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,
#18751
Edith Philip Smith
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Edith Philip Smith FLS FRSE was a botanist and teacher who became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Head of the Botany Department at Queen's College, Dundee . Career She was one of the first female graduates to receive a degree at the University of Oxford when the first women's graduation ceremony was held there in 1920. She studied at Somerville College, and in June 1920 passed exams in the School of Natural Science with first-class honours, leading to a BA. She then spent a year at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, and undertook research in the plant physiology laboratory at Harvard.
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Eddie Roux
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Eddie Roux was a Transvaal Colony-born botanist, academic, writer, member of the South African Communist Party and anti-apartheid activist. Early life He was born Edward Roux to Afrikaner father Phillip R. Roux, a pharmacist and botanist, who was involved in the Labour Party and English mother, Edith May Wilson. He grew up in Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg. Roux's political view were further inspired by the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. After matriculating at Jeppe High School, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand and studied botany and zoology. At university, he joined ...
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Robert Hippolyte Chodat
1865 - 1934 (69 years)
Robert Hippolyte Chodat was a Swiss botanist and phycologist who was a professor and director of the botanical institute at the University of Geneva. He studied medicine and botany at Geneva, where he was later a lecturer of pharmacy. In 1889 he attained the title of associate professor, two years later becoming a full professor of medical and pharmaceutical botany. From 1900 onward, he taught classes in general and systematic botany. In 1908 he was appointed rector at the University of Geneva.
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Robert Elias Fries
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Robert Elias Fries , the youngest son of Theodor Magnus Fries and grandson of Elias Magnus Fries and an expert on mushrooms. A Swedish botanist who was a member of the British Mycological Society and involved with The Botanical Museum , Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Natural History Museum , the National Botanic Garden of Belgium , Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de la Ville de Genève , Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew ,the Swedish Museum of Natural History Department of Phanerogamic Botany and the United States National Herbarium, Smithsonian Institution .
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Yrjö Reenpää
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Yrjö Reenpää was a Finnish physiologist and philosopher and professor of physiology in University of Helsinki. He developed general sensory physiology on the bases of Kantian epistemology, psycho-physics and phenomenology.
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Emmeline Moore
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Emmeline Moore was an American biologist known for her various articles on fish diseases, as well as pioneering work in conservation and combating water pollution. She earned a PhD in biology from Cornell University in 1916. Moore supervised and edited fourteen watershed reports conducted in New York between 1926 and 1939 and these were the most comprehensive scientific surveys of any states' water resources. She died at a nursing home in Guilderland, New York at the age of 91 following an extended illness.
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Louisa E. Rhine
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Louisa Ella Rhine was an American doctor of botany and is known for her work in parapsychology. At the time of her death, she was recognized as the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences, and has been referred to as the "first lady of parapsychology."
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Wataru Ishijima
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Wataru Ishijima was a paleontologist and geologist. Ishijima was one of the most prolific researchers of fossil calcareous algae. After graduating from the Imperial Fisheries Institute in 1927, Ishijima joined the Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Faculty of Science, Tohoku Imperial University from 1927–1931. He then worked at the Institute of Geology, Taihoku Imperial University during 1942–1945 and then at the Rikkyo University from 1945–1980. His doctoral dissertation was submitted to Tohoku University and was privately published by Yūhodō . He described a total of 139 taxa of foss...
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Othmar Kühn
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Othmar Kühn was an Austrian geologist and paleontologist at the University of Vienna who was a member of the Nazi Party, serving in the Wehrmacht as a military geologist during World War II. He worked mainly on Cretaceous stratigraphy and began a catalogue of the fossils of Austria, Fossilium catalogus Austriae.
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Nicholas Sergeevich Obraztsov
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Nicholas Sergeevich Obraztsov was a Russian-American scholar, entomologist, and leading specialist of the tortricoid microlepidoptera. Early life and career Obraztsov was born on 18 August 1906 in Rostov on the Don, Russia, to Dr. Sergei Nikolaevich Obraztsov and his wife Ludmila Nikolaevna Obraztsova. From 1922 to 1934 he studied natural history, science, chemistry, and mathematics at the Institute for Pedagogy in Nikolaev. He furthermore obtained a PhD form the University of Munich in 1951. After various positions in Kiev, Konigsberg and Munich he emigrated to the US in 1951 where he became...
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Thomas B. Symons
1880 - 1970 (90 years)
Thomas Baddeley Symons was an American academic who briefly served as President of the University of Maryland, College Park in 1954. Symons was born in Easton, Maryland and raised on a farm in Talbot County. He entered Maryland Agricultural College as a student in 1898; initially planning to study agriculture, he was introduced to entomology by Willis Grant Johnson. He earned his undergraduate degree in entomology in 1902, and his master's degree two years later. After receiving his master's, he worked as an entomology assistant at MAC, teaching zoology and entomology, and was later appointed state entomologist, a position which he held from 1905 to 1914.
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Johannes Lid
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Johannes Lid was a Norwegian botanist. He was born in Voss, and he married the illustrator Dagny Tande Lid in 1936. He is particularly known for his works on Scandinavian flora, and for his widely used handbook to plants Norsk flora, with illustrations by his wife Dagny Tande Lid. He co-founded and chaired the Norwegian Botanical Association from 1935 to 1942. From 1948 onward he served as a curator at the Botanical Museum in Oslo. After his retirement in 1956, he carried out in-depth studies of the flora of the Canary Islands. He became a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letter...
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George Matthai
1887 - 1947 (60 years)
George Matthai was an Indian zoologist who specialized in marine biology, contributing to the systematics of Madreporarian corals. He was a professor of zoology at the Panjab University in Lahore. Life and career He returned to India in 1918 and worked at the department of zoology at the Panjab University, Lahore. He received a ScD from the University of Cambridge in 1929. He succeeded Lt. Col. J. Stephenson in 1919 and his retirement in 1942 was postponed to 1945 due to the war.
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August Adriaan Pulle
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
August Adrian Pulle was a Dutch professor and botanist. He made important contributions to knowledge of the Flora of Suriname and the island of New Guinea. Personal life Education Pulle attended high school in Arnhem and studied pharmacy at the Utrecht University, in 1899 he took his bachelor's degree. He attended lectures of the plant physiologist F. A. F. C. Went and decided to continue his studies in zoology and botany. In 1900, Pulle was appointed as assistant at the botanical laboratory and herbarium, in 1904 he was appointed teacher of natural history at the Higher secondary school in Utrecht.
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Matsumoto Hikoshichirō
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
was a Japanese zoologist, palaeontologist, and archaeologist, and a recipient of the Imperial Academy Prize. Biography Born in Meiji 20 , Matsumoto graduated from the Department of Zoology, Tokyo Imperial University, in 1911. From 1914 to 1933 he taught at Tohoku Imperial University, initially as a lecturer, then from 1922 as professor. From 1955, he was professor of biology at Fukushima Medical University, where he taught basic medicine. In 1921, he was awarded the Imperial Academy Prize in recognition of his work on brittle stars . His contributions to the field of vertebrate palaeontology ...
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William Roy McGregor
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
William Roy McGregor was a New Zealand zoologist and conservationist who was successful in halting forestry in the Waipoua forest and establishing the forest as a protected sanctuary. Academic career McGregor was born in Thames, New Zealand on 8 July 1894, the son of a draper. He attended Auckland Grammar School in 1909, and then became a school teacher. In 1918 he was appointed a demonstrator in biology at Auckland University College, and in 1922 became a lecturer in zoology. In 1924 he undertook ecological research into the kauri, a giant tree species native to New Zealand. In the late 1920s he was hired by the State Forest Service as a consultant for the Waipoua forest.
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Leopold Adametz
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Leopold Adametz was an Austrian zoologist. The son of a manufacturer, he studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and at the University of Leipzig. In 1886, he was awarded his doctorate. He became an assistant of Martin Wickens and in 1888 an assistant professor of zoology. From 1891 he was a professor in Krakau, from 1898 until 1932 he was the professor of animal product studies and the morphology of house pets at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Wien. He was a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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Bunzō Hayata
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Bunzō Hayata was a Japanese botanist noted for his taxonomic work in Japan and Formosa, present day Taiwan. Early life Hayata was born to a devout Buddhist family in Kamo, Niigata on December 2, 1874. When he was 16, Hayata became interested in botany, and he joined the Botanical Society of Tokyo in 1892. His schooling was delayed by a series of family tragedies, and he graduated middle school at the age of 23. He then attended high school and began to collect botanical samples.
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Louis Roule
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Louis Roule was a French zoologist born in Marseille. In 1881 he obtained a degree in natural sciences at Marseille, followed by his doctorate of sciences at Paris with a thesis on ascidians of coastal Provence. From 1885 he worked as a lecturer at the faculty of sciences in Toulouse, where in 1892 he became a professor. During the previous year , he earned a doctorate in medicine.
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Ethel I. Sanborn
1883 - 1952 (69 years)
Ethel Ida Sanborn was an American paleobotanist and professor of botany at Oregon State College and University of Oregon. She published extensively on the flora of Oregon and the Western United States.
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Sinaida Rosenthal
1932 - 1988 (56 years)
Sinaida Rosenthal was a German biochemist and molecular biologist. She worked as a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and thereafter, until her death, as department head of the Central Institute for Microbiology at the Berlin based German Academy of Sciences.
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Arthur Looss
1861 - 1923 (62 years)
Arthur Looss was a German zoologist and parasitologist. Looss was born in 1861 in Chemnitz, and was educated both there and in Łódź, Poland. Thereafter, he studied at the University of Leipzig, where he received a doctorate for his study of trematodes.
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Percy Ireland Lathy
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
Percy Ireland Lathy was an English entomologist who specialised in butterflies. He was an acquaintance of James John Joicey and was associated with Joicey's Hill Museum in Witley, Surrey. Life and career Percy Ireland Lathy was born in Pulborough, West Sussex, in 1874. He lived for some time at Tillington.
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Félix d'Hérelle
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Félix d'Hérelle was a French microbiologist. He was co-discoverer of bacteriophages and experimented with the possibility of phage therapy. D'Hérelle has also been credited for his contributions to the larger concept of applied microbiology.
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Walther Gothan
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Walther Ulrich Eduard Friedrich Gothan was a German paleobotanist, known for his studies of Carboniferous flora. He studied mining and geology at the mining academies in Clausthal and Berlin, and botany and chemistry at the University of Berlin. In 1905 he received his doctorate from the University of Jena with the thesis, Zur Anatomie lebender und fossiler gymnospermen Hölzer.
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Hans Winkler
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Hans Karl Albert Winkler was a German botanist. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Hamburg, and a director of that university's Institute of Botany. Winkler coined the term 'heteroploidy' in 1916. He is remembered for coining the term 'genome' in 1920, by making a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. He wrote:
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Käthe Voderberg
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Käthe Voderberg née Nehls was a German botanist. She was a professor and the director of the institute for botany at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Life Voderberg studied natural sciences in Hamburg, Berlin, Innsbruck and Greifswald from 1930 to 1935. She finished her doctorate in botany at the University of Greifswald in 1936. In 1947, she habilitated at the University of Greifswald and became a lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Roberto Donoso-Barros
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
Roberto Donoso-Barros was a Chilean zoologist, naturalist, and herpetologist. Early life and education Donoso-Barros was born in Santiago, Chile. He attended the University of Chile in Santiago, earning his M.D. from the school in 1947.
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Annie May Hurd Karrer
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Annie May Hurd Karrer was an American plant physiologist who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. Biography Annie May Hurd was born in 1893 in La Conner, Washington. She received an A.B. degree from the University of Washington in 1915 and an M.S. from that institution in 1917. She received her Ph.D. in plant physiology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1918. The same year that she received her doctoral degree, Hurd joined the staff of the United States Department of Agriculture , as a researcher for the Bureau of Plant Industry. She married physicist Sebastian Karrer in 1923.
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Werner Janensch
1878 - 1969 (91 years)
Werner Ernst Martin Janensch was a German paleontologist and geologist. Biography Janensch was born at Herzberg . In addition to Friedrich von Huene, Janensch was probably Germany's most important dinosaur specialist from the early and middle twentieth century. His most famous and significant contributions stemmed from the expedition undertaken to the Tendaguru Beds in what is now Tanzania. As leader of an expedition set up by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where he worked as a curator, Janensch helped uncover an enormous quantity of fossils of late Jurassic period dinosaurs, including several complete Brachiosaurus skeletons, then the largest animal ever known.
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Irene McCulloch
1885 - 1987 (102 years)
Irene Agnes McCulloch was a marine biologist and USC biological sciences professor. McCulloch started at the University of Southern California in 1924 where the marine biology research department lacked funding and resources. To better the research being done, McCulloch convinced George Allan Hancock to fund the G. Allan Hancock Foundation for Marine Research, which was then renamed the Hancock Institute for Marine Studies. McCulloch was given her own foundation in 1969 at USC to continue marine biology research. McCulloch studied microbes within the Pacific Ocean with her main focus being fo...
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Émile Auguste Joseph De Wildeman
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Émile Auguste Joseph De Wildeman was a Belgian botanist and phycologist. He is known for his investigations of Congolese flora. From 1883 to 1887, he studied pharmacy at the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1891, he began work as a preparateur at the Botanical Garden of Brussels, an institution where he later served as director. In 1892, he received his doctorate in sciences and in 1926 attained the title of professor.
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Albert Fleischmann
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Albert Fleischmann was a German zoologist. Career Fleischmann was born in Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria. He studied comparative embryology at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1885. He became assistant professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in 1896 and professor in 1898. In 1901, he published a book Die Descendenztheorie which attacked Darwinism, evolution and theories of common descent.
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Maisie Carr
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Maisie Carr was an innovative Australian ecologist and botanist who contributed much to the understanding of the uniqueness of Australian plants and their environmental systems. Foundation years Maisie Carr was born Stella Grace Maisie Fawcett in Footscray, Melbourne. Neither of her parents had a science background but her love of plants was likely fostered by visits to nearby salt-marshes, her grandmother's garden and in nature study classes.
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Dorothy van Dyke Leake
1893 - 1990 (97 years)
Dorothy Van Dyke Leake was an American botanist, botanical illustrator, educator, writer and conservationist. In retirement, she became known for her efforts to preserve the Crane Creek area in northwest Stone County, Missouri.
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Robert Courrier
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Marie Jules Constant Robert Courrier ForMemRS was a French biologist, and doctor. He was a secretary of the French Academy of Sciences from 1948 to 1986. He was the winner of 1963 CNRS Gold medal, the highest scientific research award in France.
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Friedrich Johann Graf von Medem
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Friedrich Johann Graf von Medem was a Baltic German zoologist who emigrated to Colombia at age 38 and later became a representative of the IUCN Crocodiles Specialist Group for South America. He was also known as Federico Medem and published under this name.
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Miriam Lucile Bomhard
1898 - 1952 (54 years)
Miriam Lucile Bomhard was a conservationist and botanist from the United States of America. She was the first woman to receive a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Early life Bomhard was born in Bellevue, Kentucky, the daughter of the Reverend W.A. Bomhard and Emma Koch Bomhard. The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1907. In 1917, She graduated as valedictorian of her high school.
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Helen Thompson Gaige
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Helen Beulah Thompson Gaige was an American herpetologist, curator of Reptiles and Amphibians for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, and a specialist in neotropical frogs. Gaige was born in Bad Axe, Michigan, and studied at the University of Michigan with Frank Nelson Blanchard, under professor Alexander Grant Ruthven. From 1910 until 1923 she was an assistant curator of reptiles and amphibians for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan. In 1923 she became curator of amphibians. In 1928, she co-authored The Herpetology of Michigan with Ruthven. In 1937 she becam...
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Johannes Bisse
1935 - 1984 (49 years)
Johannes Bisse was a Cuban botanist, born in Germany in 1935 and arrived in Cuba in 1966. He received his doctorate from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He was the founder and first director of the Cuban National Botanic Garden in Havana.
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Louella E. Cable
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Louella E. Cable was an American ichthyologist. Biography Louella E. Cable was born in Chamberlain, South Dakota on July 5, 1900. She received a teacher's certificate from Dakota Wesleyan University and B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of South Dakota.
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Marion Edwena Kenworthy
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Marion Edwena Kenworthy, M.D. , an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, introduced psychiatric and psychoanalytic concepts to the education of social workers and to the field of social work. Life She was born in Hampden, Massachusetts. She entered Tufts Medical School in 1908 at the age of 17, and graduated cum laude with a medical degree in 1913. She accepted an appointment at the Gardner State Hospital in Massachusetts, the first woman ever on the hospital medical staff. After three years, she moved to the Foxborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. Her weekends and vacations were spent ...
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Hélène Sparrow
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Hélène Sparrow , was a Polish medical doctor and bacteriologist. She is best known for her work on the control of many epidemics including: typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. Throughout the 1920s, Sparrow worked with the Polish Armed Forces at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. While at the State Institute of Hygiene, she worked vigilantly to produce the first vaccine against typhus and ran several large-scale vaccination campaigns to control the spread of diphtheria and scarlet fever all along the eastern frontiers of Poland. In 1933, Sparrow began to study flea-borne and...
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Angela Agostini
1880 - 2000 (120 years)
Angela Agostini was an Italian botanist and mycologist who conducted research at the Botanical Institute of the University of Pavia.
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Arthur Golf
1877 - 1941 (64 years)
Arthur Golf was a German academic agronomist. A principal focus of his teaching and research was on "colonial agriculture": another was "selective breeding", concentrating on sheep. During his later years he was a professor at Leipzig University where between 1933 and 1935, and again during 1936/37, he served as University Rector.
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Emilio Veratti
1872 - 1967 (95 years)
Emilio Veratti was an Italian anatomist and pathologist. He is known for his discovery of the sarcoplasmic reticulum. He studied medicine at the Universities of Pavia and Bologna, where he received his doctorate in 1896. Following graduation he worked for Camillo Golgi at the Institute of General Pathology in Pavia. Here he distinguished himself by way of research in the fields of histology and microbiology. Eventually he attained the title of "libero docente" in histology and general pathology.
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Allen W. Seaby
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
Allen William Seaby Is best known as an ornithological painter and printmaker, and Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading. He was the author of several art books for students, and also wrote and illustrated books for children.
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Carl Isidor Cori
1865 - 1954 (89 years)
Carl Isidor Cori was an Austrian zoologist and professor who specialized in marine biology. His son, Carl Ferdinand Cori won a Nobel prize in medicine in 1947. Cori was born in Brüx to Eduard who director of the chancellery in the city, and Rosina. He became interested in nature from a young age and became an assistant to Berthold Hatschek in Prague from 1887. He received a doctorate in 1889 from Leipzig University, a degree in medicine in 1891 from Prague and habilitated in 1892. He took an interest in comparative anatomy of invertebrates and examined the Kamptozoa and Phoronidea. In 1898 he...
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Ernst Ehrenbaum
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Ernst M. E. Ehrenbaum was a German biologist and oceanographer. Biography Ehrenbaum was born in Perleberg, Province of Brandenburg, Prussia. He studied natural sciences at the universities of Berlin, Würzburg and Kiel, receiving his degree at the latter institution in 1884. From 1888 to 1892 he was head of a wanderstation for German sea fishermen, and afterwards served as custodian for sea fishing at the Biological Institute Helgoland. From 1910 to 1931 he was director of the fish laboratory at the Museum of Natural History in Hamburg. He died in Marburg an der Lahn.
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Aryeh Leo Olitzki
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Aryeh Leo Olitzki was an Israeli bacteriologist. Biography Aryeh Olitzki was born in 1898 in Allenstein, East Prussia, Germany . He studied medicine at the universities of Berlin and Breslau, and was appointed assistant at the Institute of Hygiene of the University of Breslau, from where he obtained his doctorate.
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