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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#801
Jan Nyssen
#75688
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Jan Nyssen is a Belgian physical geographer, and professor of geography at Ghent University. Career Nyssen was born in Sint-Martens-Voeren. He was employed as a mailman from 1977 to 1997 in Liège in Belgium. In 1991 he started a parallel study of Geography at the University of Liège, where he obtained the degree of Licentiate in Geography in 1995 with a dissertation on soil erosion in Ethiopia. Between 1998 and 2001 he carried out PhD research at KU Leuven University, Belgium, in which he investigated the role of human and natural processes in land degradation in the Ethiopian highlands. Pro...
Go to Profile#802
J. Ronald Eastman
#34436
Overall Influence
Dr. J. Ronald Eastman is a Professor of Geography at Clark University and the author and chief developer of IDRISI GIS Software. At Clark he teaches the class Advanced Topics in GIS. In 2003, Eastman received the Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors from the Association of American Geographers . Eastman was awarded the Distinguished Career Award at the 2010 Annual AAG Meeting.
Go to Profile#803
Giuseppe Zerbi
#107926
Overall Influence
#804
Harriet Bulkeley
#82925
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Harriet Bulkeley, is a British geographer and academic. She is Professor of Geography at Durham University. Bulkeley is also a coordinator in the Naturvation project. Through her work at Durham University, Harriet is involved in the ReInvent-EU project, which aims to encourage decarbonisation in 4 key areas: plastic, steel, paper and meat and dairy. Her research largely explores the politics and processes surrounding environmental governance, as well as the management of municipal waste in the United Kingdom and the politics, specifically urban politics, of climate change.
Go to Profile#805
Darren Tanke
#40794
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Darren H. Tanke is a Canadian fossil preparation technician of the Dinosaur Research Program at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta. Born in Calgary, Tanke became interested in natural history at an early age. In 1979, Tanke began working for Philip J. Currie in the paleontology department of the Provincial Museum of Alberta, originally as a volunteer. From 1979 until 2005 Tanke worked as a lab and field technician, a job he still holds today.
Go to Profile#806
Michael Schlesinger
#91910
Overall Influence
1943 - 2018 (75 years)
Dr. Michael Earl Schlesinger was a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and director of the Climate Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#807
Christopher Tietze
#108142
Overall Influence
#808
James S. Famiglietti
#82315
Overall Influence
James S. Famiglietti is the director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. Prior to that he was the Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA and a professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is a leading expert in global water issues and in raising awareness about the global water crisis and in particular, about global groundwater depletion.
Go to Profile#809
Keith Briffa
#42173
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
Keith Raphael Briffa was a climatologist and deputy director of the Climatic Research Unit. He authored or co-authored over 130 scholarly articles, chapters and books. In his professional work, he focused on climate variability in the late Holocene, with a special focus on northern portions of Europe and Asia. Briffa's preferred method was dendroclimatology, which is a set of procedures intended to decode information about the past climate from tree rings. Briffa helped develop data sets from trees from Canada, Fennoscandia, and northern Siberia which have been used in climate research.
Go to Profile#810
Dara Entekhabi
#81184
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Dara Entekhabi is the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research spans a variety of topics in hydrology, including land-atmosphere interactions, surface water - groundwater interactions, data assimilation, and remote sensing.
Go to Profile#811
Michael Christopher Daly
#95067
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Michael Christopher Daly , , is a British geologist, oil and gas executive and academic. BP’s global exploration chief for eight years, he retired in 2014 and became a visiting professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford where he works on continental tectonics and resources.
Go to Profile#812
Roland B. Stull
#108419
Overall Influence
#813
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska
#23908
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska was a Polish paleobiologist. In the mid-1960s, she led a series of Polish-Mongolian paleontological expeditions to the Gobi Desert. She was the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences. The most notable dinosaur species she discovered include: Deinocheirus and Gallimimus while Kielanodon and Zofiabaatar were named in her honour.
Go to Profile#814
Dennis L. Anderson
#108493
Overall Influence
#815
Arnold Klute
#108509
Overall Influence
#816
Daniel I. Axelrod
#46049
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Daniel Isaac Axelrod was an American paleoecologist specializing in Tertiary Cordilleran floras, in particular correlating fossil evidence of specific floras with climate change indicators. Biography He received his A.B. in botany, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in paleobotany from the University of California at Berkeley. He served in the United States Army during World War II performing strategic analysis of aerial photographs of terrane. After the war he was hired as an assistant professor of geology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He eventually became a full professor of both ge...
Go to Profile#817
Mike Gurnis
#103617
Overall Influence
Michael Gurnis is the John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. Gurnis served as director of the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics , an NSF-funded institute operated by Caltech which supports and promotes Earth science by developing and maintaining open-source software for computational geophysics and related fields.
Go to Profile#818
Robin Donkin
#70288
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Robert Arthur "Robin" Donkin, FBA was an English historian and geographer who served as a reader in historical geography in the University of Cambridge's Department of Geography in 1990. A fellow of the British Academy, Donkin published works on a wide range of subjects, including Cistercian monasteries, agricultural terracing, the history of pearls and pearl fishing, the Muscovy duck, the Guinea fowl, and the history of spices and aromatics.
Go to Profile#819
David T. Sandwell
#108686
Overall Influence
#820
Farouk El-Baz
#5549
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Farouk El-Baz is an Egyptian American space scientist and geologist, who worked with NASA in the scientific exploration of the Moon and the planning of the Apollo program. He was a leading geologist on the program, responsible for studying the geology of the Moon, the selection of landing sites for the Apollo missions, and the training of astronauts in lunar observations and photography. He played a key role in the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission, and later Apollo missions. He also came up with the idea of touchable Moon rocks at a museum, inspired by his childhood pilgrimage to Mecca where h...
Go to Profile#821
Hans Jürgen Rösler
#88773
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Hans Jürgen Rösler was a German mineralogy professor. He was the author of a wide range of publications and core teaching texts, including "Geochemische Tabellen" and "The Mineralogy Textbook" .
Go to Profile#822
Kate Edwards
#55468
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Kate Edwards is a geographer, writer, and content culturalization strategist, most active in information-based cartography and video game content. She was the executive director of the International Game Developers Association from December 2012 to June 2017. Edwards spent over a decade working in various roles at Microsoft, creating the Geopolitical Strategy team and working to evaluate and manage geopolitical and cultural content in software products. After leaving Microsoft she founded Englobe as a consulting firm engaged in content culturalization and strategy, primarily for the video ga...
Go to Profile#823
Bruce Jakosky
#39522
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Bruce Martin Jakosky is a professor of Geological Sciences and associate director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been involved with the Viking, Solar Mesosphere Explorer, Clementine, Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Science Laboratory and MAVEN spacecraft missions, and is involved in planning future spacecraft missions.
Go to Profile#824
Walter H. F. Smith
#85728
Overall Influence
Walter H. F. Smith is a geophysicist, currently working in NOAA's Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry. He was formerly Chair of the scientific and technical sub-committee of GEBCO from 2003 to 2013. Smith earned a BSc at the University of Southern California, and an MA, MPhil and PhD degrees at Columbia University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography until joining NOAA in 1992. Smith is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, nominated for his contributions to marine geodesy.
Go to Profile#825
Gary M. Mavko
#77157
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Gary Mavko is an emeritus professor of geophysics at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in geophysics from Stanford in 1977. Gary then joined the Tectonophysics branch of the USGS in Menlo Park where he worked in areas of rock physics and earthquake fault mechanics. He returned to Stanford in February, 1989, and is now Professor of Geophysics. Mavko was a 2006 Distinguished Lecturer of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. In 2001 he was elected an Honorary Member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists "for his deep understanding of rock physics and for the distillation of h...
Go to Profile#826
Rodney C. Ewing
#35265
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Rodney Charles Ewing is an American mineralogist and materials scientist whose research is focused on the properties of nuclear materials. He is the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy, an Affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a professor in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#827
Tapio Schneider
#87807
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Tapio Schneider is a climate scientist and a professor of environmental science and engineering at the California Institute of Technology. His research is focused on understanding how the turbulent dynamics of the atmosphere, from clouds to large-scale weather systems, shape Earth's climate. Ultimately, his goal is to develop a set of physical laws that govern climate.
Go to Profile#828
Hiroshi Aramata
#6205
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Hiroshi Aramata is a Japanese author, polymath, critic, translator and specialist in natural history, iconography and cartography. His most popular novel was Teito Monogatari , which has sold over 5 million copies in Japan alone.
Go to Profile#829
Hans‐ulrich Schmincke
#108918
Overall Influence
#830
Charles A. Doswell III
#67163
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Charles A. Doswell III is an American meteorologist and prolific severe convective storms researcher. Doswell is a seminal contributor, along with Leslie R. Lemon, to the modern conception of the supercell, which was developed originally by Keith Browning. He also has done research on forecasting and forecast verification, especially for severe convective storms, and is an advocate of ingredients-based forecasting.
Go to Profile#831
Paul Curran
#29146
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Sir Paul James Curran was president of City, University of London between August 2010 and June 2021. Sir Paul is now professor emeritus. Following a period of significant progress, City joined the University of London Federation in September 2016. He served previously as vice-chancellor of Bournemouth University and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Southampton, where he is currently a visiting professor. As a member of the senior management team at Southampton, progressing from head of geography to dean of science, Curran was credited with high-profile leadership as head of the W...
Go to Profile#832
Keith H. Paustian
#109106
Overall Influence
#833
Khajidsuren Bolormaa
#66536
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Khajidsuren Bolormaa, or Khajidsurengiin Bolormaa, is a Mongolian mineralogical engineer, as well as a healthcare and children's rights advocate, who served as the First Lady of Mongolia from 2009 to 2017. Bolormaa is the wife of former President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj. In 2006, Bolormaa founded the Bolor Foundation, which cares for orphans in Mongolia.
Go to Profile#834
Yi‐ming Wei
#109214
Overall Influence
#835
Stephen Moorbath
#105340
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Stephen Erwin Moorbath was a British geochronologist. He set up and then directed the Geological Age and Isotope Research Group at the University of Oxford, before retiring. Research Moorbath and his collaborators demonstrated the great gap between Scourian and Laxfordian gneisses in northwest Scotland. He established the basic mineral age pattern of the Scottish and Irish Caledonides and interpreted it as a cooling-uplift interval. He also pioneered lead isotope studies of ancient gneisses, showing that much of the Lewisian existed over 2,900 million years ago. Stephen dated the oldest ...
Go to Profile#836
Augusto Gansser-Biaggi
#42509
Overall Influence
1910 - 2012 (102 years)
Augusto Gansser-Biaggi was a Swiss geologist who specialised in the geology of the Himalayas. He was born in Milan. Career His geological researches were global in scope:East Greenland , a 4-month expedition under Lauge Koch.Himalaya , an 8-month expedition under Arnold Heim.Colombia Trinidad Iran He got the Tibetan variant of malaria at the First Swiss Himalaya Expedition, and thereafter a lifelong resistance. He circumambulated Mount Kailash disguised as a pilgrim, discovering at the foot of the mountain the origin of one rock seen in the Indian part of the Himalayass and a sensation: seafloor rocks on its South side .
Go to Profile#837
William Compston
#94735
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
William Compston FAA, FRS is an Australian geophysicist. He is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. Compston developed the sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe , for isotopic analyses of geological samples. SHRIMP enabled the world's oldest rock to be identified in Western Australia.
Go to Profile#838
Hans Pretzsch
#109302
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#839
Sunita J. Varjani
#109412
Overall Influence
#840
Donald V. Helmberger
#108430
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Donald Vincent Helmberger was an American seismologist; described in his Seismological Research Letters obituary as "one of the most impactful seismologists to have lived". A memorial issue in Earthquake Science was published in his honor February 2022. He served as head of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory from 1998 to 2003, and was the Smits Family Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus upon his death. He was named to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
Go to Profile#841
Arthur James Boucot
#103293
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Arthur James Boucot was an American paleontologist, biostratigrapher, and taphonomist who was an expert in Silurian and Devonian marine invertebrates, particularly brachiopods. Early life Boucot was born in Philadelphia, and raised in an academic family with early exposure to geology and paleontology. He began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out in his freshman year to work at RCA. He was drafted into the United States Army during WWII, but enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces as a navigator with the Eighth Air Force on B-24 Bombers, and was awarded the Dist...
Go to Profile#842
Sonia I. Seneviratne
#103993
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Sonia Isabelle Seneviratne is a Swiss climate scientist, professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of the ETH Zurich. She is a specialist of extreme climate events. Biography Sonia Seneviratne studied biology at the University of Lausanne and environmental sciences at the ETH Zurich. in 2002, she received a PhD in atmospheric and climate science from ETH Zurich.
Go to Profile#843
Nicholas Coops
#108051
Overall Influence
Nicholas Charles Coops is an Australian-Canadian researcher. He is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing at the University of British Columbia's Department of Forest Resources Management. In 2020, Coops received the Marcus Wallenberg Prize in recognition of his work in with satellite imagery in order to make predictions about forest growth and the ability of forests to store carbon.
Go to Profile#844
Matti Seppälä
#76583
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Matti Kullervo Seppälä was a Finnish geomorphologist specialized in cold climate aeolian processes. Seppälä obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Turku in 1971 and moved after to work at the University of Oulu. In 1978 he moved to the University of Helsinki and served as professor of physical geography from 1978 to 2009
Go to Profile#845
Monte A. Greer
#109733
Overall Influence
#846
Lorraine Lisiecki
#69740
Overall Influence
Lorraine Lisiecki is an American paleoclimatologist. She is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has proposed a new analysis of the 100,000-year problem in the Milankovitch theory of climate change. She also created the analytical software behind the LR04, a "standard representation of the climate history of the last five million years".
Go to Profile#847
Joan O. Grimalt
#109774
Overall Influence
#848
Sharon Nicholson
#100429
Overall Influence
Sharon E. Nicholson is a meteorology professor at Florida State University in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. Nicholson has been teaching about and researching climates of Africa. Nicholson has earned the Humboldt Award, the Fulbright Global Scholar award, a National Science Foundation Award.
Go to Profile#849
Wang Pinxian
#42296
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Wang Pinxian is a Chinese marine geologist. He is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science. Biography Wang obtained his degree in geology from Moscow State University of the Soviet Union in 1960, and taught at East China Normal University in Shanghai afterwards. In 1972, when the Marine Geology department of East China Normal University merged into Tongji University, Wang was transferred to Tongji.
Go to Profile#850
Sergey Zimov
#41779
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Sergey Aphanasievich Zimov is a Russian geophysicist who specialises in arctic and subarctic ecology. He is the Director of Northeast Scientific Station , a senior research fellow of the Pacific Institute for Geography , and one of the founders of Pleistocene Park . He is best known for his work in advocating the theory that human overhunting of large herbivores during the Pleistocene caused Siberia's grassland-steppe ecosystem to disappear and for raising awareness as to the important roles permafrost and thermokarst lakes play in the global carbon cycle.
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