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,
#20101
Samuel Gelfan
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Samuel Gelfan was an American professor of neurophysiology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1932–1933. Education and career Gelfan graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles with A.B. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1927. There he was a teaching fellow in biology from 1925 to 1927. He was from 1928 to 1930 a Donnelly Research Fellow at the University of Chicago and from 1930 to 1932 an assistant professor of physiology and pharmacology at the University of Alberta. For the academic year 1932–1933 he investigated muscle fibre physiology with Edgar D. Adrian at the Univer...
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Dorothea Bennett
1929 - 1990 (61 years)
Dorothea Bennett was a geneticist, known for the genetics of early mammalian development and for research into mammalian sperm surface structures and their role in fertilization and spermatogenesis. She was "one of the major figures in mouse developmental genetics".
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George Packer Berry
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
George Packer Berry was an American physician and medical educator. He served as dean of Harvard Medical School for sixteen years and is credited with greatly modernizing that institution's medical education program.
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Donald J. Borror
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Donald Joyce Borror was an American entomologist and a pioneer of bioacoustics. He is famous for co-authoring a comprehensive textbook of entomology titled An Introduction to the Study of Insects which continues to be in print with newer editions. An entomologist with a specialization on the Odonata , he also took a great interest in animal sounds and published numerous studies on bird vocalization. A longtime professor of entomology at the Ohio State University, he was a fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union as well as the Entomological Society of America.
Go to Profile#20105
Joseph Proudman
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Joseph Proudman , CBE, FRS was a distinguished British mathematician and oceanographer of international repute. His theoretical studies into the oceanic tides not only "solved practically all the remaining tidal problems which are soluble within the framework of classical hydrodynamics and analytical mathematics" but laid the basis of a tidal prediction service developed with Arthur Doodson of great international importance.
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Carl Epling
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Carl Clawson Epling was an American botanist and taxonomist. Epling is best known for being the major authority on the Lamiaceae of the Americas from the 1920s to the 1960s. In his later years he also developed an interest in genetics.
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Gordon Floyd Ferris
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Gordon Floyd Ferris was an American entomologist who served as professor of biology at Stanford University from 1912 to 1958 and earned a reputation for his teaching. He founded and edited the journal Microentomology, preferring to work on insects that could only be examined on microscopic slides. He was a specialist on the systematics of the Coccoidea.
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Peter Wildy
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Norman Peter Leete Wildy was a 20th-century British virologist who was an expert on the herpes simplex virus. Education and personal life He was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent on 31 March 1920 the son of Eric Lawrence Wildy an electrical engineer, and his wife, Gwendolen Leete . He was educated at Eastbourne College. He studied Medicine at Cambridge University graduating MB ChB, and completed his medical training at St Thomas Hospital, London. In 1945 he married Joan Audrey Kenion. They had a son and two daughters.
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Grace Medes
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Grace Medes was an American biochemist, who discovered tyrosinosis—a metabolic disorder today known as tyrosinemia—and studied fatty acid metabolism. She was awarded the Garvan-Olin Medal in 1955 for her work.
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Albert Hazen Wright
1879 - 1970 (91 years)
Albert Hazen Wright was an American herpetologist and professor at Cornell University. He was also an honorary member of the International Ornithological Congress. He did a great deal of study of the Okefenokee Swamp. In 1955 he won the Eminent Ecologist Award.
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Mary Locke Petermann
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Mary Locke Petermann was an American cellular biochemist known for her key role in the discovery and characterization of animal ribosomes, the molecular complexes that carry out protein synthesis. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Cornell University's medical school.
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Martin Glaessner
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Martin Fritz Glaessner AM was a geologist and palaeontologist. Born and educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he spent the majority of his life in working for geoscientific institutes in Austria, Russia, Australia, and studying the geology of the South Pacific in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Glaessner also did early work on the classification of the pre-Cambrian lifeforms now known as the Ediacaran biota, which he proposed were the early antecedents of modern lifeforms.
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Ronald Fisher
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis, being the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin.
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Francis J. Ryan
1916 - 1963 (47 years)
Francis Joseph Ryan was an American zoologist. He was professor and chair of Columbia University's department of zoology. Biography Ryan was born on February 1, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1937 and his Ph.D. in 1941. He then joined the faculty and eventually became assistant professor, associate professor, full professor and department head. He was a mentor of future Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg, who credited Ryan for "taking a callow underclassman from Washington Heights, brash and argumentative as precocious students often are, and tu...
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Jean Piaget
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
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Constantine John Alexopoulos
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Constantine John Alexopoulos was an American mycologist. He was the main author of the landmark book Introductory Mycology, commonly used in mycology and mycology-related courses in undergrad and grad schools around the globe. Introductory Mycology was translated into five languages.
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George Gaylord Simpson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
George Gaylord Simpson was an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution , The Meaning of Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution . He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. Simpson was extraordinarily knowledgeable about Mesozoic fossil mammals and fossil mammals of North and South America. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibrium and dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus.
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Chester Stock
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Chester Stock was an American paleontologist who specialized in the Pleistocene mammalian fauna of the Rancho La Brea tar pits. He served as a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
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Vincent Wigglesworth
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth CBE FRS was a British entomologist who made significant contributions to the field of insect physiology. He established the field in a textbook which was updated in a number of editions.
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Lee R. Dice
1887 - 1977 (90 years)
Lee Raymond Dice was an American ecologist and geneticist who taught at the University of Michigan for almost his entire career. He is known for independently developing the Sørensen–Dice coefficient.
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Israel Lyon Chaikoff
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Israel Lyon Chaikoff was a Canadian-American physiologist and biochemist, known for the Wolff–Chaikoff effect. He and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of radioactive iodine to investigate thyroid function.
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Choh Hao Li
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Choh Hao Li was a Chinese-born American biochemist who discovered, in 1966, that human pituitary growth hormone consists of a chain of 256 amino acids. In 1970 he succeeded in synthesizing this hormone, the largest protein molecule synthesized up to that time.
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Joseph Needham
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. A focus of his was what has come to be called the Needham Question of why and how China had ceded its leadership in Science and Technology to Western countries.
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Guy Frederic Marrian
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Frederic Guy Marrian CBE FRS FRSE FIC was a British biochemist mainly known for his research into oestregen. Life He was born in London on 3 March 1904 the son of Mary Eddington Currie and Frederic York Marrian, a civil engineer. He was educated at Tollington School for Boys in London then Leys School in Cambridge. He then studied Sciences at the University of London graduating with a BSc in 1925. He then went to work as a laboratory assistant to Dr Henry Dale at the National Institute of Medical Research in Hampstead.
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Stanford Moore
1913 - 1982 (69 years)
Stanford Moore was an American biochemist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972, with Christian B. Anfinsen and William Howard Stein, for work done at Rockefeller University on the structure of the enzyme ribonuclease and for contributing to the understanding of the connection between the chemical structure and catalytic activity of the ribonuclease molecule.
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Charles Best
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...
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Ragnar Granit
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Ragnar Arthur Granit was a Finnish-Swedish scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1967 along with Haldan Keffer Hartline and George Wald "for their discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye".
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Warder Clyde Allee
1885 - 1955 (70 years)
Warder Clyde Allee was an American ecologist. He is recognized to be one of the great pioneers of American ecology. As an accomplished zoologist and ecologist, Allee was best known and recognized for his research on social behavior, aggregations and distributions of animals in aquatic as well as terrestrial environments. Allee attended Earlham College and upon his graduation in 1908, pursued advanced studies at the University of Chicago where he received his PhD and graduated summa cum laude in 1912. Allee's most significant research occurred during his time at the University of Chicago and at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts.
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Max Kleiber
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Max Kleiber was a Swiss agricultural biologist, born and educated in Zürich, Switzerland. Kleiber graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology as an Agricultural Chemist in 1920, earned the ScD degree in 1924, and became a Privatdozent after publishing his thesis The Energy Concept in the Science of Nutrition.
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Arthur W. Toga
1900 - Present (126 years)
Arthur W. Toga is an American neuroscientist and the director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging and the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute within the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He is also the Ghada Irani Chair in Neuroscience and provost professor of ophthalmology, neurology, psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, radiology and engineering.
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Maurice Mehl
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
Maurice Goldsmith Mehl was an American paleontologist and professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Missouri. Life and career Mehl was born on December 25, 1887, to Frank and Rebecca Goldsmith Mehl. After graduation from Burlingame High School, he attended the University of Chicago, where he completed a B.S. in 1911 and a Ph.D. in 1914. While at Chicago, he met Lucy Jane Hull and they were married in 1912. At Chicago, Mehl studied vertebrate paleontology under the instruction of prominent paleontologist Samuel Wendell Williston. He taught at Chicago for a while as well as a...
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Robert Whittaker
1920 - 1980 (60 years)
Robert Harding Whittaker was an American plant ecologist, active in the 1950s to the 1970s. He was the first to propose the five kingdom taxonomic classification of the world's biota into the Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Monera in 1969. He also proposed the Whittaker Biome Classification, which categorized biome-types upon two abiotic factors: temperature and precipitation.
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Warren Sturgis McCulloch
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Warren Sturgis McCulloch was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement. Along with Walter Pitts, McCulloch created computational models based on mathematical algorithms called threshold logic which split the inquiry into two distinct approaches, one approach focused on biological processes in the brain and the other focused on the application of neural networks to artificial intelligence.
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Carl Ferdinand Cori
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Carl Ferdinand Cori, ForMemRS was a Czech-American biochemist and pharmacologist. He, together with his wife Gerty Cori and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay, received a Nobel Prize in 1947 for their discovery of how the glucose derivative glycogen is broken down and resynthesized in the body for use as a store and source of energy. In 2004, both Coris were designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark in recognition of their work that elucidated carbohydrate metabolism.
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Yellapragada Subbarow
1895 - 1948 (53 years)
Yellapragada Subbarow was an Indian American biochemist who discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in the cell, developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer and led the department at Lederle laboratories in which Benjamin Minge Duggar discovered chlortetracycline in 1945.
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Edward Alexander Newell Arber
1870 - 1918 (48 years)
Edward Alexander Newell Arber was an English botanist and paleontologist. He was a professor at the University of Cambridge specialising in palaeobotany. He married plant morphologist and philosopher Agnes Robertson in 1909. They had many interests in common, and his marriage was described as 'happy'. They had one child, a daughter. He died in 1918 following a period of ill health.
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John Baker
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
John Randal Baker FRS was an English biologist, zoologist, and microscopist, and a professor at the University of Oxford, where he was Emeritus Reader in Cytology. He received his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 1927.
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E. Newton Harvey
1887 - 1959 (72 years)
Edmund Newton Harvey was an American zoologist. He was acknowledged as one of the leading authorities on bioluminescence. He won the Rumford Prize in 1947 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929.
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Masayori Inouye
1900 - Present (126 years)
Masayori Inouye is a distinguished professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University. He, along with his team, discovered natural antisense RNA. Inouye was also a key scientist involved in the discovery and characterization of retrons, which are retroviral-like elements found in various bacterial genomes.
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Alfred Sturtevant
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Alfred Henry Sturtevant was an American geneticist. Sturtevant constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1911. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster with Thomas Hunt Morgan. By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the sturt in his honor. On February 13, 1968, Sturtevant received the 1967 National Medal of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
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Harald Sverdrup
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Harald Ulrik Sverdrup was a Norwegian oceanographer and meteorologist. He served as director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Norwegian Polar Institute. Background He was born at Sogndal in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. He was the son of Lutheran theologian Edvard Sverdrup and Maria Vollan . His sister Mimi Sverdrup Lunden was an educator and author. His brother Leif Sverdrup was a General with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His brother Einar Sverdrup was CEO of Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani.
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Satyu Yamaguti
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
was a Japanese parasitologist, entomologist, and helminthologist. He was a specialist of mosquitoes and helminths such as digeneans, monogeneans, cestodes, acanthocephalans and nematodes. He also worked on the parasitic crustaceans Copepoda and Branchiura. Satyu Yamaguti wrote more than 60 scientific papers and, more importantly, several huge monographs which are still in use by scientists all over the world and were cited over 1,000 times each.
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Rollins A. Emerson
1873 - 1947 (74 years)
Rollins Adams Emerson was an American geneticist who rediscovered the laws of inheritance established by Gregor Mendel. Early life Emerson was born on May 5, 1873, in tiny Pillar Point, New York, but at the age of seven his family moved to Kearney County, Nebraska, where he attended public school and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He enrolled in the College of Agriculture there, having developed an interest in the local flora and landscaping while quite young.
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David Lack
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
David Lambert Lack FRS was a British evolutionary biologist who made contributions to ornithology, ecology, and ethology. His 1947 book, Darwin's Finches, on the finches of the Galapagos Islands was a landmark work as were his other popular science books on Life of the Robin and Swifts in a Tower. He developed what is now known as Lack's Principle which explained the evolution of avian clutch sizes in terms of individual selection as opposed to the competing contemporary idea that they had evolved for the benefit of species . His pioneering life-history studies of the living bird helped in changing the nature of ornithology from what was then a collection-oriented field.
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Sol Spiegelman
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Sol Spiegelman was an American molecular biologist. He developed the technique of nucleic acid hybridization, which helped to lay the groundwork for advances in recombinant DNA technology. Early life and education Spiegelman was born in Brooklyn, New York City in 1914. He attended the City College of New York and was initially interested in biology, but found the courses uninspiring and instead chose to focus on math and physics. During his undergraduate work he took a leave of absence to work in a biology laboratory, where he studied the genetics of bacteria. He graduated in 1939 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.
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Katherine Esau
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Katherine Esau was a pioneering German-American botanist who studied plant anatomy and the effects of viruses. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants are key texts. In 1989, Esau received the National Medal of Science "In recognition of her distinguished service to the American community of plant biologists, and for the excellence of her pioneering research, both basic and applied, on plant structure and development, which has spanned more than six decades; for her superlative performance as an educator, in the classroom and through her books; for the encouragement and inspira...
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Dwight Ingle
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Dwight Joyce Ingle was an American physiologist and endocrinologist who was the chairman of the physiology department at the University of Chicago. His obituary in the National Academy of Sciences' Biographical Memoirs described him as "a first-rank, pioneering scientist in a new and uncharted field [i.e. endocrinology]."
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David Rittenberg
1906 - 1970 (64 years)
David Rittenberg was an American biochemist who pioneered the isotopic tagging of molecules. He was born and died in New York, and spent almost the whole of his life there. He obtained his B.S. in 1929 from the City College of New York, and his Ph.D. in 1935 at Columbia University under the supervision of Harold Urey.
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W. Ross Ashby
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
William Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
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Curt Stern
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Curt Stern was a German-born American geneticist. Life Curt Jacob Stern was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany on August 30, 1902. He was the first son of Earned S. Stern, born 1862 in England, who was interned during World War I, and Anna Stern, née Anna Liebrecht who was a schoolteacher . Her father C. Liebrecht was a teacher at the Israelitische Gemeindeschule Gleiwitz, a "Gymnasium" in Upper Silesia, with a PhD in mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Breslau. His father dealt in antiques and dental supplies, and his mother was a schoolteacher. The family moved to a suburb in Berlin shortly after his birth.
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