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,
#1901
George Vernon Keller
#156269
Overall Influence
#1902
Bradley Garrett
#49697
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Bradley Garrett is an American social and cultural geographer at University College Dublin in Ireland and a writer for The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. He describes his research interests as being at the intersections of cultural geography, archaeology and visual methods and writes that his research is about "finding the hidden in the world". He is the author of five books including Bunker: Building for the End Times, a contemporary account of doomsday preppers around the world, and Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, an ethnographic account of the activities of the Londo...
Go to Profile#1903
Gilberto Artioli
#156390
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#1904
Michael Mortimore
#84216
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Michael Mortimore was a British geographer and a prolific researcher of issues in the African drylands. He was an academic in Nigerian universities for over 25 years. He ran a British research consultancy, Drylands Research. He is best known for an anti-Malthusian account of population-environment relationships, More People, Less Erosion, and field-based studies of adaptation to drought.
Go to Profile#1905
Éric Calais
#144835
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Éric Calais is a French geologist-geophysicist, born in 1964, internationally recognized practitioner of high-precision space geodesy and a pioneer in its applications to measure seismic deformations at the boundaries of tectonic plates and in their interiors. He has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2017.
Go to Profile#1906
Wolfgang Seiler
#156501
Overall Influence
#1907
Kristine M. Larson
#112630
Overall Influence
Kristine Marie Larson is an American academic. She is Emeritus Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research considers the development of algorithms for high-precision Global Positioning System data analysis. She was the first to demonstrate that GPS could be used to detect seismic waves. She was awarded the 2015 European Geosciences Union Christiaan Huygens Medal.
Go to Profile#1908
Mona Domosh
#122940
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mona Domosh is a geographer and academic, and currently holds the Joan P. and Edward J. Foley Jr. 1933 Professorship of Geography at Dartmouth College. Career Domosh received her bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. from Clark University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Loughborough University. She was a professor at Florida Atlantic University from 1990 to 2000, before becoming a professor at Dartmouth.
Go to Profile#1909
Alfred Hemingway Truesdell
#156617
Overall Influence
#1910
Christopher Sargent Martens
#156631
Overall Influence
#1911
Kazushige Obara
#156664
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#1912
Robert Eugene Zartman
#156731
Overall Influence
#1913
Donald A. Swanson
#156779
Overall Influence
#1914
Geir Wing Gabrielsen
#156788
Overall Influence
#1915
Alan R. Levander
#156796
Overall Influence
#1916
Ping’an Peng
#156805
Overall Influence
#1917
Piet Hartman
#108017
Overall Influence
1922 - 2021 (99 years)
Piet Hartman was a Dutch crystallographer, who worked as professor at Leiden University and Utrecht University between 1973 and 1987. Career Hartman was born in Veendam on 11 April 1922. He studied physical chemistry at the University of Groningen. Hartman subsequently obtained his title of doctor under professor P. Terpstra at the same university on 18 December 1953, with a dissertation titled: "Relations between structure and morphology of crystals". He became a lector of crystallography at Leiden University in 1959. In 1973 he was named full professor and he continued to work at Leiden University until 1980.
Go to Profile#1918
Tibor Cserháti
#156906
Overall Influence
#1919
Gordon M. G. Shepherd
#156910
Overall Influence
#1920
William Maxham Edwards
#157077
Overall Influence
#1921
Mark L. Rivers
#157078
Overall Influence
#1922
Chunzai Wang
#157080
Overall Influence
#1923
W. Paul Menzel
#157085
Overall Influence
#1924
Julian Agyeman
#68673
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Julian Agyeman is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, at Tufts University,. He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and the Royal Geographical Society.
Go to Profile#1925
Stephan Kempe
#157118
Overall Influence
#1926
John Pickles
#107842
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John Pickles currently serves as the Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pickles attended the University of Oxford, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in Geography, with a minor in Geology, and a master's degree in Geography. He later earned doctorate degrees from the University of Natal, South Africa, and the Pennsylvania State University, United States. Pickles is a scholar in the areas of critical cartography, phenomenology, geography of media and communication and post-socialist spaces.
Go to Profile#1927
N. Gautham
#50980
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Namasivayam Gautham is a retired Professor Emeritus at the Centre of Advance Study in Crystallography and Biophysics, University of Madras. He is known for his work on DNA Crystallography, protein structure prediction and molecular docking.
Go to Profile#1928
Daniel A. Vallero
#24834
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Daniel A. Vallero is an American environmental author and scientist. He was born in East St. Louis, Illinois and grew up in Collinsville, Illinois. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in city and regional planning from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. He also earned a masters in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Kansas and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Duke University with a thesis on "“Dicarboximide Fungicide Flux to the Lower Troposphere from an Aquic Hapludult Soil”
Go to Profile#1929
Helmut Klocker
#157285
Overall Influence
#1930
Rolf L. Romer
#157302
Overall Influence
#1931
Václav Cílek
#65589
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Václav Cílek is Czech geologist, climatologist, writer, philosopher, science popularizer and translator of Tao and Zen texts. Biography In his youth, Cílek moved to Tanzania, where his father worked as a geologist. From 1969 to 1970, he studied at a high school in Tanzania. Later he continued his studies at the Mining Technical School in Příbram . In 1979 he graduated in geology from the Charles University in Prague. Since 1980, he works in Geologic Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences and specializes on geology of Cenozoic Era. He also explores interactions between environment and civilization.
Go to Profile#1932
Roberta L. Fox
#157356
Overall Influence
#1933
Michael James Hedley
#157423
Overall Influence
#1934
Olga Zolina
#121837
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Olga Zolina is a climate scientist, member of the European Geosciences Union, German Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. As of 2020, she was working at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, and at CNRS Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement, Grenoble.
Go to Profile#1935
Patrick D. Nunn
#157579
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#1936
Roland Geyer
#135981
Overall Influence
Roland Geyer is professor of industrial ecology at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara. He is a specialist in the ecological impact of plastics.
Go to Profile#1937
Clifford A. Frohlich
#157596
Overall Influence
#1938
Hans‐peter Kohler
#157654
Overall Influence
#1939
Rupert Sutherland
#141434
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Rupert Sutherland is a New Zealand geologist and academic specialising in tectonics and geophysics at the Victoria University of Wellington and a principal scientist at GNS Science. Sutherland has been described as "one of New Zealand’s leading earth science researchers" by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Go to Profile#1940
Thomas Neil Irvine
#157726
Overall Influence
#1941
Arthur D. Frankel
#157757
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#1942
Christopher Andronicos
#136938
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Christopher L. Andronicos is an American geologist, former associate professor of Geology at Purdue University. Biography He is the son of Domingo Montoya, former governor of Sandia Pueblo, and Maria Flying Horse, a Native American artist. He graduated from Del Norte High School in 1987 and the University of New Mexico where he majored in geology, graduating in 1995. He then attended Princeton University where he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and Princeton's Dodson Fellowship, completing his PhD in 1999.
Go to Profile#1943
Michael H. Ritzwoller
#152300
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael H. Ritzwoller is an observational seismologist and professor of physics at University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the director of the Center for Imaging the Earth's Interior at University of Colorado Boulder. His early work was mainly in normal mode seismology and helioseismology. Research in the last decade has concentrated on developing methods to focus seismic models derived from surface wave dispersion information to tectonic scales, particularly in the US and China. Recent emphasis has focused on developing methods for exploiting ambient noise and earthquakes in surface wave tomography and combining this information to produce 3-D models of the crust and uppermost mantle.
Go to Profile#1944
Laura Wallace
#139604
Overall Influence
Laura Martin Wallace is a geodetic principal scientist who works between the University of Texas at Austin and GNS Science in New Zealand. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2018.
Go to Profile#1945
Bruce William Yardley
#157938
Overall Influence
#1946
Jochen Bundschuh
#157948
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#1947
Naeem Ahmad Khan
#28310
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Naeem Ahmad Khan , , was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and a professor of physics who was known for his work in developing techniques using the solid-state nuclear track detector and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance. Although he worked with the Government of Pakistan for most of his career, he also taught physics at a number of Pakistani universities and was the civilian scientist of the Pakistan Air Force until his death.
Go to Profile#1948
Lee‐lueng Fu
#158074
Overall Influence
#1949
Paul Thornton Robinson
#158248
Overall Influence
#1950
Jack D. Ives
#135889
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Jack D. Ives is a Canadian montologist, an Honorary Adjunct Research Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, an author, and a prominent advocate of mountain issues at the global level. He was formerly director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, founding editor of two peer-reviewed journals, chair of the Commission on High Altitude Geoecology under the auspices of the International Geographical Union, and a senior advisor on mountain ecology and sustainable development for United ...
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