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,
#19601
Joseph Harold Friedman
#19602
Rachel Bodley
1831 - 1888 (57 years)
Rachel Littler Bodley was an American professor, botanist, and university leader. She was best known for her term as Dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania . She helped found the American Chemical Society in New York City.
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John Isaiah Northrop
1861 - 1891 (30 years)
John Isaiah Northrop, Ph.D. was an American zoologist at Columbia University. Biography John I. Northrop was born in New York City. He was named after his father, John Isaiah Northrop, a pharmacist. His mother, Mary R. Havemeyer, was a sister of Frederic Christian Havemeyer, a graduate of Columbia College, after whom Havemeyer Hall is named. His father died when he was two years old. Northrop studied for some years at a private school in New Windsor, New York, then at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, in which he prepared for the Columbia School of Mines. He graduated in 1884, with t...
Go to Profile#19604
Giuseppe Moretti
1782 - 1853 (71 years)
Giuseppe Moretti was an Italian botanist. He served as a professor of botany and as director of the botanical gardens at the University of Pavia . The genus Morettia was named in his honor by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1821.
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Dimitrie Grecescu
1841 - 1910 (69 years)
Dimitrie Grecescu was a Romanian botanist, physician and historiographer of science. Born in Cerneți, Mehedinți County, he attended school in his native village and then in nearby Turnu Severin. He then studied at the National School of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest from 1856 to 1863. With a recommendation from Carol Davila, Grecescu continued his studies in France, earning a doctorate in medicine and surgery from the University of Paris in 1868. His thesis, which dealt with the favid-causing Trichophyton fungi, was supervised by Charles-Philippe Robin. For the 1862–1863 school year, he ...
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Alexander Dickson
1836 - 1887 (51 years)
Alexander Dickson FRSE LLD was a Scottish morphological botanist and botanical artist. His family had previously had members in the legal and medical professions; one of the earliest of whom any special records exist having been John Dickson of Kilbucho and Hartree, a lawyer, who in 1649 was appointed a Senator of the College of Justice, taking the title of Lord Hartree.
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Jan Prüffer
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Jan Prüffer was a Polish biologist, a taxonomic authority in entomology. During the German occupation of Poland he gave lectures at the underground educational facilities. Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
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Anatoly Zubkov
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Anatoly Zubkov was a Soviet physiologist, D.Sc. He held the chair of physiology in the Kishinev Medical Institute. Prof. Anatoly Zubkov had published over sixty works on the various problems of the physiology and pathology of the heart and the nervous and endocrine control of functions. He was the first to translate classic works by Ivan Sechenov into English.
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Henry Adams
1813 - 1877 (64 years)
Henry Adams was an English naturalist and conchologist. With his brother Arthur Adams, also a noted conchologist, he wrote The genera of recent Mollusca: arranged according to their organization three volumes, 1858.
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Salomon Ehrmann
1854 - 1926 (72 years)
Salomon Ehrmann was a Jewish-Austrian dermatologist and histologist born in the village of Ostrovec, today part of the Czech Republic. He was an important member of the so-called Vienna School of Dermatology, a group founded by Ferdinand von Hebra .
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Franciszek Kamieński
1851 - 1912 (61 years)
Franciszek Kamieński was a Polish botanist. His name has also been spelled Frans Michailow von Kamieńsky or misspelled with the accent above the e, as in Kamiénski. Kamieński described and authored many species of Utricularia. The section Kamienskia in the genus Utricularia and the species Utricularia kamienskii are named in his honor.
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Bernardino da Ucria
1739 - 1796 (57 years)
Placido Michele Aurifici, better known as Bernardino da Ucria was a Sicilian friar and botanist. In 1766 he entered the Franciscan monastery of St Antony in Palermo, taking the name Bernardino, by which he is now known. He developed a keen interest in botany and in 1786 was appointed demonstrator in botany at the University of Palermo, in which capacity he was involved in the establishment and named custodian of the new Palermo Botanical Garden on the site that it still occupies. A keen student of Carl Linnaeus, he was responsible for the layout of the original section of garden on the basis of the Linnean system of classification.
Go to Profile#19613
Adriaan van den Spiegel
1578 - 1625 (47 years)
Adriaan van den Spiegel , name sometimes written as Adrianus Spigelius , was a Flemish anatomist born in Brussels. For much of his career he practiced medicine in Padua, and is considered one of the great physicians associated with the city. At Padua he studied anatomy under Girolamo Fabrici.
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Johan Axel Palmén
1845 - 1919 (74 years)
Johan Axel Palmén was a Finnish zoologist who was known for his studies on bird migration and for efforts in bird conservation in Finland. His studies of bird migration included the identification of flyways along which a majority of shorebirds migrated as well as the phenomenon of leap-frog migration. He established the first bird ringing station in Finland by purchasing a piece of land in the village of Tvärminne.
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Christian August Friedrich Garcke
1819 - 1904 (85 years)
Christian August Friedrich Garcke was a German botanist who was a native of Bräunrode, Saxony-Anhalt. He studied theology in Halle, obtaining his doctorate at the University of Jena in 1844. Afterwards he was a private scholar of botanical studies in Halle, relocating to Berlin in 1851, where he worked with botanist Alexander Braun . In 1865 he was appointed curator at the "Königlichen Herbarium" in Berlin, and in 1871 became an associate professor specializing in pharmacognosy.
Go to Profile#19616
J. Howard Moore
1862 - 1916 (54 years)
John Howard Moore was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator, humanitarian and socialist. He is considered to be an early, yet neglected, proponent of animal rights and ethical vegetarianism, and was a leading figure in the American humanitarian movement. Moore was a prolific writer, authoring numerous articles, books, essays, pamphlets on topics including animal rights, education, ethics, evolutionary biology, humanitarianism, socialism, temperance, utilitarianism and vegetarianism. He also lectured on many of these subjects and was widely regarded as a talented orator, earning the nam...
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Hermann Rudolph Aubert
1826 - 1892 (66 years)
Hermann Rudolph Aubert was a German physiologist born in Frankfurt. In 1850 he obtained his medical doctorate, afterwards serving as privat-docent of physiology at Breslau . In 1862 he became an associate professor, later being appointed professor of physiology at the University of Rostock .
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James Robert Matthews
1889 - 1978 (89 years)
James Robert Matthews FRSE FLS CBE LLD was a Scottish botanist. He was president of the British Ecological Society in 1934 and president of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh 1939 to 1942. Life He was born in the village of Dunning on 8 March 1889, the son of Janet and Robert Matthews. He was educated at the local school then at Perth Academy. He then studied science at the University of Edinburgh, graduating MA in 1911. During the same period he attended the Teacher Training at Moray College in Edinburgh, and qualified as a teacher in the same year. In 1911/12 he undertook a course in botan...
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Bradley Moore Davis
1871 - 1957 (86 years)
Bradley Moore Davis was an American botanist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from Leland Stanford Junior University, in 1892, he studied at Harvard, Bonn, and Naples. For 11 years he taught at the University of Chicago, from 1902 to 1906 as assistant professor of plant morphology. He held a position at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass. and at the Bureau of Fisheries. In 1911 he became assistant professor of botany at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was secretary of the American Society of Naturalists in 1914. He was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Byrom Bramwell
1847 - 1931 (84 years)
Sir Byrom Bramwell FRSE FRCPE was a British physician and medical author. He was a general physician, but became known for his work in neurology, diseases of the heart and blood, and disorders of the endocrine organs. He was president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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Joseph Paneth
1857 - 1890 (33 years)
Joseph Paneth was an physiologist born in Vienna. Paneth is remembered for his description of "Paneth cells", which are cells that provide host defense against microbes in the mucosa of the small intestine.
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Thomas Brown of Lanfine and Waterhaughs
1774 - 1853 (79 years)
Thomas Brown of Lanfine and Waterhaughs FRSE FFPSG was a noted Scottish surgeon with an interest in botany, mineralogy and fossil collecting. He is best remembered for his large donation of his entire lifetime collection of fossils etc. to the University of Glasgow, which is generally known as the Lanfine Collection.
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Johann Ehrenfried Pohl
1746 - 1800 (54 years)
Johann Ehrenfried Pohl was a German physician and botanist. He was the son of physician Johann Christoph Pohl . From 1763 to 1769, he studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1772. Afterwards, he embarked on an extended study trip to Strasbourg, Paris, Rouen and the Netherlands. In 1773, he became an associate professor of botany at Leipzig, where he later served as a professor of pathology and therapy .
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Frederick Parker Gay
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Frederick Parker Gay was an American bacteriologist who combated typhoid fever and leprosy as well as studied the mechanism of immunity. He was a charter member of the Explorers Club. Early life Frederick was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to George Frederick Gay and Louisa Maria Parker. In 1894 he was part of an Arctic expedition led by Frederick Cook.
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Johannes C. H. de Meijere
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Johannes Cornelis Hendrik de Meijere was a Dutch zoologist and entomologist who specialised in Diptera and Coleoptera. Prof. dr. Johannes Cornelis Hendrik de Meijere was Rector Magnificus at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
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Elizabeth Stern
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Elizabeth Stern was a Canadian-born American pathologist, especially well known for her insights on the cell's progression from a healthy to a cancerous state. Stern was one of the first scientists specializing in cytopathology, the study of diseased cells.
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William Holme Van Buren
1819 - 1883 (64 years)
William Holme Van Buren was an American surgeon. His grandfather was Abraham Van Buren, a son of John Beuren, a pupil of Herman Boerhaave, who emigrated to New York from Beuren, near Amsterdam, in 1700. Van Buren entered Yale College in 1834. Before graduation he left to take his medical education at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing his studies before the legal age at which a diploma could be awarded him. He spent some eighteen months in Paris and returned to receive his degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1840, with a graduation thesis on "The Starch and Dextrin Bandage", the technique of which he had learned in Paris.
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Richard Hook Richens
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Richard Hook Richens was a botanist and an early researcher in Computational Linguistics. Botany R. H. Richens was the Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cambridge University, and became best known for his studies of elm . His most famous publication was the seminal Elm, published in 1983, in which he sank many elms formerly treated as species as mere varieties or subspecies of Ulmus minor, notably the English Elm U. procera, which he renamed U. minor var. vulgaris. Richens' all-England collection of specimen elm leaves, along with comparative samples from ...
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Max Schlosser
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
Max Schlosser was a German zoologist and paleontologist. He is best known for his research on extinct primates and Caniformia. External links Schlosser Biography from Scribd
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Zinaida Botschantzeva
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Zinaida Petrovna Botschantzeva was a Soviet and Russian botanist, cytologist, embryologist, and professor of the Tashkent university. Botschantzeva came from a large Cossack family. In 1930 she graduated with a biology degree from the National University of Uzbekistan. In 1930-1933 she participated in expeditions to study the flora of Central Asia. Her research advisor was Alexei Ivanovich Vvedensky.
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Jędrzej Śniadecki
1768 - 1838 (70 years)
Jędrzej Śniadecki was a Polish writer, physician, chemist, biologist and philosopher. His achievements include being the first person who linked rickets to lack of sunlight. He also created modern Polish terminology in the field of chemistry.
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Karl Birnbaum
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Karl Birnbaum was a German-American psychiatrist and neurologist. Career In 1902 he received his doctorate from the University of Freiburg, and subsequently working at the Herzberge asylum in Berlin-Lichtenberg. In 1923 he began work as an assistant to Karl Bonhoeffer at the Charité-Berlin. In 1927 he became an associate professor.
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Gil Yosipovitch
#19634
Juliusz Zweibaum
1887 - 1959 (72 years)
Juliusz Zweibaum was a Polish scientist and specialist in histology. In 1926, he was among the first to begin studies using cell cultures in Poland. During the Second World War, he helped organize an underground medical school in the Warsaw Ghetto. He survived the holocaust and helped establish histology and embryology at the University of Warsaw.
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Carl Flügge
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Carl Flügge was born on September 12, 1847 in Hanover, Germany. He pursued his education in medicine in several cities across Germany and became a successful bacteriologist and hygienist. Flügge’s major contribution to science and medicine was the discovery of Flügge droplets. His hypothesis that droplets could contain dangerous pathogens instrumental in spreading respiratory diseases let to the concept of droplet transmission. Flügge was honored with the distinction of being the first chair of hygiene at the University of Göttingen. He also taught at the University of Wrocław and Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Gabriel Strobl
1846 - 1925 (79 years)
Gabriel Strobl was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest and entomologist who specialised in Diptera. In 1866 the then 20-year-old Gabriel Strobl became a Roman Catholic priest monk at the Benedictine monastery Admont Abbey . A devastating Monastery fire in 1865 had destroyed the Natural History Cabinet and its contents which had included Joseph Stammel’s Universe. He was entrusted by Abbot Karlmann Hieber with rebuilding the Natural History Museum. In 44 years of work - until his stroke in 1910 - Gabriel Strobl built up the Museum anew. In his first 12 years of work, he devoted himself principally to botany, before dedicating himself completely to entomology for the following 32 years.
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Martin Jacoby
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Martin Jacoby was a German entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera, especially Chrysomelidae . He was also a musician who played in the orchestra of the Royal Italian Opera in London, and later became a violin tutor.
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Jean-Baptiste Lestiboudois
1715 - 1804 (89 years)
Jean-Baptiste Lestiboudois was a French botanist and pharmacist. His son François Joseph Lestiboudois and grandson Gaspard Thémistocle Lestiboudois were also botanists. Lestiboudois studied pharmacy at a local hospital in Douai and at the University of Douai. After receiving his license to practice medicine in 1739, he relocated to the city of Lille. During the same year, Lestiboudois was appointed chief pharmacist of the French army. From 1758, he served as an apothecary at the army headquarters of Bas-Rhin, during which time Lestiboudois studied plants that occurred in the vicinity of Col...
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Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya was a Soviet botanist, professor, and herbarium curator. She described over 100 plants.
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Vladimir Prokhorovich Amalitskii
1860 - 1917 (57 years)
Vladimir Prokhorovich Amalitskii was a paleontologist and professor at Warsaw University who was involved in the discovery and excavation of the Late Permian fossil vertebrate fauna from the North Dvina River, Arkhangelsk District, Northern European Russia. He made a number of studies of the fossil remains of amphibians and reptiles from Northern Russia.
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Ernst Wilczek
1867 - 1948 (81 years)
Ernst Wilczek was a Swiss botanist and pharmacist. In 1892 he obtained his PhD from the University of Zurich, subsequently becoming an associate professor of systematic and pharmaceutical botany at the University of Lausanne. From 1902 to 1934 he served as a full professor at the university, and in 1910 was appointed director of the École de pharmacie in Lausanne. He was director of the Pont de Nant alpine garden until his retirement in 1934, when he received the status of professor emeritus.
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Pieter Pauw
1564 - 1617 (53 years)
Pieter Pauw , was a Dutch botanist and anatomist. He was a student of Hieronymus Fabricius. He was the first Anatomy Professor at University of Leiden. Biography He was the son of Pieter Pauw Adriaanszoon who settled in Amsterdam, then later in Alkmaar.
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Franz Firbas
1902 - 1964 (62 years)
Franz Firbas was a German botanist who taught at the University of Göttingen. From 1952 to 1964, he was director of their Systematisch-Geobotanisches Institut. Former students include Otto Ludwig Lange, Gerhard Lang, and Heinz Ellenberg.
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Karl Gottfried Paul Döhle
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Karl Gottfried Paul Döhle was a German pathologist who was a native of Mühlhausen. He was a student at Tübingen, Leipzig, Strassburg and Kiel, where he received his doctorate in 1882. Afterwards he was an assistant at the pathological institute in Kiel, where in 1908 he was appointed head of the pathological institute. In 1921 he attained the title of professor ordinarius at the University of Kiel, retiring a few years later in 1924.
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John Hamilton
1899 - 1934 (35 years)
John "Red" Hamilton was a Canadian criminal and bank robber active in the 1920s–1930s, most notably as an associate of John Dillinger. He is best known for his lingering death and secret burial after being mortally wounded during a robbery.
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Volney Morgan Spalding
1849 - 1918 (69 years)
Volney Morgan Spalding was an American botanist affiliated with the University of Michigan for twenty-eight years, and for most of this period was head of the botany department. Spalding was born in East Bloomfield, New York, the son of Frederick Austin and Almira Spalding. His father was of English descent and his mother of Scotch-Irish descent. He received a preliminary education in the public schools of Gorham, New York, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. He entered the University of Michigan in 1869 and was graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1873. His further preparation for professional life included ...
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Oscar Werner Tiegs
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Oscar Werner Tiegs FRS FAA was an Australian zoologist whose career spanned the first half of the 20th century. His contribution to the division of the phylum arthropoda into two parts, one including insects, myriapods, and velvet worms, and the other including trilobites, crustaceans, and arachnids, is considered to be an important contribution to zoology. He was acknowledged as having a remarkable ability for apt and beautiful drawings, and as being an excellent microscopist, as having a great capacity for meticulous accuracy, persistent work, and shrewd elicitation of relationships from massive detail.
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Sven Ludvig Lovén
1809 - 1895 (86 years)
Prof Sven Ludvig Lovén , was a Swedish marine zoologist and malacologist. The Sven Lovén Centre for Marine Sciences within the University of Gothenburg was named in his honour. Life Lovén was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied at Uppsala University in 1823, and enrolled at Lund University in 1824. He completed his studies with a Magister degree in 1829. The following year, he was appointed associate professor of zoology at Lund University. During the years 1830–1831, Lovén traveled to Berlin where he studied anatomy and microscopy techniques under the guidance of Christian Gottfried Eh...
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Antonio Musa Brassavola
1500 - 1555 (55 years)
Antonio Musa Brassavola was an Italian physician and one of the most famous of his time. He studied under Niccolò Leoniceno and Giovanni Manardo. He was the friend and physician of Ercole II, the duke of Este. He was also the consulting physician of Kings Francis I, Charles V, Henry VIII and Popes Paul III, Leo X, Clement VIII and Julius III. He performed the first successful tracheotomy, and published an account of it in 1546. He was the chair of philosophy in Ferrara and also studied botany and medicine. A genus of orchid, called Brassavola, is named after him.
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Hiroshi Tamiya
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Hiroshi Tamiya was an important Japanese plant biochemist and microbiologist. He is notable for mid-twentieth century research he did on the thermodynamics of the light-independent reactions of photosynthesis.
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