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 Earth Sciences,
#1
Arthur Newell Strahler
#2943
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Arthur Newell Strahler was a geoscience professor at Columbia University who in 1952 developed the Strahler Stream Order system for classifying streams according to the power of their tributaries. Strahler was largely responsible for the shift from qualitative to quantitative geomorphology during the mid 20th century.
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Edward Norton Lorenz
#1461
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
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Richard Chorley
#7564
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Richard John Chorley was an English geographer, and Professor of Geography at Cambridge University, known as leading figure in quantitative geography in the late 20th century, who played an instrumental role in bringing in the use of systems theory to geography.
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Yi-Fu Tuan
#4424
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Yi-Fu Tuan was a Chinese-born American geographer and writer. He was one of the key figures in human geography and arguably the most important originator of humanistic geography. Early life and education Born in 1930 in Tianjin, China to an upper-class family, he was educated in China, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. He attended University College London, but graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955 respectively. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Ca...
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Marie Tharp
#7021
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer. In the 1950s, she collaborated with geologist Bruce Heezen to produce the first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor. Her cartography revealed a more detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom.
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David Harvey
#270
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
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Robert M. Schoch
#4227
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Robert Milton Schoch is an American associate professor of Natural Sciences at the College of General Studies, Boston University. Following initial work as a vertebrate paleontologist, Schoch co-authored and expanded the fringe Sphinx water erosion hypothesis since 1990, and is the author of several pseudohistorical and pseudoscientific books.
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W. Jason Morgan
#8563
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
William Jason Morgan was an American geophysicist who made seminal contributions to the theory of plate tectonics and geodynamics. He retired as the Knox Taylor Professor emeritus of geology and professor of geosciences at Princeton University. He served as a visiting scholar in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University until his death.
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Rattan Lal
#15902
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Rattan Lal is a soil scientist. His work focuses on regenerative agriculture through which soil can help resolve global issues such as climate change, food security and water quality. He has received the Japan Prize, and the World Food Prize, among others, for his work.
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Samuel Warren Carey
#12830
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Samuel Warren Carey AO was an Australian geologist and a professor at the University of Tasmania. He was an early advocate of the theory of continental drift. His work on plate tectonics reconstructions led him to develop the Expanding Earth hypothesis.
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Keith Runcorn
#13295
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Keith Runcorn was a British physicist whose paleomagnetic reconstruction of the relative motions of Europe and America revived the theory of continental drift and was a major contribution to plate tectonics.
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Drummond Matthews
#14207
Overall Influence
1931 - 1997 (66 years)
Drummond Hoyle Matthews FRS , known as "Drum", was a British marine geologist and geophysicist and a key contributor to the theory of plate tectonics. His work, along with that of fellow Briton Fred Vine and Canadian Lawrence Morley, showed how variations in the magnetic properties of rocks forming the ocean floor could be consistent with, and ultimately help confirm, Harry Hammond Hess's 1962 theory of seafloor spreading. In 1989 he was awarded the Geological Society of London's highest honour, the Wollaston Medal.
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Robert S. Dietz
#12401
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Robert Sinclair Dietz was a scientist with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Dietz, born in Westfield, New Jersey, was a marine geologist, geophysicist and oceanographer who conducted pioneering research along with Harry Hammond Hess concerning seafloor spreading, published as early as 1960–1961. While at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography he observed the nature of the Emperor chain of seamounts that extended from the northwest end of the Hawaiian Island–Midway chain and speculated over lunch with Robert Fisher in 1953 that something must be carrying these old volcanic mountai...
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Torsten Hägerstrand
#4183
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Torsten Hägerstrand was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography. A native and resident of Sweden, Hägerstrand was a professor of geography at Lund University, where he received his doctorate in 1953. His doctoral research was on cultural diffusion. His research has helped to make Sweden, and particularly Lund, a major center of innovative work in cultural geography. He also influenced the practice of spatial planning in Sweden through his students.
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Bert Bolin
#14663
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Bert Rickard Johannes Bolin was a Swedish meteorologist who served as the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , from 1988 to 1997. He was professor of meteorology at Stockholm University from 1961 until his retirement in 1990.
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John Tuzo Wilson
#9542
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
John Tuzo Wilson was a Canadian geophysicist and geologist who achieved worldwide acclaim for his contributions to the theory of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the scientific theory that the rigid outer layers of the Earth , the lithosphere, is broken up into around 13 pieces or "plates" that move independently over the weaker asthenosphere. Wilson maintained that the Hawaiian Islands were formed as a tectonic plate shifted to the northwest over a fixed hotspot, spawning a long series of volcanoes. He also conceived of the transform fault, a major plate boundary where two plates move p...
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John Frederick Dewey
#15846
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
John Frederick Dewey is a British structural geologist and a strong proponent of the theory of plate tectonics, building upon the early work undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. He is widely regarded as an authority on the development and evolution of mountain ranges.
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Peter Haggett
#8254
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Peter Haggett is a British geographer and academic, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Urban and Regional Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Education and career Haggett was born in the rural Somerset village of Pawlett, and he was educated at Dr Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater. He would later credit the time spent in his childhood walking and cycling around the district for the development of his keen interest in geography.
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Michael Frank Goodchild
#5608
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Michael Frank Goodchild is a British-American geographer. He is an Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After nineteen years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988, as part of the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, which he directed for over 20 years. In 2008, he founded the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies.
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Ahmet Mete Işıkara
#15239
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Ahmet Mete Işıkara was a Turkish geophysicist and earthquake scientist, well known for his efforts to create public awareness of the need for protection and safety during earthquakes. Early years Işıkara was born 1941 in Mersin. In 1947 he went to primary school and in 1954 to junior highschool in Mersin. After finishing high school in Mersin, he studied in Istanbul University graduating in 1965. In the same year, he began his academic career as an geophysics assistant at the Faculty of Science. He continued his studies in Imperial College London and University of Göttingen.
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Keiiti Aki
#16189
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Keiiti Aki was a Japanese-American professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and then at the University of Southern California , seismologist, author and mentor. He and Paul G. Richards coauthored "Quantitative Seismology: theory and methods".
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Walter Munk
#5505
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Walter Heinrich Munk was an American physical oceanographer. He was one of the first scientists to bring statistical methods to the analysis of oceanographic data. Munk worked on a wide range of topics, including surface waves, geophysical implications of variations in the Earth's rotation, tides, internal waves, deep-ocean drilling into the sea floor, acoustical measurements of ocean properties, sea level rise, and climate change. His work won awards including the National Medal of Science, the Kyoto Prize, and induction to the French Legion of Honour.
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Dan McKenzie
#20215
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Dan Peter McKenzie is a Professor of Geophysics at the University of Cambridge, and one-time head of the Bullard Laboratories of the Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences. He wrote the first paper defining the mathematical principles of plate tectonics on a sphere, and his early work on mantle convection created the modern discussion of planetary interiors.
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Paul J. Crutzen
#1066
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Paul Jozef Crutzen was a Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist. He and Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for their work on atmospheric chemistry and specifically for his efforts in studying the formation and decomposition of atmospheric ozone. In addition to studying the ozone layer and climate change, he popularized the term Anthropocene to describe a proposed new epoch in the Quaternary period when human actions have a drastic effect on the Earth. He was also amongst the first few scientists to introduce the idea of a nuclear win...
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Syun-Ichi Akasofu
#9621
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Syun-Ichi Akasofu is the founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks , serving in that position from the center's establishment in 1998 until January 2007. Previously he had been director of the university's Geophysical Institute from 1986.
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Don L. Anderson
#15005
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Don Lynn Anderson was an American geophysicist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the origin, evolution, structure, and composition of Earth and other planets. An expert in numerous scientific disciplines, Anderson's work combined seismology, solid state physics, geochemistry and petrology to explain how the Earth works. Anderson was best known for his contributions to the understanding of the Earth's deep interior, and more recently, for the plate theory hypothesis that hotspots are the product of plate tectonics rather than narrow plumes emanating from the deep Earth.
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Kerry Emanuel
#13872
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Kerry Andrew Emanuel is an American professor of meteorology currently working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In particular he has specialized in atmospheric convection and the mechanisms acting to intensify hurricaness.
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Ron G. Mason
#20339
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Ronald George Mason was one of the oceanographers whose pioneering Cold War geomagnetic survey work lead to the discovery of magnetic striping on the seafloor. First discovering magnetic stripes on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the United States West Coast, he later also identified them around the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
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William Bunge
#8333
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
William Wheeler Bunge Jr. was an American geographer active mainly as a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. He also became a radical geographer and anti-war activist in the US and Canada. Personal life Bunge served in the American Fifth Army during the height of the Korean War, November 1950 to November 1952. He completed a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1955. He studied under Richard Hartshorne, the first professional geographer he had ever met. He gained a PhD in quantitative geography from the Department of Geography, University of Washington in 1960.
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Kenneth Carpenter
#4390
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Carpenter is a paleontologist. He is the former director of the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum and author or co-author of books on dinosaurs and Mesozoic life. His main research interests are armored dinosaurs , as well as the Early Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Cedar Mountain Formation in eastern Utah.
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Paul R. Ehrlich
#261
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.
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Willi Dansgaard
#12390
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Willi Dansgaard was a Danish paleoclimatologist. He was Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Icelandic Academy of Sciences, and the Danish Geophysical Society.
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Dale Russell
#7428
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Dale Alan Russell was an American-Canadian geologist and palaeontologist. Throughout his career Russell worked as the Curator of Fossil Vertebrates at the Canadian Museum of Nature, Research Professor at the Department of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University, and Senior Paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Dinosaurs he has described include Daspletosaurus and Dromiceiomimus, and he was amongst the first paleontologists to consider an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Russell also helped lead ...
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Wallace Smith Broecker
#9359
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker popularized the term "global warming". He received the Crafoord Prize and the Vet...
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Xavier Le Pichon
#17990
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Xavier Le Pichon is a French geophysicist. Among many other contributions, he is known for his comprehensive model of plate tectonics , helping create the field of plate tectonics. In 1968 he combined the kinematic ideas of W. J. Morgan, D. McKenzie and R. L. Parker with the large data sets collected by Lamont, and especially with the respective magnetic profiles, to show that Plate Tectonics could accurately describe the evolution of the major ocean basins. He is professor at the Collège de France, holder of the Chair of Geodynamics . He is a lifelong devout Catholic, and has come to think of caring attention to others' weakness as an essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve.
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Nicholas Shackleton
#14182
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Sir Nicholas John Shackleton was an English geologist and paleoclimatologist who specialised in the Quaternary Period. He was the son of the distinguished field geologist Robert Millner Shackleton and great-nephew of the explorer Ernest Shackleton.
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Frank Press
#4064
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Frank Press was an American geophysicist. He was an advisor to four U.S. presidents, and later served two consecutive terms as president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences . He was the author of 160 scientific papers and co-author of the textbooks Earth and Understanding Earth.
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Nigel Thrift
#7147
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
#39
Michael E. Mann
#3766
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
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Robert Stephen John Sparks
#23473
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
#41
Harry Glicken
#18549
Overall Influence
1958 - 1991 (33 years)
Harry Glicken was an American volcanologist. He researched Mount St. Helens in the United States before and after its 1980 eruption, and was very distraught about the death of volcanologist David A. Johnston, who was Glicken's mentor and supervisor in Spring 1980 at Mount St. Helens. Glicken was initially assigned to the USGS observation post in the weeks leading up to the eruption but was called away the night before the eruption.
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Judith Curry
#19797
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, climate models, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She was a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works. Curry retired from academia in 2017 at age 63, coinciding with her public climate change ...
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Derek Gregory
#5006
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
#44
Dana Tomlin
#4692
Overall Influence
Charles Dana Tomlin is an author, professor, and originator of Map Algebra, a vocabulary and conceptual framework for classifying ways to combine map data to produce new maps. Tomlin's teaching and research focus on the development and application of geographic information systems . He is currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, having also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Ohio State University School of Natural Resources. His coursework in Landscape Archite...
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Sean Solomon
#20109
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Sean Carl Solomon is the director of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, where he is also the William B. Ransford Professor of Earth and Planetary Science. Before moving to Columbia in 2012, he was the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. His research area is in geophysics, including the fields of planetary geology, seismology, marine geophysics, and geodynamics. Solomon is the principal investigator on the NASA MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He is also a team member on the Gravity Recovery and Interior Labo...
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Syukuro Manabe
#1632
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
is a Japanese–American meteorologist and climatologist who pioneered the use of computers to simulate global climate change and natural climate variations. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, for his contributions to the physical modeling of earth's climate, quantifying its variability, and predictions of climate change.
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Waldo R. Tobler
#9381
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Waldo Rudolph Tobler was an American-Swiss geographer and cartographer. Tobler is regarded as one of the most influential geographers and cartographers of the late 20th century and early 21st century. Tobler is most well known for his proposed idea that "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things," which has come to be referred to as the "first law of geography." He proposed a second law as well: "The phenomenon external to an area of interest affects what goes on inside."
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Christopher T. Russell
#30824
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Thomas Russell is head of the Space Physics Center at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA, professor in UCLA's Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, and Director of the UCLA Branch of the California Space Grant Consortium. He received a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1964 and a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1968. In 1977 he was awarded the James B. Macelwane Medal and in 2003 the John Adam Fleming Medal by the American Geophysical Union . He is also a Fellow of the AGU. Asteroid 21459 Chrisrussell was named after him in 2008. In 2017, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
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Ted Fujita
#5794
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Tetsuya Theodore Fujita was a Japanese American meteorologist whose research primarily focused on severe weather. His research at the University of Chicago on severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons revolutionized the knowledge of each. Although he is best known for creating the Fujita scale of tornado intensity and damage, he also discovered downbursts and microbursts and was an instrumental figure in advancing modern understanding of many severe weather phenomena and how they affect people and communities, especially through his work exploring the relationship between wind...
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Francis Birch
#12500
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Albert Francis Birch was an American geophysicist. He is considered one of the founders of solid Earth geophysics. He is also known for his part in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During World War II, Birch participated in the Manhattan Project, working on the design and development of the gun-type nuclear weapon known as Little Boy. He oversaw its manufacture, and went to Tinian to supervise its assembly and loading into Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress tasked with dropping the bomb.
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