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.
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#19501
Heinrich Anton de Bary
1831 - 1888 (57 years)
Heinrich Anton de Bary was a German surgeon, botanist, microbiologist, and mycologist . He is considered a founding father of plant pathology as well as the founder of modern mycology. His extensive and careful studies of the life history of fungi and contribution to the understanding of algae and higher plants established landmarks in biology.
Go to Profile#19502
Karl Patterson Schmidt
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Karl Patterson Schmidt was an American herpetologist. Family Schmidt was the son of George W. Schmidt and Margaret Patterson Schmidt. George W. Schmidt was a German professor, who, at the time of Karl Schmidt's birth, was teaching in Lake Forest, Illinois. His family left the city in 1907 and settled in Wisconsin. They worked on a farm near Stanley, Wisconsin, where his mother and his younger brother died in a fire on August 7, 1935. The brother, Franklin J. W. Schmidt, had been prominent in the then-new field of wildlife management. Karl Schmidt married Margaret Wightman in 1919, and they h...
Go to Profile#19503
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
1805 - 1861 (56 years)
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French zoologist and an authority on deviation from normal structure. In 1854 he coined the term éthologie . Biography He was born in Paris, the son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In his earlier years he showed an aptitude for mathematics, but eventually he devoted himself to the study of natural history and of medicine, and in 1824 he was appointed assistant naturalist to his father. In 1829 he delivered for his father the second part of a course of lectures on ornithology, and during the following three years he taught zoology at the Athénée, and te...
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Joseph Maiden
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
Joseph Henry Maiden was a botanist who made a major contribution to knowledge of the Australian flora, especially the genus Eucalyptus. This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation Maiden when citing a botanical name.
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Jay Laurence Lush
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Jay Laurence Lush was a pioneering animal geneticist who made important contributions to livestock breeding. He is sometimes known as the father of modern scientific animal breeding. Lush received National Medal of Science in 1968 and the Wolf Prize in 1979.
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William Elford Leach
1790 - 1836 (46 years)
William Elford Leach FRS was an English zoologist and marine biologist. Life and work Elford Leach was born at Hoe Gate, Plymouth, the son of an attorney. At the age of twelve he began a medical apprenticeship at the Devonshire and Exeter Hospital, studying anatomy and chemistry. By this time he was already collecting marine animals from Plymouth Sound and along the Devon coast. At seventeen he began studying medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, finishing his training at the University of Edinburgh before graduating MD from the University of St Andrews .
Go to Profile#19507
Pyotr Anokhin
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin was a Soviet and Russian biologist and physiologist, known for his theory of functional systems and the concept of systemogenesis. He made important contributions to cybernetics and psychophysiology. His pioneering concept on feedback was published in 1935.
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Adelchi Negri
1876 - 1912 (36 years)
Adelchi Negri was an Italian pathologist and microbiologist born in Perugia. He studied medicine and surgery at the University of Pavia, where he was a pupil of Camillo Golgi . After graduation in 1900, he became an assistant to Golgi at his pathological institute. In 1909 Negri became a professor of bacteriology, and the first official instructor of bacteriology in Pavia. On 19 February 1912 he died of tuberculosis at age 35.
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Patrick Geddes
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology.
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John Murray
1841 - 1914 (73 years)
Sir John Murray was a pioneering Canadian-born Scottish oceanographer, marine biologist and limnologist. He is considered to be the father of modern oceanography. Early life and education Murray was born at Cobourg, Canada West on 3 March 1841. He was the second son of Robert Murray, an accountant, and his wife Elizabeth Macfarlane. His parents had emigrated from Scotland to Ontario in about 1834. He went to school in London, Ontario and later to Cobourg College. In 1858, at the age of 17 he returned to Scotland to live with his grandfather, John Macfarlane, and continue his education at Stirling High School.
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Alexander Henry Haliday
1807 - 1870 (63 years)
Alexander Henry Haliday was an Irish entomologist. He is primarily known for his work on Hymenoptera, Diptera, and Thysanoptera, but worked on all insect orders and on many aspects of entomology. Haliday was born in Carnmoney, County Antrim later living in Holywood, County Down, Ireland. A boyhood friend of Robert Templeton, he divided his time between Ireland and Lucca, where he co-founded the Italian Entomological Society with Camillo Rondani and Adolfo Targioni Tozzetti. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Belfast Natural History Society, the Microscopical Society of London, an...
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Johannes Sobotta
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Robert Heinrich Johannes Sobotta was a German anatomist. He studied medicine in Berlin, where he subsequently worked as a second assistant at the institute of anatomy. From 1895 he served as prosector at the institute for comparative anatomy, embryology and histology at Würzburg. In 1903 he became an associate professor and in 1912 a full professor of topographical anatomy. In 1916 he relocated to the University of Königsberg as director of the anatomical institute, afterwards performing similar duties at the University of Bonn .
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Ana Aslan
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Ana Aslan was a Romanian biologist and physician of partial Armenian descent, born Anna Aslanyan, specialist in gerontology, academician from 1974 and the director of the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology .
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Georg Ludwig Kobelt
1804 - 1857 (53 years)
Georg Ludwig Kobelt was a German anatomist. He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he was a student of Friedrich Tiedemann . He received his medical doctorate in 1833, later working as a prosector at Heidelberg. From 1841 he was a prosector at the University of Freiburg, subsequently becoming an associate professor , followed by a full professorship in anatomy a few years later .
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Alexander A. Maximow
1874 - 1928 (54 years)
Alexander Alexandrowitsch Maximow was a Russian-American scientist in the fields of Histology and Embryology whose team developed the hypothesis about the existence of "polyblasts". Maximow is renowned for his experimental work on the unitarian theory of hematopoiesis: all blood cells develop from a common precursor cell. Maximow served as a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Rudolf Virchow
1821 - 1902 (81 years)
Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" and as the founder of social medicine, and to his colleagues, the "Pope of medicine".
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Alexei Ukhtomsky
1875 - 1942 (67 years)
Alexei Alexeyevich Ukhtomsky was a Russian and Soviet physiologist. His main contribution to science was the theory of dominant. Alexey Ukhtomsky was born 13 June 1875 on the family estate of the princes Ukhtomsky in the hamlet of Vosloma, near Arefino in the Rybinsk district in the province of Yaroslavl. His parents were the retired officer Alexey Ukhtomskii , and his wife Antonina Fyodorovna, née Anfimova . They had five sons, Alexey, who died in infancy, Vladimir, Nicholas, and the eldest son Alexander, who later became Archbishop Andrey , and two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth.
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Anton Reichenow
1847 - 1941 (94 years)
Anton Reichenow was a German ornithologist and herpetologist. Reichenow was the son-in-law of Jean Cabanis, and worked at the Natural History Museum of Berlin from 1874 to 1921. He was an expert on African birds, making a collecting expedition to West Africa in 1872 and 1873, and writing Die Vögel Afrikas . He was also an expert on parrots, describing all species then known in his book Vogelbilder aus Fernen Zonen: Abbildungen und Beschreibungen der Papageien . He also wrote Die Vögel der Bismarckinseln . He was editor of the Journal für Ornithologie from 1894 to 1921.
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Max Schultze
1825 - 1874 (49 years)
Max Johann Sigismund Schultze was a German microscopic anatomist noted for his work on cell theory. Biography Schultze was born in Freiburg im Breisgau . He studied medicine at Greifswald and Berlin, and was appointed an associate professor of anatomy at Halle in 1854. Five years later he became a full professor of anatomy and histology and director of the Anatomical Institute at the University of Bonn. He died in Bonn on 16 January 1874; his successor at the anatomical institute being Adolph von La Valette-St. George. He was the older brother of obstetrician Bernhard Sigmund Schultze .
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Max Rubner
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
Max Rubner was a German physiologist and hygienist. Academic career He studied at the University of Munich and worked as an assistant under Adolf von Baeyer and Carl von Voit . Later on, he taught as a professor at the University of Marburg , and in 1891 succeeded Robert Koch as a professor of hygiene at the University of Berlin. In 1909 he succeeded Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann as chair of physiology at Berlin. Rubner was co-founder of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie, and became its director in 1913. With his assistant Gerhard Albrecht, Rubner set out to study labour not just as the expenditure of energy, but also the use of intellect.
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William Cullen
1710 - 1790 (80 years)
William Cullen was a Scottish physician, chemist and agriculturalist, and professor at the Edinburgh Medical School. Cullen was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment: He was David Hume's physician, and was friends with Joseph Black, Henry Home, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith, among others.
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Henry Weed Fowler
1878 - 1965 (87 years)
Henry Weed Fowler was an American zoologist born in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania. He studied at Stanford University under David Starr Jordan. He joined the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and worked as an assistant from 1903 to 1922, associate curator of vertebrates from 1922 to 1934, curator of fish and reptiles from 1934 to 1940 and curator of fish from 1940 to 1965.
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Waldemar Haffkine
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine was a Russian-French bacteriologist known for his pioneering work in vaccines. Born into a Jewish family in Odessa, Russian Empire, Haffkin was educated at the University of Odessa and later emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he developed a cholera vaccine that he tried out successfully in India. He is recognized as the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. He tested the vaccines on himself. Joseph Lister, named him "a saviour of humanity".
Go to Profile#19524
Carl Chun
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
Carl Chun or Karl Friedrich Gustav Chun was a German marine biologist who worked as a professor at the University of Königsberg , Breslau and at Leipzig . He was a pioneer of German oceanographic research, organizing the first deep-sea expedition aboard the SS Valdivia in 1898-99. He spent much of his life studying the collections made during the expedition and was responsible for discovering many marine organisms including the vampire squid.
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Henry Maudsley
1835 - 1918 (83 years)
Henry Maudsley FRCP was a pioneering English psychiatrist, commemorated in the Maudsley Hospital in London and in the annual Maudsley Lecture of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Life and career Maudsley was born on an isolated farm near Giggleswick in the North Riding of Yorkshire and educated at Giggleswick School. Maudsley lost his mother at an early age. His aunt cared for him, teaching him poetry which he would recite to the servants, and secured for him a top tutor and an expensive apprenticeship to University College London medical school. He earned ten gold medals and graduated with an M.D.
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Wilhelm Kühne
1837 - 1900 (63 years)
Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne was a German physiologist. Born in Hamburg, he is best known today for coining the word enzyme in 1878. Biography Kühne was born at Hamburg on 28 March 1837. After attending the gymnasium in Lüneburg, he went to Göttingen, where his master in chemistry was Friedrich Wöhler and in physiology Rudolph Wagner. Having graduated in 1856, he studied under various famous physiologists, including Emil du Bois-Reymond at Berlin, Claude Bernard in Paris, and KFW Ludwig and EW von Brücke in Vienna.
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Antonio Scarpa
1747 - 1832 (85 years)
Antonio Scarpa was an Italian anatomist and professor. Biography Scarpa was born to an impoverished family in the frazione of Lorenzaga, Motta di Livenza, Veneto. An uncle, who was a member of the priesthood, gave him instruction until the age of 15, when he passed the entrance exam for the University of Padua. He was a pupil of Giovanni Battista Morgagni and Marc Antonio Caldani. Under the former, he became doctor of medicine on 19 May 1770; in 1772, he became professor at the University of Modena.
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Henry Nicholas Ridley
1855 - 1956 (101 years)
Henry Nicholas Ridley CMG , MA , FRS, FLS, F.R.H.S. was an English botanist, geologist and naturalist who lived much of his life in Singapore. He was instrumental in promoting rubber trees in the Malay Peninsula and, for the fervour with which he pursued it, came to be known as "Mad Ridley".
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Johann Baptist von Spix
1781 - 1826 (45 years)
Johann Baptist Ritter von Spix was a German biologist. From his expedition to Brazil, he brought to Germany a large variety of specimens of plants, insects, mammals, birds, amphibians and fish. They constitute an important basis for today's National Zoological Collection in Munich. Numerous examples of his ethnographic collections, such as dance masks and the like, are now part of the collection of the Museum of Ethnography in Munich.
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Karl Anton Eugen Prantl
1849 - 1893 (44 years)
Karl Anton Eugen Prantl , also known as Carl Anton Eugen Prantl, was a German botanist. Prantl was born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria, and studied in Munich. In 1870 he graduated with the dissertation Das Inulin. Ein Beitrag zur Pflanzenphysiologie . He worked with Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli and Julius Sachs. From 1887 on, he published Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien with fellow botanist Adolf Engler, who completed the work in 1915.
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Johann Jacob Dillenius
1684 - 1747 (63 years)
Johann Jacob Dillen Dillenius was a German botanist. He is known for his Hortus Elthamensis on the rare plants around Eltham, London, and for his Historia muscorum , a natural history of lower plants including mosses, liverworts, hornworts, lycopodss, algae, lichens and fungi.
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Vasily Danilewsky
1852 - 1939 (87 years)
Vasily Lakovlevich Danilewsky was a Ukrainian physician, physiologist and parasitologist. He was professor of physiology at University of Kharkiv and then at Kharkiv Medical Institute. He helped to establish the Danilevsky Institute of Endocrine Pathology Problems which he directed until his death.
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Leonhart Fuchs
1501 - 1566 (65 years)
Leonhart Fuchs , sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs and cited in Latin as Leonhartus Fuchsius, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings had been used in other herbal books, Fuchs' book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plan...
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Charles Frédéric Girard
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
Charles Frédéric Girard was a French biologist specializing in ichthyology and herpetology. Born in Mulhouse, France, he studied at the College of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, as a student of Louis Agassiz. In 1847, he accompanied Agassiz as his assistant to Harvard University. Three years later, Spencer Fullerton Baird called him to the Smithsonian Institution to work on its growing collection of North American reptiles, amphibians and fishes. He worked at the museum for the next ten years and published numerous papers, many in collaboration with Baird.
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Julius Friedrich Cohnheim
1839 - 1884 (45 years)
Julius Friedrich Cohnheim was a German-Jewish pathologist. Biography Cohnheim was born at Demmin, Pomerania. He studied at the universities of Würzburg, Marburg, Greifswald, and Berlin, receiving his doctoral degree at the University of Berlin in 1861. After taking a postgraduate course in Prague, he returned to Berlin in 1862, where he practised until 1864, when he took service as surgeon in the war against Denmark. In the fall of the same year he became assistant at the pathological institute of Berlin University under Rudolf Virchow, remaining there until 1868. During this time he publishe...
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Otto Bollinger
1843 - 1909 (66 years)
Otto Bollinger was a German pathologist born in Altenkirchen, Kusel, Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1868, he obtained his doctorate in Berlin and two years later received his habilitation. He taught classes at the Tierärtzliche Hochschule in Zürich and in 1874 became an associate professor at the Tierarzneischule in Munich. In 1880, he succeeded Ludwig von Buhl as professor of general pathology and pathological anatomy at the University of Munich.
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Fritz Perls
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Friedrich Salomon Perls , better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Perls coined the term "Gestalt therapy" to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964 and lived there until 1969.
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Félix Dujardin
1801 - 1860 (59 years)
Félix Dujardin was a French biologist born in Tours. He is remembered for his research on protozoans and other invertebrates. Biography In 1840 he was appointed professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Toulouse, and during the following year was a professor of zoology and botany at Rennes. In regard to his educational background, Dujardin was largely self-taught, the son of a watchmaker.
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Domenico Cirillo
1739 - 1799 (60 years)
Domenico Maria Leone Cirillo was an Italian physician, entomologist, botanist and patriot of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799. Professional life Cirillo completed his medical degree at the University of Naples in 1759 and assumed the role of Professor of Botany there the following year. He was a pioneer in the Kingdom of Naples for introducing the Linnaean system, to which he had been initiated through fruitful contacts with Gioachino Venturi, a disciple of Linnaeus.
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Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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John Henry Comstock
1849 - 1931 (82 years)
John Henry Comstock was an eminent researcher in entomology and arachnology and a leading educator. His work provided the basis for classification of butterflies, moths, and scale insects. Career Comstock was born on February 24, 1849, in Janesville, Wisconsin. He entered Cornell University as a student in 1869, a year after the school was founded. He also took classes at Harvard University in the summer of 1872 and at Yale University in 1875.
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Birbal Sahni
1891 - 1949 (58 years)
Birbal Sahni FRS was an Indian paleobotanist who studied the fossils of the Indian subcontinent. He also took an interest in geology and archaeology. He founded what is now the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany at Lucknow in 1946. His major contributions were in the study of the fossil plants of India and in plant evolution. He was also involved in the establishment of Indian science education and served as the President of the National Academy of Sciences, India and as an Honorary President of the International Botanical Congress, Stockholm.
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Franz Unger
1800 - 1870 (70 years)
Franz Joseph Andreas Nicolaus Unger was an Austrian botanist, paleontologist and plant physiologist. Life and work Initially, Unger studied law at the University of Graz. In 1820 he moved to Vienna to study medicine, in 1822 he enrolled at the Charles University in Prague. In 1823 Unger returned to Vienna and completed his medical studies in 1827.
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Georg Ossian Sars
1837 - 1927 (90 years)
Prof Georg Ossian Sars HFRSE was a Norwegian marine and freshwater biologist. Life Georg Ossian Sars was born on 20 April 1837 in Kinn, Norway , the son of Pastor Michael Sars and Maren Sars; the historian Ernst Sars was his elder brother, and the singer Eva Nansen was his younger sister. He grew up in Manger, Hordaland, where his father was the local priest. He studied from 1852 to 1854 at Bergen Cathedral School, from 1854 at Christiania Cathedral School, and joined the university at Christiana in 1857. He indulged his interest in natural history while studying medicine; having collected w...
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Margaret Morse Nice
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Margaret Morse Nice was an American ornithologist, ethologist, and child psychologist who made an extensive study of the life history of the song sparrow and was author of Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow . She observed and recorded hierarchies in chicken about three decades ahead of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who coined the term "pecking order". After her marriage, she made observations on language learning in her children and wrote numerous research papers.
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Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald was a German-Dutch paleontologist and geologist who conducted research on hominins, including Homo erectus. His discoveries and studies of hominid fossils in Java and his studies of other important fossils of south-eastern Asia firmly established his reputation as one of the leading figures of 20th-century paleo-anthropology.
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Max Theiler
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Max Theiler was a South African-American virologist and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for developing a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937, becoming the first African-born Nobel laureate.
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Thomas Nuttall
1786 - 1859 (73 years)
Thomas Nuttall was an English botanist and zoologist who lived and worked in America from 1808 until 1841. Nuttall was born in the village of Long Preston, near Settle in the West Riding of Yorkshire and spent some years as an apprentice printer in England. Soon after going to the United States he met professor Benjamin Smith Barton in Philadelphia. Barton encouraged his strong interest in natural history.
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Jacob Hübner
1761 - 1826 (65 years)
Jacob Hübner was a German entomologist. He was the author of Sammlung Europäischer Schmetterlinge , a founding work of entomology. Scientific career Hübner was the author of Sammlung Europäischer Schmetterlinge , a founding work of entomology. He was one of the first specialists to work on the European Lepidoptera. He described many new species, for example Sesia bembeciformis and Euchloe tagis, many of them common. He also described many new genera.
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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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