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.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#20051

Edmund Ware Sinnott

Edmund Ware Sinnott
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Edmund Ware Sinnott was an American botanist and educator. Sinnott is best known for his work in plant morphology. Career Sinnott received his Bachelor of Arts , Master of Arts , and Doctor of Philosophy , all from Harvard University. During his freshman year of college, he lived in Stoughton Hall. Sinnott studied in Australia with Arthur Johnson Eames from 1910 to 1911. Upon graduation, he became an instructor at Harvard, and worked with I. W. Bailey, the anatomist. From 1915 to 1928, he was at the Connecticut Agricultural College at Storrs, becoming Professor of Botany and Genetics. From 19...
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#20052

Rudolph Schoenheimer

Rudolph Schoenheimer
1898 - 1941 (43 years)
Rudolf Schoenheimer was a German-American biochemist who developed the technique of isotope labelling/tagging of biomolecules, enabling detailed study of metabolism. This work revealed that all the constituents of an organism are in a constant state of chemical renewal.
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#20053

H. E. Hinton

1912 - 1977 (65 years)
Howard Everest Hinton was a British entomologist and Professor who studied beetles. Education and early life Howard Hinton grew up in Mexico and attended Modesto Junior College and the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1939 for research on Mexican water beetles . During World War II he worked on the problem of storage of food products to counter the depredation of moths and beetles.
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#20054

William King Gregory

William King Gregory
1876 - 1970 (94 years)
William King Gregory was an American zoologist, renowned as a primatologist, paleontologist, and functional and comparative anatomist. He was an expert on mammalian dentition, and a leading contributor to theories of evolution. In addition he was active in presenting his ideas to students and the general public through books and museum exhibits.
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#20056

Henry A. Gleason

Henry A. Gleason
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
Henry Allan Gleason was an American ecologist, botanist, and taxonomist. He was known for his endorsement of the individualistic or open community concept of ecological succession, and his opposition to Frederic Clements's concept of the climax state of an ecosystem. His ideas were largely dismissed during his working life, leading him to move into plant taxonomy, but found favour late in the twentieth century.
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#20057

Chandler McCuskey Brooks

1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Dr. Chandler McCuskey Brooks was an American physiologist notable for his research on the relationships between the central nervous and endocrine systems. He was also known for his studies of the electrophysiology of the heart. Brooks was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He also headed the physiology and pharmacology departments of the Long Island College of Medicine and a Guggenheim fellow .
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#20058

William S. Tillett

1892 - 1974 (82 years)
William Smith Tillett was an American internist and microbiologist. He is best known for the discovery of C-reactive protein and the streptokinase. He was also a professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine.
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#20059

Emil T. Kaiser

1938 - 1988 (50 years)
Emil Thomas Kaiser was a Hungarian-born American biochemist. Kaiser was most notable for his research of enzyme modification. He also was noted for developing new types of catalysts and for a more active form of a peptide hormone.
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#20060

George S. Myers

1905 - 1985 (80 years)
George Sprague Myers was an American ichthyologist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. He served as the editor of Stanford Ichthyological Bulletin as well as president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Myers was also head of the Division of Fishes at the United States National Museum, and held a position as an ichthyologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. He was also an advisor in fisheries and ichthyology to the Brazilian Government.
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#20061

Bernardo Houssay

Bernardo Houssay
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Bernardo Alberto Houssay was an Argentine physiologist. Houssay was a co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of glucose in animals, sharing the prize with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori. He is the first Latin American Nobel laureate in the sciences.
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#20062

Edward Arthur Steinhaus

1914 - 1969 (55 years)
Edward Arthur Steinhaus was an American bacteriologist and pathologist who specialized in insect pathology particularly on the applications of microorganisms for the control of insect pests. He also served as the founder or cofounder of the Annual Review of Entomology, the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology, and the Society for Invertebrate Pathology.
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#20063

Fred Conrad Koch

Fred Conrad Koch
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Frederick Conrad Koch was an American biochemist and endocrinologist. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Koch graduated from the University of Illinois in 1899. He was affiliated with the University of Chicago from 1912 to 1941, serving as chairman of the department of biochemistry from 1936 to 1941. He retired as professor emeritus, and was director of biomedical research at Armour and Company. He was known primarily for his work on male sex hormones and testicular function. He served as the 19th president of the Endocrine Society, which in 1957 established the Fred Conrad Koch Lifetime Achievement ...
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#20064

Theophilus Painter

1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Theophilus Shickel Painter was an American zoologist best known for his work on the structure and function of chromosomes, especially the sex-determination genes X and Y in humans. He was the first to discover that human sex was determined by an X/Y heteromorphic chromosomal pair mechanism. He also carried out work in identifying genes in fruit flies . His work exploited the giant polytene chromosomes in the salivary glands of Drosophila and other Dipteran larvae. Painter was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1938 and the American Philosophical Society in 1939.
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#20065

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Ralph Vary Chamberlin
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Ralph Vary Chamberlin was an American biologist, ethnographer, and historian from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was a faculty member of the University of Utah for over 25 years, where he helped establish the School of Medicine and served as its first dean, and later became head of the zoology department. He also taught at Brigham Young University and the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for over a decade at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he described species from around the world.
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#20066

Harold Munro Fox

1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Harold Munro Fox was an English zoologist. Education and early life He was born Harold Munro Fuchs in Clapham, London, in 1889 to George Gotthilf Fuchs, a former captain in the Prussian Army, and Margaret Isabella Campbell Munro, daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Munro of the Yorkshire Regiment. However, his parents separated when he was just a few years old. Fox was educated at Brighton College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read for the Natural Sciences Tripos .
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#20067

Philip Herries Gregory

1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Philip Herries Gregory was a British mycologist and phytopathologist. He established an international reputation as a pioneer of aerobiology and a leading expert on the liberation and dispersal of fungal spores and their relation to plant diseases and to human respiratory diseases. In 1957 he was elected to a one-year term as president of the British Mycological Society.
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#20068

Agnes Arber

Agnes Arber
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Agnes Arber FRS was a British plant morphologist and anatomist, historian of botany and philosopher of biology. She was born in London but lived most of her life in Cambridge, including the last 51 years of her life. She was the first woman botanist to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and the third woman overall. She was the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London for her contributions to botanical science.
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#20069

Frederick Hutt

1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Prof Frederick Bruce Hutt HFRSE was a Canadian zoologist and geneticist in the 20th century. His book Animal Genetics has 31 published editions from 1964 to 1981 and is translated into six languages.
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#20070

Sabra Klein

Sabra Klein is an American microbiologist who is a Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research considers how sex and gender impact the immune system. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Klein investigated why men and women have different COVID-19 outcomes.
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#20071

E. Morton Jellinek

1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Elvin Morton "Bunky" Jellinek , E. Morton Jellinek, or most often, E. M. Jellinek, was a biostatistician, physiologist, and an alcoholism researcher, fluent in nine languages and able to communicate in four others.
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#20072

Charles Paul Alexander

1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Charles Paul Alexander was an American entomologist who specialized in the craneflies, Tipulidae. Charles Paul Alexander was the son of Emil Alexander and Jane Alexander . Emil immigrated to the United States in 1873 and changed his surname from Schlandensky to Alexander. Charles entered Cornell University in 1909, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1913 and a Ph.D. in 1918. Between 1917 and 1919, he was entomologist at the University of Kansas, then from 1919 to 1922, at the University of Illinois.
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#20073

Hans Hoff

Hans Hoff
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Hans Hoff was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. Life After completing his medical studies at the University of Vienna in 1918 Hoff worked as assistant physician and as an assistant at the clinic under Julius Wagner-Jauregg. In 1932 he became a private lecturer and specialist in psychiatry and neurology. In 1936 he was appointed to the board of the Department of Neurology clinic in Vienna.
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#20074

Louise Pearce

Louise Pearce
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Louise Pearce was an American pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute who helped develop a treatment for African sleeping sickness . Sleeping sickness was a fatal epidemic which had devastated areas of Africa, killing two-thirds of the population of the Uganda protectorate between 1900 and 1906 alone. With chemists Walter Abraham Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger and pathologist Wade Hampton Brown, Pearce worked to develop and test arsenic-based drugs for its treatment. In 1920, Louise Pearce traveled to the Belgian Congo where she designed and carried out a drug testing protocol for human trials to establish tryparsamide's safety, effectiveness, and optimum dosage.
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#20075

Claus W. Jungeblut

1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Claus Washington Jungeblut was an American bacteriologist and vitamin researcher. Biography Jungeblut was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota to Nicholas and Gertrude Jungeblut. He was educated at University of Bern where he obtained his M.D. in 1921. He was an assistant at Robert Koch Institute .
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#20076

Archie Carr

Archie Carr
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Archie Fairly Carr, Jr. was an American herpetologist, ecologist, and conservationist. He was a Professor of Zoology at the University of Florida and an acclaimed writer on science and nature. He brought attention to the world's declining sea turtle populations due to over-exploitation and habitat loss. Wildlife refuges in Florida and Costa Rica have been named in his honor.
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#20077

Francis Gilman Blake

1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Francis Gilman Blake was a leading American immunologist. He served as dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, president of the American Association of Immunologists, and physician-in-chief of the Yale–New Haven Hospital.
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#20078

Myron Gordon

1899 - 1959 (60 years)
Myron Gordon was an American biologist and geneticist and became an expert on platy fish Xiphophorus while using them for his pioneering cancer research, starting in the late 1920s. Early papers were published while still a graduate student at Cornell University, but he is best known for his research at New York University and the New York Zoological Society .
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#20079

John Macleod

John Macleod
1876 - 1935 (59 years)
John James Rickard Macleod, , was a Scottish biochemist and physiologist. He devoted his career to diverse topics in physiology and biochemistry, but was chiefly interested in carbohydrate metabolism. He is noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin during his tenure as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, for which he and Frederick Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. Awarding the prize to Macleod was controversial at the time, because according to Banting's version of events, Macleod's role in the discovery was negligible. It was not until d...
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#20080

Conrad Vernon Morton

1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Conrad Vernon Morton was an American botanist, who did notable writings on Ferns. He was also a specialist in Gesneriaceae and Solanaceae for the Smithsonian Institution from 1928. In 1938, botanists Standl. & Steyerm., published Mortoniodendron, a genus of flowering plants from Central America, belonging to the family Malvaceae in Conrad Morton's honour. Then in 1939, botanist Robert Everard Woodson published Mortoniella a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Central America, in the family Apocynaceae, also in his honour. Later in 1975, botanist Wiehler published Neomortonia, a genus of ...
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#20081

Ludlow Griscom

1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Ludlow Griscom was an American ornithologist known as a pioneer in field ornithology. His emphasis on the identification of free-flying birds by field marks became widely adopted by professionals and amateurs. Many called him "Dean of the Birdwatchers."
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#20082

Torkel Weis-Fogh

Torkel Weis-Fogh
1922 - 1975 (53 years)
Torkel Weis-Fogh was a Danish zoologist and Professor at the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen. He is best known for his contributions to the understanding of insect flight, especially the clap and fling mechanism used by very small insects. James Lighthill named this "the Weis-Fogh mechanism of lift generation".
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#20083

David Thoday

1883 - 1964 (81 years)
David Thoday FRS was a botanist. Career Thoday was Harry Bolus professor of botany, University of Cape Town and later professor at the University College of North Wales 1923–1949. As a botanist, his work is denoted by the author abbreviation Thoday when citing a botanical name.
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#20084

Jean Clark Dan

1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jean Clark Dan née Clark was an American embryologist who pioneered research into the acrosomal reaction. Born in 1910 to a family of staunch Presbyterians in Westfield, New Jersey, Jean Clark Dan graduated from Wilson College in Pennsylvania in 1932 where she studied biology. She pursued her graduate studies in invertebrate zoology at the University of Pennsylvania and spent her summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At the Marine Biological Laboratory she met her future husband and scientific collaborator Katsuma Dan, the son of a prominent Japanese statesman.
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#20085

William Keeton

1933 - 1980 (47 years)
William Tinsley Keeton was an American zoologist known internationally for his work on animal behavior, especially bird migration, and for his work on millipede taxonomy. He was a well-liked professor of biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and author of a widely used introductory textbook, Biological Science.
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#20086

Donald R. Whitehead

1938 - 1990 (52 years)
Donald Robert Whitehead was an American entomologist, who specialized in the study of the biogeography and systematics of weevils. Whitehead was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree in 1961, from Rutgers University, and his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1971.
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#20087

Sam Ruben

1913 - 1943 (30 years)
Samuel Ruben was an American chemist who with Martin Kamen co-discovered the synthesis of the isotope carbon-14 in 1940. Early life Ruben was the son of Herschel and Frieda Penn Rubenstein – the name was officially shortened to Ruben in 1930. Young Sam developed a friendship with neighbor Jack Dempsey and became involved with a local boys' boxing club and later, when the family moved across the Bay to Berkeley, he was a successful basketball player at Berkeley High School . After achieving his B.S. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, he continued his studies there and was awarded a Ph.D.
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#20088

Edward Oliver Essig

1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Edward Oliver Essig was an American entomologist who specialized in the Hemiptera. Essig was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote Injurious and Beneficial Insects of California , Insects of Western North America , A History of Entomology , College Entomology and several hundred scientific works on Hemiptera.The Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley is named for him. He was also interested in horticulture and wrote A check-list of Fuchsias. American Fuchsia Society .
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#20089

Kjell Kleppe

Kjell Kleppe
1934 - 1988 (54 years)
Kjell Kleppe was a Norwegian biochemist and molecular biologist who was a pioneer in the polymerase chain reaction technique and built the first laboratory in the country for bio- and gene technology.
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#20090

Alexander Thomas Cameron

1882 - 1947 (65 years)
Alexander Thomas Cameron was a British-born Canadian biochemist. He was best known as Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Manitoba, and as the author of numerous popular biochemistry textbooks, including the Textbook of Biochemistry.
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#20091

Dorothea Leighton

1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Dorothea Cross Leighton was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.
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#20092

Jean Weigle

1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Jean-Jacques Weigle was a Swiss molecular biologist at Caltech and formerly a physicist at the University of Geneva from 1931 to 1948. He is known for his major contributions on field of bacteriophage λ research, focused on the interactions between those viruses and their E. coli hosts.
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#20093

Otis Freeman Curtis

1888 - 1949 (61 years)
Otis Freeman Curtis was an American botanist and plant physiologist, at the State Agricultural Experimental Station, and professor of botany at Cornell University. He made important contributions to the study of translocation.
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#20094

Oskar Baudisch

Oskar Baudisch
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Oskar Baudisch was an Austrian American biochemist and radiographer. He is mainly known for a chemical reaction that bears his name, the Baudisch reaction. Early life and education Baudisch was born to Joseph and Julie Baudisch in Maffersdorf, Austria, which is today Vratislavice nad Nisou, now part of the Czech Republic.
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#20095

Ira Baldwin

1895 - 1999 (104 years)
Ira Lawrence Baldwin was the founder and director emeritus of the Wisconsin Academy Foundation. He began teaching bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin in 1927 and a few years later moved into what became a career in administration. He held positions as chair of the Department of Bacteriology, dean of the Graduate School, dean and director of the College of Agriculture, university vice president for academic affairs, and special assistant to the president. He was also involved in programs for agricultural development both in the United States and abroad. Ira Baldwin wrote a hostile revi...
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#20096

Elisabeth Schiemann

Elisabeth Schiemann
1881 - 1972 (91 years)
Elisabeth Schiemann was a German geneticist, crop researcher and resistance fighter in the Third Reich. Background and education Elisabeth Schiemann was born in Viljandi, Estonia, at the time part of the Governorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire. Her father was the historian ; from 1887 she lived in Berlin. She was part of the first generation of women in Germany who were permitted to study and pursue independent careers as academics, although initially in a limited capacity.
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#20097

Vadim Dmitrij Vladykov

1898 - 1986 (88 years)
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#20098

Arthur H. Steinhaus

1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Arthur H Steinhaus was an American physical fitness expert and sports physiologist. Biography Arthur H [no middle name] Steinhaus was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 4, 1897. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in zoology and physiology and his B.P.E. and M.P.E. from George Williams College in physical education .
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#20099

Roman Kenk

Roman Kenk
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Roman Kenk was a Slovenian, later American, zoologist. Life Roman Kenk received his PhD degree in zoology at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1921, and worked at the University of Ljubljana. From 1931 to 1932, and again in the summer of 1933, Kenk stayed at the University of Virginia, USA, where he met Ada Antonio Blanco, who had come from Puerto Rico. They married in 1933 and returned to Ljubljana, where they stayed for 5 years and then moved to Puerto Rico. Four years later, in 1942, Kenk became a naturalized American citizen.
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#20100

Mary Dora Rogick

Mary Dora Rogick
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Mary Dora Rogick was an American zoologist. In 1935 she joined the College of New Rochelle in New York, where she spent her career as a professor and researcher. She was a specialist in the taxonomy and ecology of bryozoa, a phylum of aquatic invertebrate animals.
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