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,
#18951
Albert von Kölliker
1817 - 1905 (88 years)
Albert von Kölliker was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist, and histologist. Biography Albert Kölliker was born in Zurich, Switzerland. His early education was carried on in Zurich, and he entered the university there in 1836. After two years, however, he moved to the University of Bonn, and later to that of Berlin, becoming a pupil of noted physiologists Johannes Peter Müller and of Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle. He graduated in philosophy at Zurich in 1841, and in medicine at Heidelberg in 1842. The first academic post which he held was that of prosector of anatomy under Henle, but his tenure ...
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Othniel Charles Marsh
1831 - 1899 (68 years)
Othniel Charles Marsh was an American professor of paleontology at Yale College and president of the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of the preeminent scientists in the field of paleontology. Among his legacies are the discovery or description of dozens of new species and theories on the origins of birds.
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Ivan Pavlov
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs. Education and early life
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Robert Hooke
1635 - 1703 (68 years)
Robert Hooke FRS was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of the first two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that he built himself, the other scientist being Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1674. An impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood, he found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London's great fire of 1666. Hooke was also a member of the Royal Society and since 1662 was its curator of experiments. Hooke was also Professor of Geometry a...
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Alexander Oparin
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Oparin was a Soviet biochemist notable for his theories about the origin of life, and for his book The Origin of Life. He also studied the biochemistry of material processing by plants and enzyme reactions in plant cells. He showed that many food production processes were based on biocatalysis and developed the foundations for industrial biochemistry in the USSR.
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William Bateson
1861 - 1926 (65 years)
William Bateson was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. His 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics.
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Santiago Ramón y Cajal
1852 - 1934 (82 years)
Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a Spanish neuroscientist, pathologist, and histologist specializing in neuroanatomy and the central nervous system. He and Camillo Golgi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. Ramón y Cajal was the first person of Spanish origin to win a scientific Nobel Prize. His original investigations of the microscopic structure of the brain made him a pioneer of modern neuroscience.
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Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
1632 - 1723 (91 years)
Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch microbiologist and microscopist in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as "the Father of Microbiology", and one of the first microscopists and microbiologists. Van Leeuwenhoek is best known for his pioneering work in microscopy and for his contributions toward the establishment of microbiology as a scientific discipline.
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Otto Heinrich Warburg
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Otto Heinrich Warburg , son of physicist Emil Warburg, was a German physiologist, medical doctor, and Nobel laureate. He served as an officer in the elite Uhlan during the First World War, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery. He was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931. In total, he was nominated for the award 47 times over the course of his career.
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Martinus Beijerinck
1851 - 1931 (80 years)
Martinus Willem Beijerinck was a Dutch microbiologist and botanist who was one of the founders of virology and environmental microbiology. He is credited with the discovery of viruses, which he called "contagium vivum fluidum".
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John Edward Gray
1800 - 1875 (75 years)
John Edward Gray was a British zoologist. He was the elder brother of zoologist George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray . The same is used for a zoological name.
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Edmund Beecher Wilson
1856 - 1939 (83 years)
Edmund Beecher Wilson was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist. He wrote one of the most influential textbooks in modern biology, The Cell. He discovered the chromosomal XY sex-determination system in 1905—that human males have XY and females XX sex chromosomes. Nettie Stevens independently made the same discovery the same year and published shortly thereafter.
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Karl Ernst von Baer
1792 - 1876 (84 years)
Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer Edler von Huthorn was a Baltic German scientist and explorer. Baer was a naturalist, biologist, geologist, meteorologist, geographer, and is considered a, or the, founding father of embryology. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a co-founder of the Russian Geographical Society, and the first president of the Russian Entomological Society, making him one of the most distinguished Baltic German scientistss.
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Reginald Punnett
1875 - 1967 (92 years)
Reginald Crundall Punnett FRS was a British geneticist who co-founded, with William Bateson, the Journal of Genetics in 1910. Punnett is probably best remembered today as the creator of the Punnett square, a tool still used by biologists to predict the probability of possible genotypes of offspring. His Mendelism is sometimes said to have been the first textbook on genetics; it was probably the first popular science book to introduce genetics to the public.
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Jacques Monod
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".
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Pierre André Latreille
1762 - 1833 (71 years)
Pierre André Latreille was a French zoologist, specialising in arthropods. Having trained as a Roman Catholic priest before the French Revolution, Latreille was imprisoned, and only regained his freedom after recognising a rare beetle species he found in the prison, Necrobia ruficollis.
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Hermann von Helmholtz
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Association, the largest German association of research institutions, is named in his honor.
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Andreas Vesalius
1514 - 1564 (50 years)
Andries van Wezel , latinised as Andreas Vesalius , was a Flemish anatomist and physician who wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem , what is considered to be one of the most influential books on human anatomy and a major advance over the long-dominant work of Galen. Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy. He was born in Brussels, which was then part of the Habsburg Netherlands. He was a professor at the University of Padua and later became Imperial physician at the court of Emperor Charles V.
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Karl Landsteiner
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of fifty five for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.
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Claude Bernard
1813 - 1878 (65 years)
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. Historian I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". He originated the term milieu intérieur, and the associated concept of homeostasis .
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E. B. Ford
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
Edmund Brisco "Henry" Ford was a British ecological geneticist. He was a leader among those British biologists who investigated the role of natural selection in nature. As a schoolboy Ford became interested in lepidoptera, the group of insects which includes butterflies and moths. He went on to study the genetics of natural populations, and invented the field of ecological genetics. Ford was awarded the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1954. In the wider world his best known work is Butterflies .
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Arthur Tansley
1871 - 1955 (84 years)
Sir Arthur George Tansley FLS, FRS was an English botanist and a pioneer in the science of ecology. Educated at Highgate School, University College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, Tansley taught at these universities and at Oxford, where he served as Sherardian Professor of Botany until his retirement in 1937. Tansley founded the New Phytologist in 1902 and served as its editor until 1931. He was a pioneer of the science of ecology in Britain, being heavily influenced by the work of Danish botanist Eugenius Warming, and introduced the concept of the ecosystem into biology. Tansley was ...
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John Gould
1804 - 1881 (77 years)
John Gould was an English ornithologist who published monographs on birds, illustrated by plates produced by his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists, including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Gould's work is referenced in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.
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Robert Edmond Grant
1793 - 1874 (81 years)
Robert Edmond Grant MD FRCPEd FRS FRSE FZS FGS was a British anatomist and zoologist. Life Grant was born at Argyll Square in Edinburgh , the son of Alexander Grant WS, and his wife, Jane Edmond. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh then studied Medicine at Edinburgh University. Having obtained his MD at Edinburgh in 1814, Grant gave up medical practice in favour of marine biology and the zoology of invertebrates, living on a legacy from his father. As a materialist and freethinker, and politically radical, he was open to ideas in biology that were considered subversive in the climate of opinion prevailing in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars.
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Ivan Sechenov
1829 - 1905 (76 years)
Doctor Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov , was a Russian psychologist, physiologist, and medical scientist. The very famous Russian scientist of human reflexes Pavlov referred to him as the "Father of Russian physiology and scientific psychology" at his time, but today we rather consider Sechenov as scientist in medical physiology, and father of Russian physiology and also researcher in psychology, but also in relation to it in neurological physiology. Sechenov is also considered one of the originators of objective psychology as an attempt to introduce objectiveness in the rather wide Russian psycho...
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Jacques Lacan
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
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Felix Hoppe-Seyler
1825 - 1895 (70 years)
Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe-Seyler was a German physiologist and chemist, and the principal founder of the disciplines of biochemistry and molecular biology. He had discovered Yeast nucleic acid which is now called RNA in his attempts to follow up and confirm Miescher's results by repeating parts of Miescher's experiments
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Erich von Tschermak
1871 - 1962 (91 years)
Erich Tschermak, Edler von Seysenegg was an Austrian agronomist who developed several new disease-resistant crops, including wheat-rye and oat hybrids. He was a son of the Moravia-born mineralogist Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg. His maternal grandfather was the botanist, Eduard Fenzl, who taught Gregor Mendel botany during his student days in Vienna.
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Herman Boerhaave
1668 - 1738 (70 years)
Herman Boerhaave was a Dutch botanist, chemist, Christian humanist, and physician of European fame. He is regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital and is sometimes referred to as "the father of physiology," along with Venetian physician Santorio Santorio . Boerhaave introduced the quantitative approach into medicine, along with his pupil Albrecht von Haller and is best known for demonstrating the relation of symptoms to lesions. He was the first to isolate the chemical urea from urine. He was the first physician to put thermometer measurements to clinical practice.
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William John Swainson
1789 - 1855 (66 years)
William John Swainson FLS, FRS , was an English ornithologist, malacologist, conchologist, entomologist, and artist. Life Swainson was born in Dover Place, St Mary Newington, London, the eldest son of John Timothy Swainson the Second , an original fellow of the Linnean Society. He was cousin of the amateur botanist Isaac Swainson. His father's family originated in Lancashire, and both grandfather and father held high posts in Her Majesty's Customs, the father becoming Collector at Liverpool.
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Ernest Starling
1866 - 1927 (61 years)
Ernest Henry Starling was a British physiologist who contributed many fundamental ideas to this subject. These ideas were important parts of the British contribution to physiology, which at that time led the world.
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John Stevens Henslow
1796 - 1861 (65 years)
John Stevens Henslow was an English Anglican priest, botanist and geologist. He is best remembered as friend and mentor to his pupil Charles Darwin. Early life Henslow was born at Rochester, Kent, the son of a solicitor John Prentis Henslow, who was the son of John Henslow.
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Cesare Lombroso
1835 - 1909 (74 years)
Cesare Lombroso was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, physician, and founder of the Italian school of criminology. He is considered the founder of modern criminal anthropology by changing the Western notions of individual responsibility.
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Josif Pančić
1814 - 1888 (74 years)
Josif Pančić was a Serbian botanist, a doctor of medicine, a lecturer at the Great School , and the first president of the Serbian Royal Academy. He extensively documented the flora of Serbia, and is credited with having classified many species of plants which were unknown to the botanical community at that time. Pančić is credited with discovering the Serbian spruce. He is regarded as the father of Serbian botany.
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Robert Broom
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Robert Broom FRS FRSE was a British- South African medical doctor and palaeontologist. He qualified as a medical practitioner in 1895 and received his DSc in 1905 from the University of Glasgow. From 1903 to 1910, he was professor of zoology and geology at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, South Africa, and subsequently he became keeper of vertebrate palaeontology at the South African Museum, Cape Town.
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Eduard Strasburger
1844 - 1912 (68 years)
Eduard Adolf Strasburger was a Polish-German professor and one of the most famous botanists of the 19th century. He discovered mitosis in plants. Life Eduard Strasburger was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, the son of Krystyna Anna and Edward Bogumił Strasburger . In 1870, he married Aleksandra Julia Wertheim , they had two children: Anna and Julius .
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Joseph Henry Woodger
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Joseph Henry Woodger was a British theoretical biologist and philosopher of biology whose attempts to make biological sciences more rigorous and empirical was significantly influential to the philosophy of biology in the twentieth century. Karl Popper, the prominent philosopher of science, claimed "Woodger... influenced and stimulated the evolution of the philosophy of science in Britain and in the United States as hardly anybody else".
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Oldfield Thomas
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas was a British zoologist. Career Thomas worked at the Natural History Museum on mammals, describing about 2,000 new species and subspecies for the first time. He was appointed to the museum secretary's office in 1876, transferring to the zoological department in 1878.
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Willem Einthoven
1860 - 1927 (67 years)
Willem Einthoven was a Dutch medical doctor and physiologist. He invented the first practical electrocardiograph in 1895 and received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924 for it . Early life and education Willem Einthoven was born in Semarang on Java in the Dutch East Indies , the son of Louise Marie Mathilde Caroline de Vogel and Jacob Einthoven. His father, a doctor, died when Willem was a child. His mother returned to the Netherlands with her children in 1870 and settled in Utrecht. His father was of Jewish and Dutch descent, and his mother's ancestry was Dutch and Swiss. In ...
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Jean Cruveilhier
1791 - 1874 (83 years)
Jean Cruveilhier was a French anatomist and pathologist. Academic career Cruveilhier was born in Limoges, France. As a student in Limoges, he planned to enter the priesthood. He later developed an interest in pathology, being influenced by Guillaume Dupuytren , a friend of Cruveilhier's father. In 1816 he earned his medical doctorate in Paris, where in 1825 he succeeded Pierre Augustin Béclard as professor of anatomy. In 1836 he relinquished the chair of anatomy to Gilbert Breschet , and in doing so, became the first occupant of the recently founded chair of pathological anatomy.
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Andrei Famintsyn
1835 - 1918 (83 years)
Andrei Sergeyevich Famintsyn was a Russian botanist, public figure, and academician of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences . Career Famintsyn attended Saint Petersburg State University and studied under Russian fungal expert Lev Semionovich Tsenkovsky. In 1861, he continued his scientific career as a teacher at his alma mater and became a professor . In 1890, Famintsyn founded and headed the Laboratory of Plant Anatomy and Physiology of the Academy of Sciences .
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Emil von Behring
1854 - 1917 (63 years)
Emil von Behring , born Emil Adolf Behring , was a German physiologist who received the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first one awarded in that field, for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin. He was widely known as a "saviour of children", as diphtheria used to be a major cause of child death. His work with the disease, as well as tetanus, has come to bring him most of his fame and acknowledgment. He was honoured with Prussian nobility in 1901, henceforth being known by the surname "von Behring."
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Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link
1767 - 1851 (84 years)
Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link was a German naturalist and botanist. Biography Link was born at Hildesheim as a son of the minister August Heinrich Link , who taught him love of nature through collection of 'natural objects'. He studied medicine and natural sciences at the Hannoverschen Landesuniversität of Göttingen, and graduated as MD in 1789, promoting on his thesis "Flora der Felsgesteine rund um Göttingen" . One of his teachers was the famous natural scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach . He became a private tutor in Göttingen.
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Étienne-Jules Marey
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Étienne-Jules Marey was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer. His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema. He was also a pioneer in establishing a variety of graphical techniques for the display and interpretation of quantitative data from physiological measurement.
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Arnold Adolph Berthold
1803 - 1861 (58 years)
Arnold Adolph Berthold was a German scientist, most notably a physiologist and zoologist . He is best known in modern science for his pioneering experiments in the field of endocrinology. He published works on herpetology, ornithology, entomology and chemistry.
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John Bowlby
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby, CBE, FBA, FRCP, FRCPsych was a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Carl Ludwig Willdenow
1765 - 1812 (47 years)
Carl Ludwig Willdenow was a German botanist, pharmacist, and plant taxonomist. He is considered one of the founders of phytogeography, the study of the geographic distribution of plants. Willdenow was also a mentor of Alexander von Humboldt, one of the earliest and best known phytogeographers. He also influenced Christian Konrad Sprengel, who pioneered the study of plant pollination and floral biology.
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Raymond Pearl
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Raymond Pearl was an American biologist, regarded as one of the founders of biogerontology. He spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Pearl was a prolific writer of academic books, papers and articles, as well as a committed populariser and communicator of science. At his death, 841 publications were listed against his name. An early eugenicist, he eventually became an important critic of eugenics. He also advanced the concept of carrying capacity, although he didn't use the term, and was a Malthusian concerned with resource limits. He was a critique of mass consum...
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Henrik Dam
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Carl Peter Henrik Dam was a Danish biochemist and physiologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1943 for joint work with Edward Doisy in discovering vitamin K and its role in human physiology. Dam's key experiment involved feeding a cholesterol-free diet to chickens. He initially replicated experiments reported by scientists at the Ontario Agricultural College . McFarlane, Graham and Richardson, working on the chick feed program at OAC, had used chloroform to remove all fat from chick chow. They noticed that chicks fed only fat-depleted chow developed hemorrhages and started bleeding from tag sites.
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Reginald Innes Pocock
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
Reginald Innes Pocock F.R.S. was a British zoologist. Pocock was born in Clifton, Bristol, the fourth son of Rev. Nicholas Pocock and Edith Prichard. He began showing interest in natural history at St. Edward's School, Oxford. He received tutoring in zoology from Sir Edward Poulton, and was allowed to explore comparative anatomy at the Oxford Museum. He studied biology and geology at University College, Bristol, under Conwy Lloyd Morgan and William Johnson Sollas. In 1885, he became an assistant at the Natural History Museum, and worked in the section of entomology for a year. He was put in charge of the collections of Arachnida and Myriapoda.
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