Search People Result | Academic Influence

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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#3051

Charles Francis Richter

Charles Francis Richter

1900 - 1985 (85 years)

Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist. Richter is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at the California Institute of Technology.

#3052

Francis Parker Shepard

1897 - 1985 (88 years)

Francis Parker Shepard was an American sedimentologist most associated with his studies of submarine canyons and seafloor currents around continental shelves and slopes. Early life and education Shepard was born to a moderately wealthy family in Marbleheard, Massachusetts. He studied geology under R. A. Daly at Harvard University, a period that was interrupted by service in the US Navy during the First World War. After meeting his future wife, Elizabeth Buchner, he chose to study for his doctorate at the University of Chicago, close to her Milwaukee home. There he worked alongside J. Harlan Bretz, Rollin D.

#3053

Kirk Bryan

1888 - 1950 (62 years)

Kirk Bryan was an American geologist on the faculty of Harvard University from 1925 until his death in 1950. The son of R.W.D. Bryan , Bryan received his undergraduate education at the University of New Mexico and later obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University.

#3054

Hans Jenny

1899 - 1992 (93 years)

Hans Jenny was a Swiss-born soil scientist and expert on pedology , particularly the processes of soil formation. He served as 1949 President of the Soil Science Society of America. Overview Hans Jenny was born in Basel, Switzerland. He earned a diploma in agriculture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1922, and a D. Sc. degree in 1927 for a thesis on ion exchange reactions.

#3055

Raymond Cecil Moore

1892 - 1974 (82 years)

Raymond Cecil Moore was an Americann geologist and paleontologist. He is known for his work on Paleozoic crinoids, bryozoans, and corals. Moore was a member of US Geological Survey from 1913 until 1949. In 1919 he became professor at the University of Kansas . In 1953 Professor Moore organized the launch and became the first editor of the still ongoing multi-volume work Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Contributors to the Treatise have included the world's specialists in the field. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1958. In 1970 he was awarded the Mary Clar...

#3056

C. W. Thornthwaite

1899 - 1963 (64 years)

Charles Warren Thornthwaite was an American geographer and climatologist. He is best known for devising the Thornthwaite climate classification, a climate classification system modified in 1948 that is still in use worldwide, and also for his detailed water budget computations of potential evapotranspiration.

#3057

Frederic Brewster Loomis

1873 - 1937 (64 years)

Frederic Brewster Loomis was an American paleontologist. Educated at Amherst College and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he spent his entire professional career at Amherst. His specialty was vertebrate paleontology. Many fossils he uncovered during his extensive field work are still exhibited at Amherst's Beneski Museum of Natural History. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Geological Society of America, and president of the Paleontological Society.

#3058

Harold Masursky

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...

#3059

Maurice Ewing

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

William Maurice "Doc" Ewing was an American geophysicist and oceanographer. Ewing has been described as a pioneering geophysicist who worked on the research of seismic reflection and refraction in ocean basins, ocean bottom photography, submarine sound transmission , deep sea core samples of the ocean bottom, theory and observation of earthquake surface wavess, fluidity of the Earth's core, generation and propagation of microseismss, submarine explosion seismology, marine gravity surveys, bathymetry and sedimentation, natural radioactivity of ocean waters and sediments, study of abyssal plain...

#3060

Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff

1897 - 1994 (97 years)

Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff, Sr. was an American scientist and pioneer of X-ray crystallography. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1949 and Foreign member of the Royal Society, on April 19, 1951.

#3061

Abdul Jabbar Abdullah

Abdul Jabbar Abdullah

1911 - 1969 (58 years)

Abdul Jabbar Abdullah Sam was an Iraqi wave theory physicist, dynamical meteorologist, and President Emeritus of the University of Baghdad. Abdullah obtained a doctorate in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946 before returning to Iraq to become an educator and researcher. After several years as the President of the University of Baghdad, Abdullah left Iraq amid a period of social unrest, and lived in the United States for the remainder of his life.

#3062

Beno Gutenberg

1889 - 1960 (71 years)

Beno Gutenberg was a German-American seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague and mentor of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.

#3063

George Gaylord Simpson

George Gaylord Simpson

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

George Gaylord Simpson was an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution , The Meaning of Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution . He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. Simpson was extraordinarily knowledgeable about Mesozoic fossil mammals and fossil mammals of North and South America. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibrium and dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus.

#3064

Adolf Carl Noé

1873 - 1939 (66 years)

Adolf Carl Noé was an Austrian-born paleobotanist. He is credited for identifying the first coal ball in the United States in 1922, which renewed interest in them. He also developed a method of peeling coal balls using nitrocellulose. Many of the paleobotanical materials owned by the University of Chicago's Walker Museum were provided by Noé, where he was also a curator of fossil plants. He was also a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History, where he assisted with their reconstruction of a Carboniferous forest.

#3065

Owen Thomas Jones

1878 - 1967 (89 years)

Owen Thomas Jones, FRS FGS was a Welsh geologist. Education He was born in Beulah, near Newcastle Emlyn, Cardiganshire, the only son of David Jones and Margaret Thomas. He attended the local village school in Trewen before going to Pencader Grammar School in 1893. In 1896 he went up to University College, Aberystwyth, to study physics, graduating in 1900. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded a B.A. degree in Natural Sciences in 1902.

#3066

Reino Antero Hirvonen

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Reino Antero Hirvonen was a famous Finnish physical geodesist, also well known for contributions in mathematical and astronomical geodesy. He worked at first at the Finnish Geodetic Institute under W.A. Heiskanen on gravimetric geoid determination, publishing his dissertation The Continental Undulations of the Geoid in 1934 on the determination of a global geoid model from only 4500 data points.

#3067

M. S. Krishnan

1898 - 1970 (72 years)

Maharajapuram Seetharaman Krishnan was an Indian Geologist. He was the first Indian to serve as the Director of the Geological Survey of India. Early years Krishnan was born on 24 August 1898 in Tanjore, Madras Presidency. After school education in Tanjore, he continued his studies in St.Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli. He graduated with B.A. Honours in geology from the Presidency College, Madras, in 1919, undertook post-graduate training and research with ARCS Scholarship at Imperial College London in 1921 and received his Diploma of Imperial College in 1923 and in 1924, he was awarded t...

#3068

Kenneth Walton

1923 - 1979 (56 years)

Prof Kenneth Walton FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish geographer. He was Vice Principal of the University of Aberdeen 1977 to 1979. Life He was born in Cheshire in 1923. He was educated at King's School in Macclesfield.

#3069

Tove Birkelund

1928 - 1986 (58 years)

Tove Birkelund was a Danish geologist who specialized in historical geology. She is remembered internationally for her research into the fossils of extinct squid-like species, including belemnites and ammonites, which she investigated in Denmark, Greenland and several other countries. She played a leading role in the Danish research community, serving as a member of the Danish Research Council for Natural Sciences and of the Carlsberg Foundation. From 1966 to 1986, Birkelund was professor of historical geography at Copenhagen University's Geological Institute.

#3070

Roald H. Fryxell

1934 - 1974 (40 years)

Roald Hilding Fryxell was an American educator, geologist and archaeologist. He was a Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University and pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of geoarchaeology, with a career that involved work on monumental projects in North America and even outer space.

#3071

Arthur Bartrum

1885 - 1949 (64 years)

John Arthur Bartrum was a New Zealand geologist and university professor. He was born in Geraldine, South Canterbury, New Zealand on 24 May 1885.

#3072

Nikolai Mikhailovich Strakhov

1900 - 1978 (78 years)

Nikolai Mikhailovich Strakhov was a Soviet geologist who specialized in lithology and lithogenesis of ocean sediment. His book Principles of Lithogenesis was a landmark text. He also founded the journal Lithology and Mineral Resources.

#3073

Doris Reynolds

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Doris Livesey Reynolds FRSE FGS was a British geologist, best known for her work on metasomatism in rocks and her role in the "Granite Controversy". She was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

#3074

Sverre Petterssen

Sverre Petterssen

1898 - 1974 (76 years)

Sverre Petterssen was a Norwegian meteorologist, prominent in the field of weather analysis and forecasting. Early life Born in Norway into a humble family, he paid for his higher education by working at the telegraph office, and a nursery provided by the armed forces that he joined as a recruit. He studied in Bergen where he met Tor Bergeron during a lecture, and was so impressed by his analysis of a 1922 storm that he joined the Bergen School of Meteorology in 1923. In the late 1920s, he worked at the Geophysical Institute in Tromsø, northern Norway.

#3075

Edgar T. Wherry

Edgar T. Wherry

1885 - 1982 (97 years)

Edgar Theodore Wherry was an American mineralogist, soil scientist and botanist. He had a deep interest in ferns and Sarracenia. Wherry earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1906 from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate in mineralogy in 1909 from the same university. From 1908 to 1912, he taught at Lehigh University. He lived in Washington, D.C. from 1912 to 1930, part of this time working as an assistant curator of mineralogy for the U. S. National Museum of Natural History, and also for the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture. He taught botany at the University of Pennsylvania from 1930 to 1955, when he retired.

#3076

Martin Glaessner

1906 - 1989 (83 years)

Martin Fritz Glaessner AM was a geologist and palaeontologist. Born and educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he spent the majority of his life in working for geoscientific institutes in Austria, Russia, Australia, and studying the geology of the South Pacific in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Glaessner also did early work on the classification of the pre-Cambrian lifeforms now known as the Ediacaran biota, which he proposed were the early antecedents of modern lifeforms.

#3077

Thomas Griffith Taylor

Thomas Griffith Taylor

1880 - 1963 (83 years)

Thomas Griffith "Grif" Taylor was an English-born geographer, anthropologist and world explorer. He was a survivor of Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica . Taylor was a senior academic geographer at universities in Sydney, Chicago, and Toronto. His writings on geography and race were controversial.

#3078

Percy Edward Kent

1913 - 1986 (73 years)

Sir Percy Edward Kent was a British geologist who won the Royal Medal in 1971. Awarded the Bigsby Medal in 1955 and the Murchison Medal in 1969, he was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1973 Birthday Honours.

#3079

Walter Hermann Bucher

1888 - 1965 (77 years)

Walter Hermann Bucher was a German-American geologist and paleontologist. He was born in Akron, Ohio, to Swiss-German parents. The family then returned to Germany, where he was raised. In 1911 he was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Heidelberg with a focus on geology and paleontology. The same year he returned to the U.S. and joined the University of Cincinnati as a lecturer. By 1924 he was a professor of geology at the institution.

#3080

W. B. R. King

1889 - 1963 (74 years)

William Bernard Robinson King was a British geologist. Education King was educated at the University of Cambridge graduating a first-class Honours degree in geology in 1912 Career He joined the British Geological Survey and distinguished himself on field studies in Wales. In 1914 he was commissioned as a second-lieutenant in the Territorial Army and in 1915 was rapidly trained as a hydrologist and sent to France to assist the Chief Engineer of the British Expeditionary Force establish potable water supplies from boreholes. He has been called "the first British military hydrogeologist"

#3081

Paul Fourmarier

1877 - 1970 (93 years)

Paul Frédéric Joseph Fourmarier was a Belgian geologist and specialist in tectonics and stratigraphy, after whom the Fourmarierite mineral is named. Fourmarier was born in La Hulpe, Province of Brabant, Belgium and studied at the University of Liège, graduating in 1899. He became a professor of geology at the university in 1920.

#3082

E. J. Bowen

1898 - 1980 (82 years)

Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.

#3083

Isaiah Bowman

1878 - 1950 (72 years)

Isaiah Bowman, AB, Ph. D. , was an American geographer and President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1935–1948, controversial for his antisemitism and inaction in Jewish resettlement during WWII. Biography Bowman was born in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His family was Mennonite, and, at the age of eight weeks, Bowman's father moved his family to a log cabin in Brown City, Michigan, sixty miles north of Detroit. In 1900, Isaiah became an American citizen and began intensive study to prepare himself for admittance to Harvard. Studying first at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti , Bowman c...

#3084

Alfred Hettner

1859 - 1941 (82 years)

Alfred Hettner was a German geographer. His parents were art historian Hermann Theodor Hettner and Marie von Stockmar. His maternal grandfather was Christian Friedrich, Baron Stockmar. His half-brother was Otto Hettner.

#3085

Arthur Francis Buddington

1890 - 1980 (90 years)

Arthur Francis "Bud" Buddington was an American geologist. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he grew up there and in West Mystic, Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University and Princeton University.

#3086

Cecil Madigan

1889 - 1947 (58 years)

Cecil Thomas Madigan was an Australian explorer and geologist, academic, aerial surveyor, meteorologist, author and officer of the British army. He was born in Renmark, South Australia. His family had associations with William Benjamin Chaffey.

#3087

Hugo Benioff

1899 - 1968 (69 years)

Victor Hugo Benioff was an American seismologist and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for his work in charting the location of deep earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean.

#3088

Glenn Thomas Trewartha

1896 - 1984 (88 years)

Glenn Thomas Trewartha was an American geographer of Cornish American descent. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a Ph.D. in 1924. He taught at the University of Wisconsin.

#3089

James Gilluly

1896 - 1980 (84 years)

James Gilluly was an American geologist. Regarding the Cupriferous Porphyry Genesis, Gilluly integrated detailed observations of the Ajo porphyry between 1936 and 1936 with experimental data . Gilluly concluded that after the Ajo quartz monzonite intruded and crystallized, it was fractured by magmatic bypass solutions . Gilluly frequency experimental restrictions to estimate a paleo depth between 1000 and 3000 , consistent with solidus temperatures of 900 °C for granite, containing 4% by weight of water. He realized that the source magmatic content was water, sulfur and halogens, and that the binders can form complexes with metals to produce an aqueous fluid with larger volumes.

#3090

Randy Read

1957 - 1983 (26 years)

Randy John Read is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and professor of protein crystallography at the University of Cambridge. Education Read was educated at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 followed by a PhD in 1986 for X-ray crystallography of serine proteases and their protein inhibitors supervised by Michael N. G. James.

#3091

Preston E. James

1899 - 1986 (87 years)

Preston Everett James was an American geographer. He was president of the American Association of Geographers from 1951 to 1952, and gave the annual presidential address at their 1966 banquet. James' work had a distinct focus on the geography of Latin America, and as such, the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers' Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award is named for him.

#3092

Victor P. Starr

1909 - 1976 (67 years)

Victor Paul Starr was an American meteorologist and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1974. For his contributions to atmospheric science, he received the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal in 1961.

#3093

Hans Cloos

1885 - 1951 (66 years)

Hans Cloos was a prominent German structural geologist. Born in Magdeburg, Germany, Hans Cloos earned his doctorate at Freiburg in 1910, then worked in Indonesia and Namibia up until the start of First World War. During the war his geological skills were put to use along the western front.

#3094

Henry Hurd Swinnerton

1875 - 1966 (91 years)

Henry Hurd Swinnerton was a British geologist. He was professor of geology at University College Nottingham from 1910 to 1946. Swinnerton was educated at the Royal College of Science, and earned a doctorate in zoology from the University of London in July 1902.

#3095

Kirtley F. Mather

Kirtley F. Mather

1888 - 1978 (90 years)

Kirtley Fletcher Mather was an American geologist and faculty member at Harvard University. An expert on petroleum geology and mineralogy, Mather was a prominent scholar, advocate for academic freedom, social activist, and critic of McCarthyism. He is known for his efforts to harmonize the dialogue between science and religion, his role in the Scopes "Monkey Trial", his faith-based liberal activism, support for adult education programs and advocacy for civil liberties.

#3096

Louis J. Battan

1923 - 1986 (63 years)

Louis Joseph Battan was an American atmospheric scientist who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1953, where he was hired to work in the field of the physics of clouds and precipitation. In 1958 he was appointed professor of meteorology and associate director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was a pioneer in cloud physics and radar meteorology.

#3097

Irene Barnes Taeuber

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.

#3098

Ray S. Bassler

1878 - 1961 (83 years)

Ray Smith Bassler was an American geologist and paleontologist. Biography Bassler was born in 1878, in Philadelphia. When he was in high school he used to sell fossils for Edward Oscar Ulrich. He got his bachelor's degree in 1902 from the University of Cincinnati, and received master's degree in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1905 from George Washington University. Starting from 1904 to 1948 he was an assistant professor there. From 1905 to 1931 he was working with Ferdinand Canu of France on Tertiary Polyzoa of the Atlantic and Gulf coastss. Starting from 1910 to 1922 he was working as a curator for the...

#3099

Charles Bungay Fawcett

1883 - 1952 (69 years)

Charles Bungay Fawcett was a British geographer, regarded as "one of the founders of modern British academic geography" and an early promoter of the idea of regional planning. He was born into a farming family in Staindrop, County Durham, and went to school in nearby Gainford. He studied science at University College, Nottingham and worked briefly as a schoolteacher before joining the staff under A. J Herbertson at the then-new School of Geography at Oxford University. He was later a lecturer at University College, Southampton, and Leeds University. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Geog...

#3100

E. G. Bowen

1900 - 1983 (83 years)

Emrys George Bowen FRGS, FSA, also known as E. G. Bowen , was an internationally renowned geographer with a particular interest in the physical geography and social geography of his native Wales. A diminutive figure, Bowen was on the academic staff of the Department of Geography and Anthropology at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, from the 1920s and continued to write and lecture there until his death in 1983.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions