he was the founder alongside Ernst Moro of the Children's Counselling Centre. He wrote extensively about Haltlose personality disorder in children.
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Adriano Fiori
1865 - 1950 (85 years)
Adriano Fiori was an Italian botanist. He studied medicine and natural sciences at the University of Modena, then spent several years working as an assistant at the botanical institute in Padua . From 1900 to 1913 he was a professor of natural sciences at the Forestry Institute of Vallombrosa, and from 1913 to 1936, he served as a professor in Florence.
Go to Profile#18453
William H. Phelps Sr.
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
William Henry Phelps Sr. was an American ornithologist and businessman. One of his sons, William H. Phelps Jr., was also an ornithologist, and collaborated with him. William Phelps was the founder of the William Phelps Ornithological Collection, located in Sabana Grande. This is still the most important private ornithological collection of the world.
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George Stewardson Brady
1832 - 1921 (89 years)
George Stewardson Brady was a professor of natural history at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne who did important volumes on Copepoda and Ostracoda, including those from the Challenger expedition.
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Charles Elmer Allen
1872 - 1954 (82 years)
Charles Elmer Allen was an American botanist and cell biologist whose discoveries include the first documentation of sex chromosomes in plants. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and held presidencies of the Botanical Society of America , the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters , the American Society of Naturalists , and the American Microscopical Society . Allen was a professor at the University of Wisconsin for over 20 years.
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Klaus Conrad
1905 - 1961 (56 years)
Klaus Conrad was a German neurologist and psychiatrist with important contributions to neuropsychology and psychopathology. He joined the Nazi Party in 1940. He was best known as a professor of psychiatry and neurology, and director of the University Psychiatric Hospital in Göttingen from 1958 until his death.
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William Somerville
1860 - 1932 (72 years)
Sir William Somerville KBE FRSE LLD was a 19th/20th century Scottish agriculturalist. He is one of the few academics to have taught at both Cambridge University and Oxford University. He was twice President of the Arboricultural Society: 1900–1901 and 1922–1924.
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Henry Alexis Thomson
1863 - 1924 (61 years)
Henry Alexis Thomson CMG FRCS FRCSE was a Scottish anatomist and medical author. He was Professor of Systematic Surgery at the University of Edinburgh from 1909 to 1923. He was an honorary member of the French Association of Surgeons and of the American Society of Clinical Surgery.
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Miguel Colmeiro Penido
1816 - 1901 (85 years)
Miguel Colmeiro y Penido was a Spanish botanist, and member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences . Biography Colmeiro was born on 22 October 1816 in Santiago de Compostela. He was the rector of the Faculty of Sciences in the Complutense University of Madrid where he later became the Dean. He had been the Director of the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, and professor of Phytography and Botanical Geography. He also was a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and of the Real Academia Nacional de Medicina de España.
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Hendrik Weyenbergh, Jr.
1842 - 1885 (43 years)
#18461
Friedrich Panse
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Friedrich Panse was a German psychiatrist who was involved with the Nazi T-4 Euthanasia Program. He was an advisor who "expertly guided" patients into gas chambers. After the war, in 1948, Dr. Panse was tried, but he was acquitted. His defense that was that if he had not participated, even more patients would have died. He was then made Director of the psychiatric clinic of the Medical Academy of the Rhine Hospital in Düsseldorf. In 1965 he was elected president of the German Society for Psychiatry and Neurology.
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Gabriel Langfeldt
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Gabriel Langfeldt was a Norwegian psychiatrist. He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1940 to 1965. His publications centered on schizophrenia and forensic medicine. He was involved as an expert during the trial against Hamsun, and wrote a book about Quisling.
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Donald Strathearn Rawson
1905 - 1961 (56 years)
Donald Strathearn Rawson was a Canadian limnologist who worked with the University of Saskatchewan from 1928 to 1961. For his research, Rawson wrote six publications about twelve lakes he had researched in Saskatchewan. He additionally conducted lake investigations in Western Canada during the 1930s and the Northwest Territories in the 1940s. While with the university, Rawson was both in charge of their Fisheries Laboratory and head of biology from the late 1940s to early 1960s. In 1944, Rawson was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. For Canada, Rawson was posthumously named a Person of ...
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Carl Schiøtz
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Carl Schiøtz was a Norwegian physician and professor of hygiene and bacteriology at the University of Oslo. Biography He was born in Hamar, Norway. His parents were Jonas Schanche Kielland Schiøtz and his wife Hanna Minda Constance Øvergaard. His brother was military officer Johannes Henrik Schiøtz . In 1906, he was married to Borghild Hannestad . After graduating in 1896 from Hamar Cathedral School, he became a cand.med. in 1904 at the University of Kristiana From 1907 to 1914 he worked at Nes in Ringsaker. He moved to Kristiania to work at the Rikshospitalet as a reserve doctor, university fellow and health inspector.
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Hugh Scott
1885 - 1960 (75 years)
Hugh Scott was a British entomologist and biogeographer. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941. He worked as curator of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology and as assistant keeper in the Department of Entomology, British Museum .
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Max Rothmann
1868 - 1915 (47 years)
Max Rothmann was a German neuroanatomist and physiologist who was a native of Berlin. Biography He was born on April 26, 1868, in Berlin, into a Jewish family. His father Oskar Rothmann was the physician and "Sanitätsrat".
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Jacob Hermann Knapp
1832 - 1911 (79 years)
Jacob Hermann Knapp , also known as Hermann Knapp, was a German-American ophthalmologist and otolaryngologist. Biography Knapp was born in Dauborn, Nassau. He earned his medical degree from the University of Giessen in 1854. As a young physician he studied with Franciscus Cornelis Donders in Utrecht, William Bowman in London, Albrecht von Graefe in Berlin and Hermann von Helmholtz in Heidelberg. From 1860 until 1868 he was a professor of ophthalmology at Heidelberg.
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John Fraser
1750 - 1811 (61 years)
John Fraser, FLS, F.R.H.S., was a Scottish botanist who collected plant specimens around the world, from North America and the West Indies to Russia and points between, with his primary career activity from 1780 to 1810. Fraser was a commissioned plant collector for Catherine, Czar of Russia in 1795, Paul I of Russia in 1798, and for the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1806; he issued nursery catalogues c. 1790 - 1796, and had an important herbarium that was eventually sold to the Linnean Society.
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Carl Wehmer
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Wehmer , was a German chemist and mycologist. He worked on the production of citric acid by fermentation.
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Arthur van Gehuchten
1861 - 1914 (53 years)
Arthur van Gehuchten was a Belgian anatomist, born in Antwerp. He was professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Leuven until the start of World War I in 1914. He moved to England and taught biology at Cambridge University until his death. Van Gehuchten is especially known for his contributions to the theory of neuronss. In anatomy, the van Gehuchten method is the fixing of a histologic tissue in a mixture of glacial acetic acid 10 parts, chloroform 30 parts, and alcohol 60 parts.
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Johann Christian Albers
1795 - 1857 (62 years)
Johann Christian Albers was a German physician and malacologist. During his career, he served as Medicinalrath and Regierungsrath in Berlin. As a zoologist, he was the taxonomic authority of the land snail family Orthalicidae and of numerous land snail genera, including: Napaeus, Diaphera, Amphidromus, Scutalus, Drymaeus and Opeas.
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Margaret Anderson
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Margaret Dampier Anderson was a British biochemist and scientific indexer. She published four scientific articles in the 1920s before marrying in 1927 and began indexing books beginning in 1960. Life Margaret Whetham was born on 21 April 1900, the daughter of William Cecil Dampier Whetham, a Cambridge-educated scientist and agricultural academic, and his wife Catherine Durning Holt, a daughter of Liverpool merchant Robert Durning Holt who had also pursued an education at Cambridge. One of her many great aunts was social reformer Beatrice Webb. She had one brother and four sisters, including Edith Holt Whetham.
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J. R. Tosh
1872 - Present (154 years)
James Ramsay Tosh FRSE was a 19th/20th century Scottish canal engineer and marine biologist. He gives his name to the Brown Whipray Himantura Toshi also known as Tosh's Whipray. Life He was born in Dundee on 2 November 1872. He was educated at Donaldson Street School then Harris Academy in Dundee. He then studied at St Andrews University graduating BSc MA in 1894.
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Basanta Kumar Das
1899 - 1957 (58 years)
Basanta Kumar Das was an Indian fisheries zoologist. He studied air-breathing fishes and served as a professor of zoology at the Osmania University and directed research on fisheries. Life and work Das was born in Gangoor, Burdwan District. He studied at the government school in Allahabad before joining Muir Central College and receiving an MS in 1918. He became a lecturer in Allahabad University in 1920 and received a UP State Scholarship to study abroad. He joined Imperial College and conducted research under E.W. MacBride on studied air-breathing fishes and received a DSc from the University of London in 1926.
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Filippo De Filippi
1869 - 1938 (69 years)
Filippo De Filippi was an Italian medical doctor, scientist, mountaineer and explorer. De Filippi was born in Turin on 6 April 1869 to Giuseppe De Filippi, a lawyer, and Olimpia Sella. Personal and professional life Working as a doctor De Filippi specialised in physiological chemistry and in experimental aspects of surgery, lecturing at Bologna and Genoa universities.
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Eric Frederic Drabble
1887 - 1933 (46 years)
Eric Frederic Drabble FLS was a British botanist and leading authority on British Viola. Drabble was a lecturer in botany at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School from 1901 to 1903. In 1903 he graduated with a DSc from the University of London. He was a lecturer from 1903 to 1905 at the Royal College of Science. He then moved to Liverpool University where he was a lecturer from 1905 to 1906; there Drabble and Leo Farmar were the two members of the economic botany section of the scientific staff of Liverpool University's Institute of Commercial Research in the Tropics. Drabble was a lecturer at ...
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Georg Heinrich Borowski
1746 - 1801 (55 years)
Georg Heinrich Borowski was a German zoologist born in Königsberg , East Prussia, to Andreas Ernst Borowski and wife, Maria Regina Negelken. His elder brother was the Archbishop of Koenigsberg, Ludwig Ernst von Borowski. He died in Frankfurt a. d. Oder, where he had taught at the university there.
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Ferdinand Franz Wallraf
1748 - 1824 (76 years)
Ferdinand Franz Wallraf was a German botanist, mathematician, theologian, art collector and Roman Catholic priest. His collection formed the founding nucleus of the Wallraf–Richartz Museum. Biography He was the son of a Master tailor. After 1760, he attended the and, from 1765, studied at the Art Faculty; graduating in 1767 with a master's degree. He had no money to continue his higher education so, having received minor orders in 1763, he became a teacher. In 1772, he was ordained a priest by Auxiliary Bishop . Beginning in 1776 his friend, the Professor and physician, Johann Georg Menn , helped him study medicine.
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Charles Potter
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Charles Potter FRES was an English entomologist known for his work on stored product insects and their management. He devised a laboratory technique for standardized insecticide treatment using an atomized spray to cover a surface uniformly. The equipment he designed for this purpose is now known as the Potter spray tower.
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Roy R. Grinker Sr.
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Roy Richard Grinker Sr. was an American neurologist and psychiatrist, Professor of Psychiatry at University of Chicago, and pioneer in American psychiatry and psychosomatics. Biography Grinker was born in Chicago, where his father was a neuropsychiatrist. He received a B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1919 and a M.D. in 1921 from Rush Medical College. Directly afterwards he spent a postgraduate year in Europe. In 1933 back in Europe he took psychoanalytic training with Sigmund Freud.
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Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes was an American librarian, mathematician, and botanist who became the first woman to become state librarian of Indiana and the first woman on the faculty of Purdue University.
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Édouard Lefèvre
1839 - 1894 (55 years)
Édouard Lefèvre was a French botanist and later entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera. He became a member of the Entomological Society of France in 1869, and twice served as president of the society in 1884 and 1893.
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Ernestine Hogan Basham Thurman
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Ernestine Hogan Basham Thurman was an American entomologist and researcher, focusing on mosquitoes and vector control. In 1951 she was the first woman sent by the United States to Thailand to establish a malaria control program.
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Mancel Thornton Munn
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Mancel Thornton Munn was a New York State botanist, an agronomist, and an expert in crop seed testing who pioneered some of the early American legislative efforts to regulate the import of seeds from other countries. He was also an Emeritus Professor of Seed Investigations at Cornell University.
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Milton Hopkins
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Milton Hopkins, Jr. was an American historian, professor of biology, and an editor of college textbooks. Biography In 1917 Milton Hopkins, Jr. moved with his family to Port Washington, New York and attended elementary school and high school there. In 1930 he received his bachelor's degree from Amherst College. After graduating with M.A. and Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University, he was a professor of biology from 1936 to 1945 at the University of Oklahoma.
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Sergey Kravkov
1873 - 1938 (65 years)
Sergey Pavlovich Kravkov was a soil scientist and agricultural chemist. He lived in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. Biography Sergey Pavlovich Kravkov was born 21 June 1873 in Ryazan in the family of a non-commissioned officer Pavel Alexeyevich Kravkov , who served as a senior clerk in the office of the Chief Enlistment Officer of the Ryazan Governorate. According to the family legend, the scientist's mother Evdokia Ivanovna , before wedding a "Kaluga petty bourgeois", was an illegitimate daughter of Konstantin Kavelin , a famous Russian historian, jurist and sociologist, one ...
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Harvey M. Patt
1918 - 1982 (64 years)
Harvey Milton Patt was an American physiologist, radiation biologist, and cell biologist, who made "important scientific contributions in cell cycle kinetics and tissue repopulation." Education and career Patt received in 1942 his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Chicago. His dissertation is titled The relation of a low blood calcium to parathyroid secretion. He was an instructor in physiology at the University of Chicago after serving for two years as a lieutenant J.G. in the United States Navy.
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Fritz Isidore van Emden
1898 - 1958 (60 years)
Fritz Isidore van Emden also known as Frits van Emden was an entomologist who specialized in Coleoptera and Diptera. Biography Fritz Isidore van Emden was born in Amsterdam on 3 October 1898. Van Emden's parents were textile dealer Abraham van Emden and Konstanze Irma Lippman , who had married at Leipzig on 23 March 1897.
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Giovanni Vastarini-Cresi
1870 - 1924 (54 years)
Giovanni Vastarini-Cresi was an Italian anatomist and professor at the Naples Anatomical Institute. He is especially known for studies of the human tongue and arterio-venous anastomoses in humans and other animals.
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Rezső Bálint
1874 - 1929 (55 years)
Rezső Bálint was a Jewish-Hungarian neurologist and psychiatrist. He discovered Bálint's syndrome. He was born into a German-Jewish family that had settled in Budapest. Rezso Balint’s first writings, published while he was still a medical student, were case studies examining muscular atrophy in hemiplegia. He went on to study tabes dorsalis and the treatment of epilepsy. In 1907, Dr. Balint recorded his observations of a patient who suffered from a unique constellation of neurologic symptoms including fixation of gaze, neglect of objects in his periphery, and misreaching for target objects. T...
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Johan Carl Krauss
1759 - 1826 (67 years)
Johan Carl Krauss , was a German-born professor of medicine at Leiden, botanist, taxonomist and author of botanical books. He was the son of Christophorus Adam Krauss, a physician at the court of Prince Hohenlohe, and Dorothea Zolner. He is best known for his publication "Afbeeldingen der fraaiste, meest uitheemsche boomen en heesters".
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Harriette Cushman
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Harriette Eliza Cushman was the first female Extension Service poultry specialist in the United States, a lifelong supporter of the arts, an environmental advocate, and an honorary member of the Blackfoot tribe.
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Robert Hogg
1818 - 1897 (79 years)
Robert Hogg was a Scottish nurseryman and botanist. He was known as a pomologist who contributed to the science of classification. He published his book British Pomology in 1851, and co-edited The Florist and Pomologist: A Pictorial Monthly Magazine of Flowers, Fruits and General Horticulture.
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Edward Sandford Burgess
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Edward Sandford Burgess was an American botanist and professor. External links Biography at University of Oregon Libraries WebsiteFind A Grave Memorial
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H. Orin Halvorson
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Halvor Orin Halvorson was an American microbiologist. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1928, he continued to teach there until 1949, becoming director of their Hormel Institute in 1943. He served as head of the Bacteriology Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign beginning in 1949, and first director of the School of Life Sciences there beginning in 1959. He retired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965, whereupon he returned to the University of Minnesota faculty. He served as president of the Society of American Bacteriologists in 1955.
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James Murray
1923 - 1961 (38 years)
James Murray was an organic chemist at the University of Otago. He was the first twentieth century lichenologist in New Zealand. Career James Murray worked at the University of Otago in Dunedin as a senior lecturer in chemistry.
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Mark Ridley
1560 - 1624 (64 years)
Dr Mark Ridley was an English physician and lexicographer, born in Stretham, Cambridgeshire, to Lancelot Ridley. He became physician to the English merchants in Russia, and then personal physician to the Tsar of Russia.
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Ethel Katherine Crum
1886 - 1943 (57 years)
Ethel Katherine Crum was an American botanist, noted for collecting and studying California flora, as well as serving as assistant curator of the University of California Herbarium. She discovered and formally described at least 13 species and varieties of plants.
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Harry Kirk
1859 - 1948 (89 years)
Harry Borrer Kirk was a New Zealand school inspector, biologist and university professor. Public life He was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England on 9 March 1859 to Sarah Jane Mattocks and Thomas Kirk. The family emigrated to New Zealand arriving in Auckland on 9 February 1863 and Wellington in 1874 when Thomas Kirk was appointed to Wellington College. Harry studied for University of New Zealand exams at home, gaining a BA in 1882 and a MA 1883, after which he joined the Department of Education first as a clerk and then as an inspector of native schools. As an inspector, he spend almost tw...
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Józef Grzybowski
1869 - 1922 (53 years)
Józef Grzybowski , was a Polish geologist, paleontologist and foraminiferologist. Grzybowski was born in Kraków. He was educated at Jagiellonian University where he became the director of the Paleontological Laboratory. Grzybowski was a Professor of Palaeontology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, a pioneer in the use of microfossils for stratigraphical applications.
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