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,
#19901
William Grant Craib
1882 - 1933 (51 years)
William Grant Craib was a British botanist. Craib was Regius Professor of Botany at Aberdeen University and later worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Life Craib was born in Banff, Aberdeenshire in northern Scotland on 10 March 1882 and he was educated at Banff Academy and Fordyce Academy. He entered Aberdeen University as an Art student but due to problems with his eyes he left and worked for a while on a ship as an engineer. When his eyes were better, he returned to Aberdeen University and took a Master of Arts degree. He was ready to study for his Bachelor of Science degree, but he ...
Go to Profile#19902
Robert Bonnet
1851 - 1921 (70 years)
Robert Bonnet was a German anatomist born in Augsburg. In 1876 he received his doctorate at Munich, where in 1880 he began work as an assistant at the anatomical institute. The following year, he was appointed professor at the Königliche Centraltierarzneischule in Munich. In 1889 he became an associate professor at the University of Würzburg, and two years later was appointed full professor of anatomy and director of the anatomical institute at Giessen. Later in his career, he served as a professor at the Universities of Greifswald and Bonn .
Go to Profile#19903
Alice Rich Northrop
1864 - 1922 (58 years)
Alice Rich Northrop was an American botanist. She was known for expanding access to nature for New York City's public school children. Northrop traveled extensively to regions of the world where women did not usually venture, including Central America, the Caribbean, and Western North America. On a trip to the Bahamas, she and her husband, John Isaiah Northrop, discovered 18 new species. Her husband was killed in a laboratory accident in 1891, a week before their son was born.
Go to Profile#19904
Ermanno Giglio-Tos
1865 - 1926 (61 years)
Ermanno Giglio-Tos was an Italian entomologist. Giglio-Tos was born at Chiaverano, Turin, and studied at the University of Turin from 1886 until 1896 under Michele Lessona. Later he was a professor at the University of Cagliari. He specialised in Diptera, Mantodea, Phasmatodea, Orthoptera and Blattodea. His collections are in the Turin Museum of Natural History. He died, aged 61, in his home city of Turin.
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Charles Darwin
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has b...
Go to Profile#19906
Carl Linnaeus
1707 - 1778 (71 years)
Carl Linnaeus , also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as .
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Ernst Haeckel
1834 - 1919 (85 years)
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its s...
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Louis Pasteur
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was named after him. His research in chemistry led to remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of the causes and preventions of diseases, which laid down the foundations of hygiene, public health and much of modern medicine. Pasteur's works are credited with saving millions of lives through the developments of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology and has ...
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Gregor Mendel
1822 - 1884 (62 years)
Gregor Johann Mendel OSA was a German-Czech biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno , Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Men...
Go to Profile#19910
Georges Cuvier
1769 - 1832 (63 years)
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier , was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.
Go to Profile#19911
J. B. S. Haldane
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane , nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was a British-Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. He served in the Great War, and obtained the rank of captain. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field, he taught biology at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Institution, and University College London. Renouncing his British citizenship, he became an Indian citizen in 1961 and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute for t...
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Alfred Russel Wallace
1823 - 1913 (90 years)
Alfred Russel Wallace was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
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Thomas Henry Huxley
1825 - 1895 (70 years)
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative anatomy. He has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
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Richard Owen
1804 - 1892 (88 years)
Sir Richard Owen was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen is generally considered to have been an outstanding naturalist with a remarkable gift for interpreting fossils.
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Trofim Lysenko
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist and pseudo-scientist. He was a strong proponent of Lamarckism, and rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own idiosyncratic, pseudoscientific ideas later termed Lysenkoism.
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Thomas Hunt Morgan
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.
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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
1744 - 1829 (85 years)
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck , often known simply as Lamarck , was a French naturalist, biologist, academic, and soldier. He was an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws.
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Joseph Dalton Hooker
1817 - 1911 (94 years)
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
Go to Profile#19919
Julian Huxley
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London , the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society , and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
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Hugo de Vries
1848 - 1935 (87 years)
Hugo Marie de Vries was a Dutch botanist and one of the first geneticists. He is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while apparently unaware of Gregor Mendel's work, for introducing the term "mutation", and for developing a mutation theory of evolution.
Go to Profile#19921
Camillo Golgi
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Camillo Golgi was an Italian biologist and pathologist known for his works on the central nervous system. He studied medicine at the University of Pavia between 1860 and 1868 under the tutelage of Cesare Lombroso. Inspired by pathologist Giulio Bizzozero, he pursued research in the nervous system. His discovery of a staining technique called black reaction in 1873 was a major breakthrough in neuroscience. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named for him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex.
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Edward Drinker Cope
1840 - 1897 (57 years)
Edward Drinker Cope was an American zoologist, paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, he distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science, publishing his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations.
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Johannes Peter Müller
1801 - 1858 (57 years)
Johannes Peter Müller was a German physiologist, comparative anatomist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist, known not only for his discoveries but also for his ability to synthesize knowledge. The paramesonephric duct was named in his honor.
Go to Profile#19924
Theodor Schwann
1810 - 1882 (72 years)
Theodor Schwann was a German physician and physiologist. His most significant contribution to biology is considered to be the extension of cell theory to animals. Other contributions include the discovery of Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system, the discovery and study of pepsin, the discovery of the organic nature of yeast, and the invention of the term "metabolism".
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August Weismann
1834 - 1914 (80 years)
August Friedrich Leopold Weismann FRS , HonFRSE, LLD was a German evolutionary biologist. Fellow German Ernst Mayr ranked him as the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin. Weismann became the Director of the Zoological Institute and the first Professor of Zoology at Freiburg.
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Asa Gray
1810 - 1888 (78 years)
Asa Gray is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His Darwiniana was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Gray was adamant that a genetic connection must exist between all members of a species. He was also strongly opposed to the ideas of hybridization within one generation and special creation in the sense of its not allowing for evolution. He was a strong supporter of Darwin, although Gray's theistic evolution was guided by a Creator.
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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...
Go to Profile#19931
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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