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,
#18901
Otto Friedrich Müller
1730 - 1784 (54 years)
Otto Friedrich Müller, also known as Otto Friedrich Mueller was a Danish naturalist and scientific illustrator. Biography Müller was born in Copenhagen. He was educated for the church, became tutor to a young nobleman, and after several years' travel with him, settled in Copenhagen in 1767, and married a lady of wealth.
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Joseph Gaertner
1732 - 1791 (59 years)
Joseph Gaertner was a German botanist, best known for his work on seeds, De Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum . Biography He was born in Calw, and studied in Göttingen under Albrecht von Haller. He was primarily a naturalist, but also worked at physics and zoology. He travelled extensively to visit other naturalists. He was professor of anatomy in Tübingen in 1760, and was appointed professor of botany at St Petersburg in 1768, but returned to Calw in 1770. Gaertner made back cross to convert one species into another. Back cross increases nuclear gene frequency His observations were: 1....
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Alfred Newton
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Alfred Newton FRS HFRSE was an English zoologist and ornithologist. Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University from 1866 to 1907. Among his numerous publications were a four-volume Dictionary of Birds , entries on ornithology in the Encyclopædia Britannica while also an editor of the journal Ibis from 1865 to 1870. In 1900 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society. He founded the British Ornithologists Union.
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Charles Doolittle Walcott
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Charles Doolittle Walcott was an American paleontologist, administrator of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927, and director of the United States Geological Survey. He is famous for his discovery in 1909 of well-preserved fossils, including some of the oldest soft-part imprints, in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada.
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Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau
1810 - 1892 (82 years)
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau was a French biologist. Life He was born at Berthézène, in the commune of Valleraugue , the son of a Protestant farmer. He studied science and then medicine at the University of Strasbourg, where he took the double degree of M.D. and D.Sc., one of his theses being a Théorie d'un coup de canon ; next year he published a book, Sur les arolithes, and in 1832 a treatise on L'Extraversion de la vessie. Moving to Toulouse, he practised medicine for a short time, and contributed various memoirs to the local Journal de Médecine and to the Annales des sciences naturelles .
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Joseph Grinnell
1877 - 1939 (62 years)
Joseph Grinnell was an American field biologist and zoologist. He made extensive studies of the fauna of California, and is credited with introducing a method of recording precise field observations known as the Grinnell System. He served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley from the museum's inception in 1908 until his death.
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Clinton Hart Merriam
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Clinton Hart Merriam was an American zoologist, mammalogist, ornithologist, entomologist, ecologist, ethnographer, geographer, naturalist and physician. He was commonly known as the 'father of mammalogy', a branch of zoology referring to the study of mammals.
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Dmitri Ivanovsky
1864 - 1920 (56 years)
Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky was a Russian botanist, the co-discoverer of :viruses , and one of the founders of virology. Life Ivanovsky was born in the village of Nizy, Gdov Uyezd. He studied at the University of Saint Petersburg under Andrei Famintsyn in 1887, when he was sent to Ukraine and Bessarabia to investigate a tobacco disease causing great damage to plantations located there at the time. Three years later, he was assigned to look into a similar disease occurrence of tobacco plants, this time raging in the Crimea region. He discovered that both incidents of disease were caused by an ...
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Edwin Stephen Goodrich
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Edwin Stephen Goodrich FRS , was an English zoologist, specialising in comparative anatomy, embryology, palaeontology, and evolution. He held the Linacre Chair of Zoology in the University of Oxford from 1921 to 1946. He served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science from 1920 until his death.
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Hermann Burmeister
1807 - 1892 (85 years)
Karl Hermann Konrad Burmeister was a German Argentine zoologist, entomologist, herpetologist, botanist, and coleopterologist. He served as a professor at the University of Halle, headed the museum there and published the Handbuch der Entomologie before moving to Argentina where he worked until his death.
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Hermann Loew
1807 - 1879 (72 years)
Friedrich Hermann Loew was a German entomologist who specialised in the study of Diptera, an order of insects including flies, mosquitoes, gnats and midges. He described many world species and was the first specialist to work on the Diptera of the United States.
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Charles Bonnet
1720 - 1793 (73 years)
Charles Bonnet was a Genevan naturalist and philosophical writer. He is responsible for coining the term phyllotaxis to describe the arrangement of leaves on a plant. He was among the first to notice parthenogenetic reproduction in aphids and established that insects respired through their spiracles. He was among the first to use the term "evolution" in a biological context. Deaf from an early age, he also suffered from failing eyesight and had to make use of assistants in later life to help in his research.
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Angelo Ruffini
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Angelo Ruffini was an Italian histologist and embryologist. He studied medicine at the University of Bologna, where beginning in 1894 he taught classes in histology. In 1903 he attained the chair of embryology at the University of Siena.
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James Homer Wright
1869 - 1928 (59 years)
James Homer Wright was an early and influential American pathologist, who was chief of pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1896 to 1926. Wright was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1915, he joined with Richard C. Cabot to begin publication of the Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital. These began regular publication as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal which later became the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Francis Willughby
1635 - 1672 (37 years)
Francis Willughby FRS was an English ornithologist and ichthyologist, and an early student of linguistics and games. He was born and raised at Middleton Hall, Warwickshire, the only son of an affluent country family. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the mathematician and naturalist John Ray, who became a lifetime friend and colleague, and lived with Willughby after 1662 when Ray lost his livelihood through his refusal to sign the Act of Uniformity. Willughby was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, then aged 27.
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Max Askanazy
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Max Askanazy was a German-Swiss pathologist. In 1890 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Königsberg, where he worked for several years in its pathological institute. In 1903 he obtained the title of professor. In 1905 he succeeded Friedrich Wilhelm Zahn , as professor of general pathology at the University of Geneva, a position he maintained until 1939.
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William Aiton
1731 - 1793 (62 years)
William Aiton was a Scottish botanist. Aiton was born near Hamilton. Having been regularly trained to the profession of a gardener, he travelled to London in 1754, and became assistant to Philip Miller, then superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden. In 1759 he was appointed director of the newly established botanical garden at Kew, where he remained until his death. He effected many improvements at the gardens, and in 1789 he published Hortus Kewensis, a catalogue of the plants cultivated there. He is buried at nearby St. Anne's Church, Kew.
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Hans Fruhstorfer
1866 - 1922 (56 years)
Hans Fruhstorfer was a German explorer, insect trader and entomologist who specialised in Lepidoptera. He collected and described new species of exotic butterflies, especially in Adalbert Seitz's Macrolepidoptera of the World. He is best known for his work on the butterflies of Java.
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John Kunkel Small
1869 - 1938 (69 years)
John Kunkel Small was an American botanist. He studied plants in the southeast and wrote a book about the deterioration of habitats in Florida. Born on January 31, 1869, in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Kunkel studied botany at Franklin & Marshall College and Columbia University. He was the first Curator of Museums at The New York Botanical Garden, a post in which he served from 1898 until 1906. From 1906 to 1934 he was Head Curator and then from 1934 until his death he was Chief Research Associate and Curator. Small's doctoral dissertation, published as Flora of the Southeastern United States in 1903, and revised in 1913 and 1933, remains the best floristic reference for much of the South.
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Barton Warren Evermann
1853 - 1932 (79 years)
Barton Warren Evermann was an American ichthyologist. Early life and education Evermann was born in Monroe County, Iowa in 1853. His family moved to Indiana while he was still a child and it was there that he grew up, completed his education, and married. Evermann graduated from Indiana University in 1886.
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Arthur Henry Reginald Buller
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, was a British-Canadian mycologist. He is mainly known as a researcher of fungi and wheat rust. Academic career Born in Moseley, Birmingham, England, he was educated at Queen's College, Taunton. He then studied at Mason College, which later became the University of Birmingham, , the University of Leipzig , and the University of Munich. He was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of Birmingham. He worked briefly for the Naples Zoological Station. From 1901 to 1904, he was a lecturer in Botany at the University of Birmingham. He came to Canada in 1904, founded the B...
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Louis Boutan
1859 - 1934 (75 years)
Louis Marie-Auguste Boutan was a French biologist and photographer. He was a pioneer in the field of underwater photography. Biography The son of , he was born in Versailles and studied biology and natural history at the University of Paris. In 1880, he was named deputy head assigned to organize the French exhibit at the Melbourne International Exhibition . He stayed in Australia for 18 months, travelling the continent and identifying new animal species. In 1886, Boutan was named maître de conférences at the University of Lille. In the same year, he learned how to dive. In 1893, he was named professor at the Laboratoire Arago.
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Göte Turesson
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Göte Wilhelm Turesson was a Swedish evolutionary botanist who made significant contributions to ecological genetics, and coined the terms ecotype and agamospecies. He conducted extensive work to demonstrate that there is a genetic basis to the differentiation of plant populations. This work stood in sharp contrast to most researchers at the time, who believed that the differentiation of plant populations was due to phenotypic plasticity. Further, Turesson came to the conclusion that differentiation of plant populations was largely driven by natural selection. His work on locally adapted pl...
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Leo Kanner
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Leo Kanner was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, physician, and social activist best known for his work related to infantile autism. Before working at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kanner practiced as a physician in Germany and South Dakota. In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, describing 11 children who displayed "a powerful desire for aloneness" and "an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness." He named their condition "early infantile autism". Kanner was in charge of developing the first child psy...
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Émile Blanchard
1819 - 1900 (81 years)
Charles Émile Blanchard was a French zoologist and entomologist. Career Blanchard was born in Paris. His father was an artist and naturalist and Émile began natural history very early in life. When he was 14 years old, Jean Victoire Audouin , allowed him access to the laboratory of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. In 1838, he became a technician or préparateur in this then, as now, famous institution. In 1841, he became assistant-naturalist.
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William Thompson Sedgwick
1855 - 1921 (66 years)
William Thompson Sedgwick was a teacher, epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and a key figure in shaping public health in the United States. He was president of many scientific and professional organizations during his lifetime, including president of the American Public Health Association in 1915. He was one of three founders of the joint MIT-Harvard School of Public Health in 1913.
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Addison Emery Verrill
1839 - 1926 (87 years)
Addison Emery Verrill was an American invertebrate zoologist, museum curator and university professor. Life Verrill was born on February 9, 1839, in Greenwood, Maine, the son of George Washington Verrill and Lucy Verrill. As a boy he showed an early interest in natural history, building collections of rocks and minerals, plants, shells, insects and other animals. When he moved with his family to Norway, Maine, at age fourteen he attended secondary school at the Norway Liberal Institute.
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Hans von Berlepsch
1850 - 1915 (65 years)
Count Hans Hermann Carl Ludwig von Berlepsch was a German ornithologist. Berlepsch studied zoology at the University of Halle. He used his inherited wealth to sponsor bird collectors in South America, including Jan Kalinowski and Hermann von Ihering. His collection of 55,000 birds was sold to the Senckenberg Museum at Frankfurt on Main after his death.
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Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin
1727 - 1817 (90 years)
Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin was a scientist who studied medicine, chemistry and botany. Biography Born in Leiden in the Netherlands, he studied medicine at Leiden University, then moved first to Paris and afterward to Vienna. In 1752, he studied under Gerard van Swieten in Vienna.
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Petrus Camper
1722 - 1789 (67 years)
Petrus Camper FRS , was a Dutch physician, anatomist, physiologist, midwife, zoologist, anthropologist, palaeontologist and a naturalist in the Age of Enlightenment. He was one of the first to take an interest in comparative anatomy, palaeontology, and the facial angle. He was among the first to mark out an "anthropology," which he distinguished from natural history. He studied the orangutan, the Javan rhinoceros, and the skull of a mosasaur, which he believed was a whale.
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Jean Théodore Delacour
1890 - 1985 (95 years)
Jean Théodore Delacour was a French ornithologist and aviculturist. He later became American. He was renowned for not only discovering but also rearing some of the rarest birds in the world. He established very successful aviaries twice in his life, stocked with birds from around the world, including those that he obtained on expeditions to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. His first aviary in Villers-Bretonneux was destroyed in World War One. The second one that he established at Clères was destroyed in World War Two. He moved to the United States of America where he worked on avian systematics and was one of the founders of the International Committee for Bird Protection .
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Édouard Chatton
1883 - 1947 (64 years)
Édouard Chatton was a French biologist who first characterized the distinction between the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellular types. "Pansporella perplexa. Reflections on the Biology and Phylogeny of the Protozoa" [Pansporella perplexa, Amoebien a spores protegees parasite des Daphnies. Réflexions sur la biologie et la phylogénie des Protozoaires. Annales des Sciences Naturelles 10 8: 5-84. Paris, 1925]ref name=sapp2005></ref>
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Yuly Shokalsky
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Yuly Mikhailovich Shokalsky was a Russian Empire and Soviet oceanographer, cartographer, and geographer. Career A grandson of Anna Kern, Pushkin's celebrated mistress, Shokalsky graduated from the Naval Academy in 1880 and made a career in the Imperial Russian Navy, helping establish the Sevastopol Marine Observatory and rising to the rank of Lieutenant-General in 1912. At the same time, he developed interest in limnology and meteorology and became the most prolific Russian author on the subjects. In the Marine Miscellanies alone, he published some 300 articles.
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Paul Fildes
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Sir Paul Gordon Fildes was a British pathologist and microbiologist who worked on the development of chemical-biological weaponry at Porton Down during the Second World War. Biography Early life Fildes was born in Kensington, London, the son of the artist Sir Luke Fildes and great grandson of reformist Mary Fildes, Paul attended Winchester School and then studied surgery at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained an MB BCh degree.
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Leopoldo Marco Antonio Caldani
1725 - 1813 (88 years)
Leopoldo Marco Antonio Caldani was an Italian anatomist and physiologist. Caldani was born in Bologna, Italy. He studied medicine in Bologna, receiving his degree in 1750, and became a professor of practical medicine in 1755. Caldani left to become professor of theoretical medicine at Padua, and in 1771 became professor of anatomy, retiring in 1805.
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Paul Uhlenhuth
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Paul Theodor Uhlenhuth was a German bacteriologist and immunologist, and Professor at the University of Strasbourg , at the University of Marburg and at the University of Freiburg . He was a rector of the University of Freiburg from 1928–1929. After his retirement in 1936, he led his own research institute in Freiburg, known as the State Research Laboratory, until his death in 1957.
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Alexander Wetmore
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Frank Alexander Wetmore was an American ornithologist and avian paleontologist. He was the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was also an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the United States National Academy of Sciences.
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John Roxborough Norman
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
John Roxborough Norman was an English ichthyologist. He started as a clerk in a bank. His lifetime affliction with rheumatic fever began during his military service during the First World War. He entered the British Museum in 1921 where he worked for Charles Tate Regan . From 1939 to 1944, he was in charge of the Natural History Museum at Tring as the Curator of Zoology. Norman was the author of, among others, A History of Fishes and A Draft Synopsis of the Orders, Families and Genera of Recent Fishes . He was considered closer to Albert Günther than to Regan.
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Paul C. Bucy
#18940
Nicolas Steno
1638 - 1686 (48 years)
Niels Steensen was a Danish scientist, a pioneer in both anatomy and geology who became a Catholic bishop in his later years. Steensen was trained in the classical texts on science; however, by 1659 he seriously questioned accepted knowledge of the natural world. Importantly he questioned explanations for tear production, the idea that fossils grew in the ground and explanations of rock formation. His investigations and his subsequent conclusions on fossils and rock formation have led scholars to consider him one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and modern geology. The importance of Ste...
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Julius Victor Carus
1823 - 1903 (80 years)
Julius Victor Carus was a German zoologist, comparative anatomist and entomologist. Career Carus was born in Leipzig. He served as curator of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University from 1849 to 1851, and as professor of comparative anatomy and director of the Zoological Museum at the University of Leipzig in 1853.
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Justus Christian Loder
1753 - 1832 (79 years)
Justus Ferdinand Christian Loder was a German anatomist and surgeon who was a native of Riga. Biography In 1777 Loder earned his medical doctorate at the University of Göttingen, and the following year was appointed professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Jena, where he practiced medicine for the next 25 years. At Jena he was responsible for the establishment of an anatomical theatre and an Accouchierhaus . In 1780-81, at the expense of the Duke of Weimar, he took a scientific journey to France, England and Holland, a trip in which he made the acquaintance of several well-known ...
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Hans Chiari
1851 - 1916 (65 years)
Hans Chiari was a pathologist from Austria-Hungary, who was a native of Vienna. He was the son of gynecologist Johann Baptist Chiari , and brother to rhinolaryngologist Ottokar Chiari . Biography Chiari studied medicine in Vienna, where he was an assistant to Karl Freiherr von Rokitansky and Richard Ladislaus Heschl . In 1878 he received his habilitation in pathological anatomy, and within a few years became an associate professor at the University of Prague. At Prague he was also superintendent of the pathological-anatomical museum. In 1906 he relocated to the University of Strasbourg as a ...
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A. S. Hitchcock
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
Albert Spear Hitchcock was an American botanist and agrostologist. Hitchcock graduated from the Iowa Agricultural College with bachelor's degree in 1884 and M.S. in 1886. From 1892 to 1901 he was a professor of botany at the Kansas State Agricultural College. Hitchcock joined the USDA in 1901 as Assistant Agrostologist under Frank Lamson-Scribner. In 1905 he was put in charge of the grass herbarium and became Systematic Agrostologist. After 1928, he held the title of Principal Biologist in charge of Systematic Agrostology of the Department of Agriculture and kept that title until his death in 1935.
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William Kirby
1759 - 1850 (91 years)
William Kirby was an English entomologist, an original member of the Linnean Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society, as well as a country rector, so that he was an eminent example of the "parson-naturalist". The four-volume Introduction to Entomology, co-written with William Spence, was widely influential.
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Rudolf Kner
1810 - 1869 (59 years)
Rudolf Ignaz Kner was an Austrian geologist, paleontologist, zoologist and ichthyologist. He also wrote some poems which were published by his brother-in-law K.A. Kaltenbrunner. Biography Kner was born in Linz where his father Johann Evangelist Georg Kner was a tax officer. His mother Barbara , daughter of forester Johann von Adlersburg was earlier married to apothecary Felix Gulielmo until his death. Barbara had a daughter Marie Gulielmo from her earlier marriage before having Rudolf and his sister Pauline. Pauline Anna Barbara Kner married the Austrian poet Karl Adam Kaltenbrunner in 1834.
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Ernst Freese
1926 - 1990 (64 years)
Dr. Ernst Freese was a molecular biologist who worked on the mechanism of mutations in DNA. From 1962 until his death he was Chief of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Institutes of Health . Ernst Freese's scientific career started in theoretical particle physics and later moved to molecular biology where he contributed to early genetics research.
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Yves Delage
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
Yves Delage was a French zoologist known for his work into invertebrate physiology and anatomy. He also discovered the function of the semicircular canals in the inner ear. He is also famous for noting and preparing a speech on the Turin Shroud, arguing in favour of its authenticity. Delage estimated the probability that the image on the shroud was not caused by the body of Jesus Christ as 1 in 10 billion.
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Charles Flahault
1852 - 1935 (83 years)
Charles Henri Marie Flahault was a French botanist, among the early pioneers of phytogeography, phytosociology, and forest ecology. The word relevé for a plant community sample is his invention. Early life and education Flahault was born in Bailleul, Nord, and received his Baccalauréat de Lettres at Douai in 1872, after which he became a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes de Paris. He was noticed by Joseph Decaisne , who gave him private lessons, after which he entered the Sorbonne in 1874 to study in the laboratory of Philippe Van Tieghem , obtaining his doctoral degree in biology in 1878. H...
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Alfred Mirsky
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Alfred Ezra Mirsky was an American pioneer in molecular biology. Mirsky graduated from Harvard College in 1922, after which he studied for two years at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons until 1924 when he moved to the University of Cambridge on a US National Research Council fellowship for the academic year 1924–1925. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1926, with a dissertation under Lawrence J. Henderson on the Haemoglobin molecule, completing work begun under Joseph Barcroft.
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