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.
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3001
Oliver Edwin Baker
1883 - 1949 (66 years)
Oliver Edwin Baker was an American economic geographer. Education and early career Baker was born in Tiffin, Ohio. His father, Edwin Baker, was a merchant, and his mother, Martha Ranney Thomas, had been a schoolteacher. His health in his early life was so poor that he did not begin school until the age of 12, before which time he was taught by his mother. After graduating public school he went on to Heidelberg College. He graduated with a B.S. degree in history and mathematics at the age of 19 in 1903, and took an M.S. degree in philosophy and sociology a year later. The next year he went on to Columbia University, receiving an M.A.
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Marguerite Lefèvre
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Marguerite Alice Lefèvre was an academic geographer and the first woman to hold a professorship at the Catholic University of Leuven. A prize at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a street in Leuven are named in her honour.
Go to Profile#3003
Albert Hugh Smith
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
Albert Hugh Smith OBE was a scholar of Old English and Scandinavian languages and played a major part in the study and publication of English place-names. Hugh Smith was the son of Albert John Smith, a butler, and Anne Smith of Sowerby, West Yorkshire. He was educated at Rishworth School, West Yorkshire, and, after a time working as a railway booking clerk, he went to Leeds University where he was awarded 1st Class BA in English in 1924 and a PhD in 1926. His PhD thesis was on the place-names of the North Riding and the study of place-names remained of continuing interest to him, resulting in several publications.
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Hans von Mžik
1876 - 1961 (85 years)
Hans von Mžik was an Austrian orientalist and geographer. Starting in 1921 he was head of the map collection at the Austrian National Library and co-founder of the series Museion. Selected publications 1911. Die reise des Arabers Ibn Baṭūṭa durch Indien und China bearbeitet von dr. Hans von Mžik. Hamburg, Gutenberg-verlag.
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Otto Eggert
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Paul Hermann Otto Eggert was a German surveyor and professor of Gdańsk University of Technology . He was also dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering from 1909 to 1910 and from 1919 to 1920 and the first head of the Department of Geodesy at the Technical University of Gdańsk .
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Elwood S. Moore
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Elwood S. Moore was a Canadian economic geologist, teacher, and administrator. Born near Heathcote, Ontario, the son of Benjamin and Hannah Moore, Moore graduated from the University of Toronto in 1904 and taught high school until 1907. In that year, he studied at the University of Chicago as a fellow in geology. He received a Master of Arts degree in 1908 from the University of Toronto and his doctorate in 1909 from the University of Chicago.
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Maurice Lugeon
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Maurice Lugeon FRS HFRSE FGS was a Swiss geologist, and the pioneer of nappe tectonics. He was a pupil of Eugène Renevier. Named for Maurice Lugeon, the lugeon is a measure of transmissivity in rocks, determined by pressurized injection of water through a bore hole driven through the rock. One Lugeon is equivalent to one litre of water per minute, injected into 1 metre of borehole at an injection pressure of 10 atmospheres.
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Leonid Kulik
1883 - 1942 (59 years)
Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik was a Soviet mineralogist who is noted for his research into meteorites. He was born in Dorpat, , and was educated at the Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg and the Kazan University. He served in the Russian military during the Russo-Japanese War, then spent some time in jail for revolutionary political activities. He then served with the Russian military during World War I.
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Afrikan Krishtofovich
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Afrikan Nikolayevich Krishtofovich was a Soviet geologist, paleobotanist and botanist. His name is abbreviated as "Krysht." when attributing him as the author of botanical names. He was a fossil hunter specializing in Mesozoic flora. In 1932 he published his book Geological review of the countries of the Far East.
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Motonori Matuyama
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Motonori Matuyama was a Japanese geophysicist who was the first to provide systematic evidence that the Earth's magnetic field had been reversed in the early Pleistocene and to suggest that long periods existed in the past in which the polarity was reversed. He remarked that the Earth's field had later changed to the present polarity. The era of reversed polarity preceding the current Brunhes Chron of normal polarity is now called the Matuyama Reversed Chron; and the transition between them is called the Brunhes–Matuyama or Matuyama-Brunhes reversal.
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Feodor Yulievich Levinson-Lessing
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Franz Yulievich Levinson-Lessing , or Theodor Levinson-Lessing was a Russian geologist. He graduated from the physico-mathematical faculty of the University of St. Petersburg in 1883, was placed in charge of the geological collection in 1886, and was appointed privat-docent at St. Petersburg University in 1889. In 1892 he became professor, and the next year dean, of the physico-mathematical faculty of Yuryev University . Aside from his work on petrography he published also essays in other branches of geology, the result of scientific journeys throughout Russia.
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Joseph Partsch
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Joseph Partsch was a German geographer, born at Schreiberhau, Silesia. Biography He studied at the University of Breslau, receiving his doctorate in 1874, and began teaching at the university , becoming later a professor of geography. Here he remained until 1905, when on the death of Friedrich Ratzel, he was called to the chair of geography at the University of Leipzig. Here, he served as a full professor of geography up until 1922. He died in Bad Brambach, Vogtland on June 22, 1925.
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Hendrik Enno Boeke
1881 - 1918 (37 years)
Hendrik Enno Boeke was a Dutch mineralogist and petrographer. From 1900 he studied chemistry and physics at the University of Amsterdam, where his instructors included Hendrik Willem Bakhuis Roozeboom and Johannes Diderik van der Waals. He then worked as an assistant under Gustav Tammann in Göttingen and to Friedrich Rinne at the Technical University of Hannover. In 1909 he became a lecturer of chemistry at the University of Königsberg, and during the following year, an associate professor of physical-chemical mineralogy and petrology at the University of Leipzig.
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Elias Mariolopoulos
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Elias Mariolopoulos was a Greek astronomer, physicist, author, professor, dean, meteorologist, and climatologist. He is considered the father of modern Greek meteorology and climatology. Elias established a facility for the measurement of atmospheric electricity for the first time in Greece and also founded a special radiometric station in Hymettos, as an extension to the National Observatory of Athens. As an academic, he was the doctoral advisor overseeing the publication of dozens of doctoral dissertations. He was the Dean of the School of Physics and Mathematics at both the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens twice.
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Raymond Priestley
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Sir Raymond Edward Priestley was an English geologist and early Antarctic explorer. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, where he helped found The Raymond Priestley Centre on the shores of Coniston Water in the Lake District National Park.
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José Carlos Millás
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
José Carlos Millás was a Cuban meteorologist. He is known for his research on past Atlantic hurricane seasons, and has been called one of the "fathers of tropical meteorology". Born in Havana, Cuba, Millás graduated as a civil engineer from the University of Havana. He then took post-graduate courses at the University of Chicago. In 1913 he was appointed assistant director of the National Observatory of Cuba, becoming the institute's director in 1921. In the 1930s, before radar and refined hurricane-tracking equipment was available, Millás collaborated with R. W. Gray and Grady Norton of the ...
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Aleksandr A. Chernov
1877 - 1963 (86 years)
Aleksandr A. Chernov was a geologist and paleontologist from the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. He was made a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1957, and granted the title of Honoured Scientist of the RSFSR in 1946.
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Wilhelm Eitel
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Wilhelm Hermann Julius Eitel was a German-American scientist. Education In Frankfurt am Main, Wilhelm Eitel completed his pre-academical training at the Wöhler-Gymnasium in 1909; after that he studied at the universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg , where, on 23 July 1912, he obtained his Ph.D. in "Mineralchemie" from his promotor Professor Theodor Curtius.
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Karl-Erik Bergsten
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Karl-Erik Bergsten was a Swedish geographer. When professor Fredrik Enquist retired in 1952 Bergsten assumed his chair as geography professor in Göteborg University. Bergsten held that position until 1958 when he moved to the University of Lund being succeeded by Sten Rudberg in Göteborg.
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William John Sinclair
1877 - 1935 (58 years)
William John Sinclair was a geologist and vertebrate paleontologist, noteworthy for his collaboration with Walter W. Granger on stratigraphy in New Mexico and Wyoming. Sinclair received in 1904 his M.S. and Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley, where John C. Merriam was his doctoral supervisor. After receiving his Ph.D., Sinclair went to Princeton University as a Teaching Fellow and was promoted in 1905 to Instructor in Geology, in 1916 to Assistant Professor, in 1928 to Associate Professor, and in 1930 to Professor.
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Hans Stille
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Hans Wilhelm Stille was an influential German geologist working primarily on tectonics and the collation of tectonic events during the Phanerozoic. Stille adhered to the contracting Earth hypothesis and together with Leopold Kober he worked on the geosyncline theory to explain orogeny. Stille's ideas emerged in the aftermath of Eduard Suess' book Das Antlitz der Erde . Stille's and Kober's school of thought was one of two that emerged in the post-Suess era the other being headed by Alfred Wegener and Émile Argand. This competing view rejected Earth contraction and argued for continental drift.
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Ethel Shakespear
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
Dame Ethel Mary Reader Shakespear was an English geologist, Justice of the Peace, public servant, and philanthropist. She is most famously known for her work on the Lower Ludlow Formation and won several awards for her influential papers.
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Sabin Manuilă
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Sabin Manuilă was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian statistician, demographer and physician. A nationalist activist during World War I, he became noted for his pioneering research into the biostatistics of Transylvania and Banat regions, as well as a promoter of eugenics and social interventionism. As a bio- and geopolitician, Manuilă advocated the consolidation of Greater Romania through population exchanges, colonization, state-sponsored assimilation, or discriminatory policies.
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James Wreford Watson
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Prof James Wreford Watson FRSE FRSC IBG LLD was a Scottish Canadian geographer and cartographer, who served as the Chief Geographer of Canada and the first president of the Canadian Association of Geographers. He was also a poet who wrote under the name James Wreford and was the recipient of Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, for his poetry.
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Andrija Mohorovičić
1857 - 1936 (79 years)
Andrija Mohorovičić was a Croatian geophysicist. He is best known for the eponymous Mohorovičić discontinuity and is considered one of the founders of modern seismology. Early years Mohorovičić was born in Volosko, Opatija, where his father , was a blacksmith, making anchors. The younger Andrija also loved the sea and married a captain's daughter, Silvija Vernić. They had four sons. Mohorovičić obtained his elementary education in his home town, then continued at the gymnasium of neighbouring Rijeka. He received his higher education in mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Prague in 1875, where one of his professors was Ernst Mach.
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Karol Bohdanowicz
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Karol Bohdanowicz was a Polish geologist, an expert in mining geology and physical geography. Bohdanowicz' research contributed to the construction of the Caspian railway line and enabled the estimation of oil deposits in the desert areas of the Caspian Depression. He also discovered substantial gold deposits in Siberia. He was the author of about 200 scientific papers, including a number of textbooks on geology of deposits and two monographs: 'Mineral raw materials of the world' and 'Iron ores'.
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Wilhelm Sievers
1860 - 1921 (61 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Sievers was a German geologist and geographer. He served as professor of geography at the University of Giessen. His field work focussed on South America, and his Allgemeine Länderkunde was for several decades a standard work on world geography.
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Carl Owen Dunbar
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Carl Owen Dunbar was an American paleontologist who specialized in invertebrate fossils. He was a Professor of Geology at Yale University from 1920 until 1959. He was also Director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University from 1942 until 1959. As editor of a textbook series on historical geology from the 1920s through the 1950s, his work was published and sold in over 1 million books.
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Léon Teisserenc de Bort
1855 - 1913 (58 years)
Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort was a French meteorologist and a pioneer in the field of aerology. Together with Richard Assmann , he is credited as co-discoverer of the stratosphere, as both men announced their discovery during the same time period in 1902. Teisserenc de Bort pioneered the use of unmanned instrumented balloons and was the first to identify the region in the atmosphere around 8-17 kilometers of height where the lapse rate reaches zero, known today as the tropopause.
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Wincenty Okołowicz
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Wincenty Okołowicz was a Polish geographer and an expert in geomorphology and climatology. He is best known as the author of the 1965 major Polish classification of world's climates, Climatic Zones of the World .
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Ewald Banse
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Ewald Banse was a German geographer. Banse was a professor at the technical college in his native city. Allied propaganda cited Banse's main work, Raum und Volk im Weltkriege , as proof of Germany's war lust. Banse advocated the union of all areas settled by Germans in a Great German Reich extending far beyond the 1914 frontiers. To achieve this he expressly demanded military action. The warrior was to be the carrier of the coming rule of "Nordic nobility".
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Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg
1836 - 1927 (91 years)
Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg was an Austrian mineralogist. Biography He was born in Litovel, Moravia, and studied at the University of Vienna, where he obtained a teaching degree. He studied mineralogy at Heidelberg and Tübingen and obtained a PhD. He returned to Vienna as a lecturer in mineralogy and chemistry and, in 1862 was appointed second vice curator of the Imperial Mineralogical Cabinet, becoming director in 1868. He resigned as director in 1877. He was also professor of petrography at the University of Vienna. He was appointed professor in 1873 and a member of the Imperial Academy ...
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Shiba P. Chatterjee
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Shiba Prasad Chatterjee was a Professor of Geography at the University of Calcutta, India. He served as President of the International Geographical Union from 1964 until 1968, Chatterjee received a Murchison Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1959, and a Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 1985. He coined the name 'Meghalaya' for one of India's states.
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Heinrich Seilkopf
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Heinrich Seilkopf was a German meteorologist. From March 1916 to March 1919 he was a research assistant at the weather office in Berlin and until the end of the year scientific assistant at the Meteorological Observatory in Essen.
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August Tammekann
1894 - 1959 (65 years)
August Ferdinand Tammekann was an Estonian geographer. In 1923 he graduated from the University of Tartu. He started teaching at the University of Tartu in 1926. During his Tartu years, he lived in Villa Tammekann, designed in 1936 by Alvar Aalto.
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Wilhelm von Branca
1844 - 1928 (84 years)
Carl Wilhelm Franz von Branca Until 1895: Wilhelm Branco; 1895-1907: Wilhelm von Branco was a German geologist and paleontologist. Biography Von Branca was born in Potsdam. After having been an officer, and then a farmer, Branca studied geology in Halle and Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate in 1876. He did postdoctoral work in Straßburg, Berlin, Munich, and in Rome with Karl Alfred von Zittel. In 1881 he received his habilitation from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Berlin , where he then worked as a lecturer. After a short stint as a lecturer in Aachen, von Branca became State Geologist at the Prussian Geological State Service in Berlin.
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Albrecht Penck
1858 - 1945 (87 years)
Albrecht Penck was a German geographer and geologist and the father of Walther Penck. Biography Born in Reudnitz near Leipzig, Penck became a university professor in Vienna, Austria, from 1885 to 1906, and in Berlin from 1906 to 1927. There he was also the director of the Institute and Museum for Oceanography by 1918. He dedicated himself to geomorphology and climatology, and he raised the international profile of the Vienna school of physical geography.
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Ferdinand Zirkel
1838 - 1912 (74 years)
Prof Ferdinand Zirkel FRS HFRSE was a German geologist and petrographer. Biography Zirkel was born in Bonn. Educated in his native town, he graduated PhD from the University of Bonn in 1861. His training and initial interest was in mining. In 1860 he traveled to Iceland with William Thierry Preyer, and in 1862 they published Reise nach Island im Sommer 1860.
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Robert George Spencer Hudson
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Robert George Spencer Hudson was an English geologist and paleontologist. He was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, the eldest son of Robert Spencer Hudson. Education Hudson was educated at St Matthew's School and then Lawrence Sheriff School, where his interest in geology was started through a schoolmaster taking the students fossil hunting in the strata used for cement making.
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August Rothpletz
1853 - 1918 (65 years)
Friedrich August Rothpletz was a German geologist and paleontologist. Biography From 1875 to 1880 he conducted geological mapping in Saxony as part of the Sächsischen Geologischen Landesanstalt , afterwards receiving his doctorate from the University of Leipzig . Two years later he obtained his habilitation at the University of Munich, where he taught classes in geology, Alpine tectonics and paleobotany. In 1894 he became an associate professor and in 1904 succeeded Karl von Zittel as professor of geology and paleontology at Munich. From 1904 to 1918 he was director of the Bayerische Staatssa...
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Eleanora Knopf
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Eleanora Frances Knopf was an American geologist who worked for the United States Geological Survey and did research in the Appalachians during the first two decades of the twentieth century. She studied at Bryn Mawr College, and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry, a master's degree in geology, and a Ph.D. in geology in 1912. She was the first American geologist to use the new technique of petrography which she pioneered in her life's work - the study of Stissing Mountain.
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René Chudeau
1864 - 1921 (57 years)
René Chudeau was a French geologist. Formerly an instructor at the University of Besançon, from 1905 to 1914 he conducted a series of geological surveys in the Sahara . His interests included Quaternary deposits, the formation of sand dunes, processes of aeolian erosion, et al. In the Taoudeni basin, he investigated ancient volcanoes, and south of Agadez, he found the presence of dinosaur bones. In the Zinder region, he made a discovery of Lower Cretaceous rocks being overlain by Upper Cretaceous successions. His geological collections are housed at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in...
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Wilhelm Ule
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Wilhelm Ule, sometimes referred to as Willi Ule was a German geographer and limnologist. He was the son of science writer Otto Eduard Vincenz Ule . He studied mathematics and geography in Berlin and Halle, where he graduated in 1888 with a dissertation on the lakes of Mansfeld, Die Mansfelder Seen. The following year he obtained his habilitation with a study on the depth ratios of Masurian lakes. In 1889 he also became managing director of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
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Gaetano Rovereto
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Gaetano Rovereto was an Italian geologist and paleontologist who, though critical of the application of theories to geology, was in favour of cyclical processes to explain geological formations. He published on geomorphology apart from describing and cataloguing fossil molluscs. He worked in Argentina from 1909 to 1921, exploring the region while also serving as a consultant for irrigation and public works. Rovereto was born in Mele, Genoa, eldest son of Teresa Piccardo and Giuseppe Francesco belonging to the noble family of the Marquises of Rivanazzano and associated with the paper manufacturing industry.
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Rudolf Hoernes
1850 - 1912 (62 years)
Rudolf Hoernes was an Austrian geologist, born in Vienna, son of Moritz Hoernes. He studied under Eduard Suess and became a Professor of geology in Graz. He was known for his earthquake studies in 1878 and proposed a classification of earthquakes into subsidence earthquakes, volcanic earthquakes and tectonic earthquakes. In 1893, he published a detailed textbook on earthquake theory from a geological point of view.
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Hanns Bruno Geinitz
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
Hanns Bruno Geinitz was a German geologist, born at Altenburg, the capital of Saxe-Altenburg. He was educated at the universities of Berlin and Jena, and gained the foundations of his geological knowledge under Friedrich August von Quenstedt. In 1837 he took the degree of Ph.D. with a thesis on the Muschelkalk of Thuringia. In 1850 he became professor of geology and mineralogy in the Royal Polytechnic School at Dresden, and in 1857 he was made director of the Royal Mineralogical and Geological Museum; he held these posts until 1894.
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Ptolemy
100 - 170 (70 years)
Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treat...
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Strabo
64 BC - 23 (87 years)
Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived in Asia Minor during the transitional period of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Life Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus in around 64BC. His family had been involved in politics since at least the reign of Mithridates V. Strabo was related to Dorylaeus on his mother's side. Several other family members, including his paternal grandfather, had served Mithridates VI during the Mithridatic Wars. As the war drew to a close, Strabo's grandfather had turned several Pontic fortresses over to the Romans.
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Herodotus
484 BC - 425 BC (59 years)
Herodotus was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He is referred to as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero.
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Alexander von Humboldt
1769 - 1859 (90 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
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