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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Biology,
#18801
Julius Bernstein
1839 - 1917 (78 years)
Julius Bernstein was a German physiologist born in Berlin. His father was Aron Bernstein , a founder of the Reform Judaism Congregation in Berlin 1845; his son was the mathematician Felix Bernstein .
Go to Profile#18802
Donald Ewen Cameron
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Donald Ewen Cameron was a Scottish-born psychiatrist. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the . He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association , Canadian Psychiatric Association , American Psychopathological Association , Society of Biological Psychiatry and the World Psychiatric Association .
Go to Profile#18803
Carl Joseph Schröter
1855 - 1939 (84 years)
Carl Joseph Schröter was a Swiss botanist born in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany. From 1874 he studied natural sciences at Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule , where one of his early influences was geologist Albert Heim . Following his habilitation in 1878, he worked as an assistant to Carl Eduard Cramer . In 1883 he succeeded Oswald Heer as professor of botany at ETH Zurich, a position he kept until 1926.
Go to Profile#18804
Charles Wyville Thomson
1830 - 1882 (52 years)
Sir Charles Wyville Thomson was a Scottish natural historian and marine zoologist. He served as the chief scientist on the Challenger expedition; his work there revolutionized oceanography and led to his being knighted.
Go to Profile#18805
Theodor Meynert
1833 - 1892 (59 years)
Theodor Hermann Meynert was a German-Austrian psychiatrist, neuropathologist, and anatomist born in Dresden. Meynert believed that disturbances in brain development could be a predisposition for psychiatric illness and that certain psychoses are reversible.
Go to Profile#18806
Theodor Langhans
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Theodor Langhans was a German pathologist who was a native of Usingen, Duchy of Nassau. He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, and at the University of Göttingen under Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle , at Berlin under Rudolf Virchow and in Würzburg, where he became an assistant to Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen . In 1867 he became a lecturer at the University of Marburg, and in 1872 became a full professor of pathology at the University of Giessen, where he succeeded Ludwig Franz Alexander Winther .
Go to Profile#18807
Li Shizhen
1517 - 1593 (76 years)
Li Shizhen , courtesy name Dongbi, was a Chinese acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician, and writer of the Ming dynasty. He is the author of a 27-year work, the Compendium of Materia Medica . He developed several methods for classifying herb components and medications for treating diseases.
Go to Profile#18808
Alfred Kühn
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Alfred Richard Wilhelm Kühn was a German zoologist and geneticist. A student of August Weismann, he was one of the pioneers of developmental biology. At a period when biology was largely descriptive, he collaborated with zoologists, botanists, organic chemists, and physicists conducting interdisciplinary studies, examining sensory biology , behaviour, and biochemistry through experiments on organisms.
Go to Profile#18809
William Benjamin Carpenter
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
William Benjamin Carpenter CB FRS was an English physician, invertebrate zoologist, and physiologist. He was instrumental in the early stages of the unified University of London. Life Carpenter was born on 29 October 1813 in Exeter, the eldest son of Dr Lant Carpenter and his wife, Anna Carpenter . His father was an important Unitarian preacher who, according to Adrian Desmond, influenced a "rising generation of Unitarian intellectuals, including James Martineau and the Westminster Reviews John Bowring." From his father, Carpenter learned to believe in the essential lawfulness of creation and that explanations of the world were to be found in physical causes.
Go to Profile#18810
Wilhelm His Sr.
1831 - 1904 (73 years)
Wilhelm His Sr. was a Swiss anatomist and professor who invented the microtome. By treating animal tissue with acids and salts to harden it and then slicing it very thinly with the microtome, scientists were able to further study the organization and function of tissues and cells under a microscope.
Go to Profile#18811
William Jacob Holland
1848 - 1932 (84 years)
Rev William Jacob Holland FRSE LLD was the eighth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. He was an accomplished lepidopterist, zoologist, and paleontologist, as well as an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Go to Profile#18812
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
1652 - 1723 (71 years)
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus , also known as August Bachmann or A. Q. Bachmann, was a German physician and botanist who helped to develop better ways of classifying plants. Life and work Rivinus was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied at the University of Leipzig , continued his studies in the University of Helmstedt . In 1677, he started lecturing in medicine at the University of Leipzig, in 1691 appointed to two chairs, that of physiology and of botany, and made the curator of the University medical garden. In 1701, he became professor of pathology, in 1719, professor of therapeutics and permanent dean of the Faculty of Medicine.
Go to Profile#18813
John William Harshberger
1869 - 1929 (60 years)
John William Harshberger, was an American botanist who specialized in plant geography, ecology and plant pathology. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 35 years. He was an ardent plant conservationist and he is credited with coining the term "ethnobotany".
Go to Profile#18814
Carl Christian Mez
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
Carl Christian Mez was a German botanist and university professor. He is denoted by the author abbreviation Mez when citing a botanical name. Life and work Mez came from a family of industrialists in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden. He was a grandchild of the entrepreneur and politician Karl Christian Mez . As a high-school student he was interested in botany, and wrote a technical paper regarding a hybrid Inula. In 1890, Mez married Therese Jensen , the daughter of poet Wilhelm Jensen. They had 5 children together. Through their oldest daughter's marriage, they became parents-in-law to psychol...
Go to Profile#18815
William Hunter
1718 - 1783 (65 years)
William Hunter was a Scottish anatomist and physician. He was a leading teacher of anatomy, and the outstanding obstetrician of his day. His guidance and training of his equally famous brother, John Hunter, was also of great importance.
Go to Profile#18816
William Bartram
1739 - 1823 (84 years)
William Bartram was an American botanist, ornithologist, natural historian and explorer. Bartram was the author of an acclaimed book, now known by the shortened title Bartram's Travels, which chronicled his explorations of the southern British colonies in North America from 1773 to 1777. Bartram has been described as "the first naturalist who penetrated the dense tropical forests of Florida".
Go to Profile#18817
Arthur Gardiner Butler
1844 - 1925 (81 years)
Arthur Gardiner Butler F.L.S., F.Z.S. was an English entomologist, arachnologist and ornithologist. He worked at the British Museum on the taxonomy of birds, insects, and spiders. Biography Arthur Gardiner Butler was born at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London. He was the son of Thomas Butler , assistant-secretary to the British Museum. He was educated at St. Paul's School, later receiving a year's tuition in drawing at the Art School of South Kensington.
Go to Profile#18818
Pierre François Olive Rayer
1793 - 1867 (74 years)
Pierre François Olive Rayer was a French physician who was a native of Saint Sylvain. He made important contributions in the fields of pathological anatomy, physiology, comparative pathology and parasitology.
Go to Profile#18819
Richard Altmann
1852 - 1900 (48 years)
Richard Altmann was a German pathologist and histologist from Deutsch Eylau in the Province of Prussia. Altmann studied medicine in Greifswald, Königsberg, Marburg, and Giessen, obtaining a doctorate at the University of Giessen in 1877. He then worked as a prosector at Leipzig, and in 1887 became an anatomy professor . He died in Hubertusburg in 1900 from a nervous disorder.
Go to Profile#18820
Hermann Schaaffhausen
1816 - 1893 (77 years)
Hermann Schaaffhausen was a German anatomist, anthropologist, and paleoanthropologist. Biography Hermann Schaaffhausen was the son of Josef Hubert Schaaffhausen and Anna Maria Wachendorf. He studied medicine at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate degree in 1839, and became a Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn. Schaaffhausen soon became involved in research in physical anthropology and the study of prehistoric humans in Europe. He is best known for his study of the Neanderthal fossils . He was a member of several scientific societies, including the Naturhistorische...
Go to Profile#18821
Leonhard Stejneger
1851 - 1943 (92 years)
Leonhard Hess Stejneger was a Norwegian-born American ornithologist, herpetologist and zoologist. Stejneger specialized in vertebrate natural history studies. He gained his greatest reputation with reptiles and amphibians.
Go to Profile#18822
Charles Lewis Camp
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Charles Lewis Camp was a palaeontologist and zoologist, working from the University of California, Berkeley. He took part in excavations at the 'Placerias Quarry', in 1930 and the forty Shonisaurus skeleton discoveries of the 1960s, in what is now the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Camp served as the third director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology from 1930 to 1949, and coincidentally as chair of the UC Berkeley Paleontology Department between 1939 and 1949. Camp named a number of species of marine reptiles such as Shonisaurus and Plotosaurus, as well as the dinosaur Seg...
Go to Profile#18823
Frantz Fanon
1925 - 1961 (36 years)
Frantz Omar Fanon was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique . His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Go to Profile#18824
Émile Roux
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Pierre Paul Émile Roux FRS was a French physician, bacteriologist and immunologist. Roux was one of the closest collaborators of Louis Pasteur , a co-founder of the Pasteur Institute, and responsible for the institute's production of the anti-diphtheria serum, the first effective therapy for this disease. Additionally, he investigated cholera, chicken-cholera, rabies, and tuberculosis. Roux is regarded as a founder of the field of immunology.
Go to Profile#18825
Eugène Simon
1848 - 1924 (76 years)
Eugène Louis Simon was a French naturalist who worked particularly on insects and spiders, but also on birds and plants. He is by far the most prolific spider taxonomist in history, describing over 4,000 species.
Go to Profile#18826
Henri Ernest Baillon
1827 - 1895 (68 years)
Henri Ernest Baillon was a French botanist and physician. He was born in Calais on 30 November 1827 and died in Paris on 19 July 1895. Baillon spent his professional life as a professor of natural history, and he published numerous works on botany. He was appointed to the Légion d'honneur in 1867 and joined the Royal Society in 1894.
Go to Profile#18827
Frits Went
1863 - 1935 (72 years)
Friedrich August Ferdinand Christian Went was a Dutch botanist. Went was born in Amsterdam. He was professor of botany and director of the Botanical Garden at the University of Utrecht. His eldest son was the Dutch botanist Frits Warmolt Went, who in 1927 as a graduate student worked on plant hormones, specifically the role of auxin in phototropism.
Go to Profile#18828
Isaac Bayley Balfour
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour, KBE, FRS, FRSE was a Scottish botanist. He was Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow from 1879 to 1885, Sherardian Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford from 1884 to 1888, and Professor of Botany at the University of Edinburgh from 1888 to 1922.
Go to Profile#18829
William Turner Thiselton-Dyer
1843 - 1928 (85 years)
Sir William Turner Thiselton-Dyer was a leading British botanist, and the third director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Life and career Thiselton-Dyer was born in Westminster, London. He was a son of William George Thiselton-Dyer , physician and Catherine Jane, née Firminger , botanist. He was educated at King's College School where he was first mathematical scholar, and later proceeded to the medical department of King's College London, where he remained until 1863 when he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford. Initially studying mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, he graduated in natural science in 1867.
Go to Profile#18830
Gregory Mathews
1876 - 1949 (73 years)
Gregory Macalister Mathews CBE FRSE FZS FLS was an Australian-born amateur ornithologist who spent most of his later life in England. Life He was born in Biamble in New South Wales the son of Robert H. Mathews. He was educated at The King's School, Parramatta.
Go to Profile#18831
Andrea Cesalpino
1524 - 1603 (79 years)
Andrea Cesalpino was a Florentine physician, philosopher and botanist. In his works he classified plants according to their fruits and seeds, rather than alphabetically or by medicinal properties. In 1555, he succeeded Luca Ghini as director of the botanical garden in Pisa. The botanist Pietro Castelli was one of his students. Cesalpino also did limited work in the field of physiology. He theorized a circulation of the blood. However, he envisioned a "chemical circulation" consisting of repeated evaporation and condensation of blood, rather than the concept of "physical circulation" popular...
Go to Profile#18832
Heinrich Frey
1822 - 1890 (68 years)
Heinrich Frey was a German-born Swiss entomologist who studied Lepidoptera. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and died in Zurich, Switzerland. Biography Heinrich Frey attended the gymnasium in Frankfurt am Main until he was 16. Here he met Senator Carl Heinrich Georg von Heyden who introduced him to entomology. He attended the University in Frankfurt am Main, then travelled to Bonn, Berlin, and Göttingen.
Go to Profile#18833
Ludimar Hermann
1838 - 1914 (76 years)
Ludimar Hermann was a German physiologist and speech scientist who used the Edison phonograph to test theories of vowel production, particularly those of Robert Willis and Charles Wheatstone. He coined the word formant, a term of importance in modern acoustic phonetics. The Hermann grid is named after him; he was the first to report the illusion in scientific literature.
Go to Profile#18834
John Merle Coulter
1851 - 1928 (77 years)
John Merle Coulter, Ph. D. was an American botanist and educator. In his career in education administration, Coulter is notable for serving as the president of Indiana University and Lake Forest College and the head of the Department of Botany at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#18835
Cyrus Thomas
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
Cyrus Thomas was an American ethnologist and entomologist prominent in the late 19th century and noted for his studies of the natural history of the American West. Biography Thomas was born in Kingsport, Tennessee, on July 27, 1825, and was of German and Irish descent. He was educated in village schools in the Kingsport area and an academy student at Jonesboro, Tennessee, as well as being self-educated. His mother hoped he would join the medical field, so he studied anatomy and physiology, but he was uninterested in medicine and took to the study of law. He was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1851 and practiced in Murphysboro.
Go to Profile#18836
Wilhelm Griesinger
1817 - 1868 (51 years)
Wilhelm Griesinger was a German neurologist and psychiatrist born in Stuttgart. Life and career He studied under Johann Lukas Schönlein at the University of Zurich and physiologist François Magendie in Paris. After receiving his doctorate, he worked in several locations, including Winnethal in Württemberg, in Stuttgart , in the medical clinic at Tübingen, and at the University of Kiel.
Go to Profile#18837
Leopold Fitzinger
1802 - 1884 (82 years)
Leopold Joseph Franz Johann Fitzinger was an Austrian zoologist. Fitzinger was born in Vienna and studied botany at the University of Vienna under Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin. He worked at the Vienna Naturhistorisches Museum between 1817, when he joined as a volunteer assistant, and 1821, when he left to become secretary to the provincial legislature of Lower Austria; after a hiatus he was appointed assistant curator in 1844 and remained at the Naturhistorisches Museum until 1861. Later he became director of the zoos of Munich and Budapest.
Go to Profile#18838
François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix
1706 - 1767 (61 years)
François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix was a French physician and botanist who was a native of Alès. He was the brother of naturalist Pierre Augustin Boissier de Sauvages . He received his education at the University of Montpellier, where he studied botany with Pierre Baux . After spending a few years in Paris, he returned to Montpellier in 1734, where he served as a professor of physiology and pathology. Following the death of François Ayme Chicoyneau , he was named to the chair of botany. At Montpellier, he made important improvements to its botanical garden, which included construction ...
Go to Profile#18839
Edwin B. Hart
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Edwin Bret Hart was an American biochemist long associated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Sandusky, Ohio, Hart studied physiological chemistry in Germany under Albrecht Kossel at the University of Marburg and University of Heidelberg. Upon his return to the United States, he worked at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, and then at the University of Michigan before being hired in 1906 by Stephen M. Babcock of the University of Wisconsin to conduct what later came to be known as the "single-grain experiment", which ran from May 1907 to 1911.
Go to Profile#18840
Harry Benjamin
1885 - 1986 (101 years)
Harry Benjamin was a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist, widely known for his clinical work with transgender people. Early life and career Benjamin was born in Berlin, and raised in a German Lutheran home. After premedical education in Berlin and Rostock, he joined a regiment of the Prussian Guard. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1912 in Tübingen for a dissertation on tuberculosis. Sexual medicine interested him, but was not part of his medical studies. In a 1985 interview he recalled:
Go to Profile#18841
Max Carl Wilhelm Weber
1852 - 1937 (85 years)
Max Carl Wilhelm Weber van Bosse or Max Wilhelm Carl Weber was a German-Dutch zoologist and biogeographer. Weber studied at the University of Bonn, then at the Humboldt University in Berlin with the zoologist Eduard Carl von Martens . He obtained his doctorate in 1877. Weber taught at the University of Utrecht then participated in an expedition to the Barents Sea. He became Professor of Zoology, Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Amsterdam in 1883. In the same year he received naturalised Dutch citizenship.
Go to Profile#18842
Otto Friedrich Ranke
1899 - 1959 (60 years)
Otto Friedrich Ranke was a German physiologist and university professor. Ranke introduced methamphetamine as a performance enhancer in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Early years and education Ranke, whose father was the psychiatrist Karl Ranke , graduated after completing his study of medicine at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg. In Freiburg, Ranke received a medical doctorate under Ludwig Aschoff with a dissertation entitled "On the change of the elastic resistance of the aortic intima and resulting formation of atheroma." Ranke studied mathematics at the Munich Technical University until 1925 with the aid of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Go to Profile#18843
Clarence Erwin McClung
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Clarence Erwin McClung was an eminent American zoologist and prairie pioneer cytologist who discovered the role of chromosomes in sex-determination. Graduating pharmacy at the University of Kansas in 1892, after a year of teaching he entered the college as a graduate student He studied one summer with W.M. Wheeler at the University of Chicago and at his suggestion, studied the spermatogenesis of Xiphidium fasciatum, a long-horned grasshopper; launching his scientific career in the research of chromosomes. McClung took advantage of the great abundance of grasshoppers in Kansas "to make them p...
Go to Profile#18844
Christen C. Raunkiær
1860 - 1938 (78 years)
Christen Christensen Raunkiær was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's climatic zones. This scheme, the Raunkiær system, is still widely used today and may be seen as a precursor of modern plant strategy schemes, e.g. J. Philip Grime's CSR system.
Go to Profile#18845
Léopold Szondi
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Léopold Szondi March 11, 1893 – January 24, 1986 Biography Szondi was born in city of Nyitra and raised in a German and Slovak-speaking Jewish family. The original name of the family was Sonnenschein. He was born as the twelfth child in his father's second marriage. The family moved to Budapest in 1898. His mother, who died very soon, was remembered by the family as an illiterate, unwholesome woman who had to be supervised by the elder siblings during her depressive periods. The father himself had a huge impact on Szondi, influencing his fate-analytical works to a great extent. These are his...
Go to Profile#18846
Lucien Quélet
1832 - 1899 (67 years)
Lucien Quélet was a French naturalist and mycologist. Quélet discovered several species of fungi and was the founder of the Société mycologique de France, a society devoted to mycological studies.
Go to Profile#18847
Aleksey Abrikosov
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Aleksey Ivanovich Abrikosov was a Soviet pathologist and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences . Early life Aleksey Abrikosov was born into a wealthy family of factory owners, who were the official suppliers of chocolate confections to the Russian Imperial Court. His grandfather was the industrialist Aleksei Ivanovich Abrikosov, who was the founder of the company now known as Babayevsky. His father, Ivan Alekseevich Abrikosov, was expected to take over the family firm until his premature death from tuberculosis. His siblings included future Tsa...
Go to Profile#18848
Edwin Conklin
1863 - 1952 (89 years)
Edwin Grant Conklin was an American biologist and zoologist. Life He was born in Waldo, Ohio, the son of A. V. Conklin and Maria Hull. He was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins University. He was professor of biology at Ohio Wesleyan and professor of zoology at Northwestern University , the University of Pennsylvania , and Princeton University . He became coeditor of the Journal of Morphology, The Biological Bulletin, and the Journal of Experimental Zoology. He was president of the American Society of Naturalists in 1912 and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1936.
Go to Profile#18849
Karl Ritter von Goebel
1855 - 1932 (77 years)
Karl Immanuel Eberhard Ritter von Goebel FRS FRSE was a German botanist. His main fields of study were comparative functional anatomy, morphology, and the developmental physiology of plants under the influence of both phylogenetic and extrinsic factors.
Go to Profile#18850
Richard Hesse
1868 - 1944 (76 years)
Richard Hesse was a German zoologist and ecologist. Hesse took his PhD in 1892 from the University of Tübingen and was subsequently appointed lecturer, later extraordinary professor of zoology at the same university. In 1909, he became professor of zoology at the Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule Berlin and in 1914 at the University of Bonn. From 1926 to 1935, he was a professor and director of the zoological institute at the University of Berlin.
Go to Profile