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,
#1851
Pieter Vermeesch
#154241
Overall Influence
#1852
Lorenz Poellinger
#154245
Overall Influence
#1853
Rebecca Lange
#126086
Overall Influence
Rebecca Ann Lange is a professor of experimental petrology, magmatism and volcanism at the University of Michigan. Her research investigates how magmatism has shaped the evolution of the Earth, as well as the formation of continental crust. She is a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America and was awarded the F.W. Clarke Medal in 1995.
Go to Profile#1854
William Shotyk
#154328
Overall Influence
#1855
Ryan H. Wiser
#154373
Overall Influence
#1856
V. K. Garg
#107533
Overall Influence
V. K. Garg is dean of the School of Environment And Earth Sciences, Central University Of Punjab, Bathinda. He is also dean of students welfare of CUPB. He visited EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2015 as visiting scientist, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, in January–February 2014 under TEQIP-II Programme.
Go to Profile#1857
John Rennie Short
#63288
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Rennie Short is professor emeritus of geography and public policy in the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Early life and education Short was born in Stirling, Scotland. He was raised in nearby Tullibody, a village in the County of Clackmannanshire. He attended the county grammar school, Alloa Academy. He received the MA in geography from Aberdeen University in 1973. followed by a PhD in geography from the University of Bristol, with a received dissertation, "Residential Mobility in The Private Housing Market of Bristol" . From 1976 to 1978, he was a pos...
Go to Profile#1858
Mark D. A. Rounsevell
#154480
Overall Influence
#1859
Kristoffer Szilas
#125922
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Kristoffer Szilas is a Danish mountaineer and geologist of Hungarian descent who lived in the US from 2012 to 2016. Mountaineering Szilas has been on about a dozen climbing expeditions around the world, which have resulted in several first ascents of previously unclimbed mountains. A few of these expeditions were carried out together with the American mountaineer Jess Roskelley according to Szilas' personal website. Their most notable achievement was the first ascent of a route that they named the 'Hypa Zypa Couloir' on the Citadel in the Kichatna Range, Alaska. In 2009 Szilas made the first...
Go to Profile#1860
Jane Wills
#69018
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jane Wills is a British geographer and academic. She is Professor of Geography at the University of Exeter. She was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2022, in recognition of her contributions to Political Geography.
Go to Profile#1861
David Stensrud
#133769
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David Jonathan Stensrud is an American meteorologist recognized for numerical modeling and forecasting of hazardous synoptic and mesoscale weather and for incorporating new data into models. Stensrud earned a B.A. in meteorology and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At Pennsylvania State University he earned M.S. in meteorology in 1985 with the thesis On the Development of Boundary Layer Rolls from the Inflection Point Instability and in 1992 a Ph.D. with the dissertation Southward Burst Mesoscale Convective Systems: An Observational and Modeling Study. He joined the Nation...
Go to Profile#1862
Eugene J. Kamprath
#154564
Overall Influence
#1863
Ulf Büntgen
#154595
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
#1864
Hugo A. Lóaiciga
#154613
Overall Influence
#1866
Walter Klöpffer
#154655
Overall Influence
#1867
Renato Solidum Jr.
#81327
Overall Influence
Renato Umali Solidum Jr. is a Filipino geologist and government official. Solidum has been Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology since August 13, 2022. Before his appointment as Secretary, Solidum served as an Undersecretary for Disaster Risk Reduction-Climate Change Adaptation at DOST and as the Officer-in-Charge of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology .
Go to Profile#1868
Malcolm Ross Walter
#154671
Overall Influence
#1869
Amos Frumkin
#93864
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Amos Frumkin is an Israeli geologist and speleologist. Frumkin is a professor of geology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Frumkin was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1953. His expertise is the geology of caves. As an active speleologist, he founded and directs the Cave Research Center of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#1870
Cynthia Ebinger
#153204
Overall Influence
Cynthia Ebinger is an American geoscientist at Tulane University known for her research on continental rifts and the movement of continental plate boundaries. Education Ebinger's undergraduate degree is from Duke University . She has an S.M. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution .
Go to Profile#1871
Georges Matheron
#17349
Overall Influence
1930 - 2000 (70 years)
Georges François Paul Marie Matheron was a French mathematician and civil engineer of mines, known as the founder of geostatistics and a co-founder of mathematical morphology. In 1968, he created the Centre de Géostatistique et de Morphologie Mathématique at the Paris School of Mines in Fontainebleau. He is known for his contributions on Kriging and mathematical morphology. His seminal work is posted for study and review to the Online Library of the Centre de Géostatistique, Fontainebleau, France.
Go to Profile#1872
Christopher G. Scott
#154976
Overall Influence
#1873
Paul W. Unger
#155006
Overall Influence
#1874
Michael Thomas Montgomery
#155047
Overall Influence
#1875
Jay Golden
#30839
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jay S. Golden is an academic and researcher. Golden is the Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability & Finance at Syracuse University where he also directs the Dynamic Sustainability research lab.
Go to Profile#1876
Estella Atekwana
#149574
Overall Influence
Estella Atekwana is a geophysicist studying biogeophysics and tectonophysics. She is currently Dean of the College of Letters and Science at University of California, Davis. She previously served as Dean of the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of Delaware. She is also an adjunct professor at both the University of Waterloo and the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Before joining the University of Delaware in 2017, she was the Department Head of the Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State University. She is a Regents Distinguished Professor and a...
Go to Profile#1877
Blaire Van Valkenburgh
#91334
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Blaire Van Valkenburgh is an American paleontologist and holds the Donald R. Dickey Chair in Vertebrate Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California Los Angeles. She is a former president of Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Go to Profile#1878
Urs Schaltegger
#155232
Overall Influence
#1879
Haakon Fossen
#155247
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
#1880
Ganapathy Shanmugam
#155249
Overall Influence
#1881
Luca Montanarella
#155329
Overall Influence
#1882
John M. Ferry
#155332
Overall Influence
#1883
Peter W. Reiners
#155471
Overall Influence
#1884
Hong-qiang Ren
#155490
Overall Influence
#1885
Thomas William Walker
#93585
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Thomas William Walker, ONZM was an Anglo-New Zealand soil scientist. He was known as "Tom" or "John" or "Johnnie" after the Johnnie Walker brand of whisky, or "The Prof" to students and latterly viewers of Maggie's Garden Show. To his family he was "Baba".
Go to Profile#1886
Roger Bivand
#116507
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Roger Simon Bivand is a British geographer, economist and professor at the Norwegian School of Economics. He specialises in open source software for spatial analysis, and played a major role in developing functions for spatial data in the R statistical programming language, including the R packages sp, rgdal, maptools and rgrass7. His book Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R , coauthored with Edzer Pebesma and Virgilio Gómez-Rubio, is considered "the authoritative resource on R's spatial capabilities".
Go to Profile#1887
Lester R. Brown
#7112
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Lester Russel Brown is an American environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and former president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day referred to him as "one of the great pioneer environmentalists."
Go to Profile#1888
Bodo Bookhagen
#155856
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
#1889
Yan Bottinga
#155927
Overall Influence
#1890
Ghassem Asrar
#99848
Overall Influence
Ghassem R. Asrar is an Iranian-American scientist in the field of Earth and space science. Since November 2019 he has served as the Senior Vice President for Science at the Universities Space Research Association.
Go to Profile#1891
Steven J. Ghan
#156016
Overall Influence
#1892
Jost Heintzenberg
#156054
Overall Influence
#1893
Stephen Daniels
#95154
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen John Daniels is a British cultural geographer. He was Professor of Cultural Geography, and is now Emeritus Professor, at the University of Nottingham. In 2015, he received the prestigious Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical Society which is awarded "for conspicuous merit in research in geography".
Go to Profile#1894
Ellis Leon Yochelson
#156095
Overall Influence
#1895
Gillian Hart
#119736
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Gillian Patricia Hart is an American geographer, best known for her books Rethinking the South African Crisis , Disabling Globalization , and Power, Labor, and Livelihood . She graduated with a PhD from Cornell University in 1978. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. She received a Vega Medal from Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden in April 2018.
Go to Profile#1896
David W. Lea
#156116
Overall Influence
#1897
Daniel Rothman
#135787
Overall Influence
Daniel H. Rothman is an American geophysicist and Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Having made significant contributions to statistical physics, much of his work has contributed to understanding how the natural environment is organized. From such research, Rothman has made fundamental advances in topics ranging from seismology and geobiology to fluid flow and biogeochemistry.
Go to Profile#1898
Alexander Strang Thom
#156198
Overall Influence
#1899
Nicklas G. Pisias
#156203
Overall Influence
#1900
Gordon De Q. Robin
#156260
Overall Influence
