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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3051
Martin Julian Buerger
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Martin Julian Buerger was an American crystallographer. He was a Professor of Mineralogy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He invented the X-ray precession camera for studies in crystallography. Buerger authored twelve textbooks/monographs and over 200 technical articles. He was awarded the Arthur L. Day Medal by the Geological Society of America in 1951. The mineral fluor-buergerite was named for him. The MJ Buerger Award was established in his honor.
Go to Profile#3052
Richard Hartshorne
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Richard Hartshorne was a prominent American geographer, and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specialized in economic and political geography and the philosophy of geography. He is known in particular for his methodological work The Nature of Geography, published in 1939.
Go to Profile#3053
Kathleen Sherrard
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Kathleen Margaret Maria Sherrard was an Australian geologist and paleontologist. Early life and education The daughter of John McInerny, a medical practitioner, and Margaratta Wright , she was born Kathleen McInerny in North Carlton, Melbourne, and later lived in Beijing.
Go to Profile#3054
Gustaaf Adolf Frederik Molengraaff
1860 - 1942 (82 years)
Gustaaf Adolf Frederik Molengraaff was a Dutch geologist, biologist and explorer. He became an authority on the geology of South Africa and the Dutch East Indies. Gustaaf Molengraaff studied mathematics and physics at Leiden University. From 1882 he studied at Utrecht University. As a student he made his first journey overseas when he joined the 1884–1885 expedition to the Dutch Antilles led by Willem Frederik Reinier Suringar and Karl Martin. He became PhD with a thesis on the geology of Sint Eustatius. He studied crystallography in Munich, where he also took the opportunity to study the geo...
Go to Profile#3055
Bruce C. Heezen
1924 - 1977 (53 years)
Bruce Charles Heezen was an American geologist. He worked with oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp at Columbia University to map the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1950s. Biography Heezen was born in Vinton, Iowa. An only child, he moved at age six with his parents to Muscatine, Iowa, where he graduated from high school in 1942. He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1947. He received his M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D in 1957 from Columbia University.
Go to Profile#3056
Cecil Edgar Tilley
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Cecil Edgar Tilley FRS HonFRSE PGS was an Australian-British petrologist and geologist. Life He was born in Unley, Adelaide, the youngest child of John Thomas Edward Tilley, a civil engineer from London, and his wife South Australia-born wife, Catherine Jane Nicholas.
Go to Profile#3057
Sydney Chapman
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Sydney Chapman was a British mathematician and geophysicist. His work on the kinetic theory of gases, solar-terrestrial physics, and the Earth's ozone layer has inspired a broad range of research over many decades.
Go to Profile#3058
Keith Edward Bullen
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Keith Edward Bullen FAA FRS was a New Zealand-born mathematician and geophysicist. He is noted for his seismological interpretation of the deep structure of the Earth's mantle and core. He was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney in Australia from 1945 until 1971.
Go to Profile#3059
Adrian Gill
1937 - 1986 (49 years)
Adrian Edmund Gill FRS was an Australian meteorologist and oceanographer best known for his textbook Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics. Gill was born in Melbourne, Australia, and worked at Cambridge, serving as Senior Research Fellow from 1963 to 1984. His father was Edmund Gill, geologist, palaeontologist and curator at the National Museum of Victoria.
Go to Profile#3060
Eula Davis McEwan
1879 - 1962 (83 years)
Eula Grace Davis McEwan was an American geologist and paleontologist who taught at the University of Nebraska. Early life and education Davis was born in Milford, Illinois, the daughter of Charles Neiswander Davis and Anna Cornelia Cuvelier Davis. Her father was a veteran of the American Civil War; her maternal grandparents were born in the Netherlands. She trained as a teacher in Indiana. As a young widow, she earned a bachelor's degree in 1913 and a master's degree in geology in 1914, both at Indiana University; she completed doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1917. She was a member...
Go to Profile#3061
Eberhard Fraas
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Eberhard Fraas was a German scientist, geologist and paleontologist. He worked as a curator at the Stuttgarter Naturaliensammlung and discovered the dinosaurs of the Tendaguru formation in then German East Africa . The dinosaur Efraasia is named after him.
Go to Profile#3062
Stanislav Kalesnik
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Stanislav Vikentyevich Kalesnik was a Soviet glaciologist, physical geographer, and academician . Biography Career He graduated from the Leningrad State University in 1929. He headed the Department of Physical Geography at his alma mater since 1950. In 1955, Stanislav Kalesnik was appointed head of the Limnology Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Kalesnik's principal works are dedicated to theoretical topics of geoscience, landscape science and glaciology, as well as geomorphology of Central Tian Shan and Dzungarian Alatau. Stanislav Kalesnik is known to have introduce...
Go to Profile#3063
Yohanan Aharoni
1919 - 1976 (57 years)
Yohanan Aharoni was an Israeli archaeologist and historical geographer, chairman of the Department of Near East Studies and chairman of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel-Aviv University. Life Born to the Aronheim family, in Germany on 7 June 1919, Aharoni immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933. He studied at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, and later at the Mikve Yisrael agricultural school. He married Miriam Gross and became a member of kibbutz Alonim.
Go to Profile#3064
Jule Gregory Charney
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Jule Gregory Charney was an American meteorologist who played an important role in developing numerical weather prediction and increasing understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere by devising a series of increasingly sophisticated mathematical models of the atmosphere. His work was the driving force behind many national and international weather initiatives and programs.
Go to Profile#3065
Hilda Ormsby
1877 - 1973 (96 years)
Hilda Ormsby born Hilda Rodwell Jones was a British academic and geographer. Life Ormsby was born in Hanley, Staffordshire in 1877. Her father was a minister and the family moved around the country frequently when she was growing up. Despite this she took a certificate in Geography in the organisation that would be very important to her - the London School of Economics and Political Science . After this she moved to France where she studied French and German and minor subjects at the École Normale de Melun. In 1911 she and brother, Llewellyn, discovered the lectures given by the LSE geographer Halford Mackinder on Saturday mornings for school teachers.
Go to Profile#3066
Gordon Manley
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Gordon Valentine Manley, FRGS was a British climatologist who has been described as "probably the best known, most prolific and most expert on the climate of Britain of his generation". He assembled the Central England temperature series of monthly mean temperatures stretching back to 1659, which is the longest standardised instrumental record available for anywhere in the world. It provides a benchmark for proxy records of climatic change for the period covered, and is a notable example of scientific scholarship and perseverance . His two papers describing the work are available online.
Go to Profile#3067
Philip Kuenen
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
Philip Henry Kuenen was a Dutch geologist. Kuenen spent his earliest youth in Scotland, as his father was professor of physics at University College, Dundee until 1906. He studied geology at Leiden University, where he was a pupil of K. Martin and B.G. Escher. He finished his studies in 1925 and then became assistant to Escher. He worked on paleontology and experimental geology.
Go to Profile#3068
Lucien Gallois
1857 - 1941 (84 years)
Lucien Louis Joseph Gallois was a French geographer born in Metz. He was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he took classes from Paul Vidal de la Blache . In 1884 he received his agrégation, later becoming a lecturer at the Sorbonne . From 1898 to 1907 he was a professor of geography at the École Normale Supérieure, and afterwards a professor at the Sorbonne, where he remained until his retirement in 1927.
Go to Profile#3069
Thomas Henry Holland
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Sir Thomas Henry Holland was a British geologist who worked in India with the Geological Survey of India, serving as its director from 1903 to 1910. He later worked as an educational administrator at Edinburgh University.
Go to Profile#3070
Franz Kossmat
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
Franz Kossmat was an Austrian-German geologist, for twenty years the director of the Geological Survey of Saxony under both the kingdom and the subsequent German Republic. Kossmat was professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the Graz University of Technology. From 1913 to 1934 Kossmat was the director of the Geological Survey of Saxony and director of the Geological-Paleontological Institute of the University of Leipzig. In 1920 he presented the first gravity measures for middle Europe. It was published in 1921. In his life he published over twenty books himself, and collaborated on numerous others.
Go to Profile#3071
Allan V. Cox
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Allan Verne Cox was an American geophysicist. His work on dating geomagnetic reversals, with Richard Doell and Brent Dalrymple, made a major contribution to the theory of plate tectonics. Allan Cox won numerous awards, including the prestigious Vetlesen Prize, and was the president of the American Geophysical Union. He was the author of over a hundred scientific papers, and the author or editor of two books on plate tectonics. On January 27, 1987, Cox died in an apparent suicide.
Go to Profile#3072
Gordon Warwick
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Dr. Gordon Thomas Warwick was a geomorphologist and speleologist, based for his entire working career at Birmingham University. Following upon his death in 1983, a medal was instituted in his honour by the British Geomorphological Research Group, of which he was a founder member.
Go to Profile#3073
Harry Hammond Hess
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Harry Hammond Hess was an American geologist and a United States Navy officer in World War II who is considered one of the "founding fathers" of the unifying theory of plate tectonics. He is best known for his theories on sea floor spreading, specifically work on relationships between island arcs, seafloor gravity anomalies, and serpentinized peridotite, suggesting that the convection of the Earth's mantle was the driving force behind this process.
Go to Profile#3074
Sergei Ivanovich Tomkeieff
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Prof Sergei Ivanovich Tomkeieff FRSE FGS was a 20th-century Russian and British geologist and petrologist who won the Geological Society's Lyell Medal in 1966. Life Tomkeieff was born on 20 October 1892 in Vilna, in the Russian Empire, and studied petrology in Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. Tomkeieff came to Britain either during or just after the First World War, and began lecturing in geology at Anderson College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1920.
Go to Profile#3075
Mignon Talbot
1869 - 1950 (81 years)
Mignon Talbot was an American paleontologist. Talbot recovered and named the only known fossils of the dinosaur Podokesaurus holyokensis, which were found near Mount Holyoke College in 1910, and published a scientific description of the specimen in 1911. In 1909 she became the first woman elected to be a member of the Paleontological Society. In the state of New York, she contributed to the Helderbergian crinoids and studied the faunas of Stafford limestone.
Go to Profile#3076
Alexander Georg Supan
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Alexander Georg Supan was an Austrian geographer. Biography Born in Innichen, County of Tyrol, Supan was first educated at the Laibach gymnasium. He studied at the University of Graz as a pupil of historian Franz Krones, then continued his education at the University of Vienna, receiving his PhD at Graz in 1870. From 1871 to 1875 he worked as a teacher in the Realschule in Laibach, and afterwards studied various sciences in Graz, Halle and Leipzig.
Go to Profile#3077
Bernard R. Hubbard
1888 - 1962 (74 years)
Bernard Rosecrans Hubbard was an American geologist and explorer who popularized the Alaskan wilderness in American media during the middle of the 20th century. Known as "the Glacier Priest", he was a Jesuit priest, head of the Department of Geology at the University of Santa Clara, California, and for a time was the highest-paid lecturer in the world, leading 31 expeditions into Alaska and the Arctic.
Go to Profile#3078
Friedrich Klockmann
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Friedrich Klockmann was a German geologist and mineralogist. He studied geology and mineralogy at the Bergakademie in Clausthal and at the University of Rostock, receiving his doctorate in 1881. Following graduation he worked for the Prussian Geological Survey, based in Berlin. From 1887 he taught classes in mineralogy and geology at the academy in Clausthal, and in 1892 attained the title of professor. From 1899 he worked as a professor at the technical university in Aachen, where in 1917/18 he served as academic rector.
Go to Profile#3079
Abraham Gottlob Werner
1749 - 1817 (68 years)
Abraham Gottlob Werner was a German geologist who set out an early theory about the stratification of the Earth's crust and propounded a history of the Earth that came to be known as Neptunism. While most tenets of Neptunism were eventually set aside, Werner is remembered for his demonstration of chronological succession in rockss; for the zeal with which he infused his pupils; and for the impulse he thereby gave to the study of geology. He has been called the "father of German geology".
Go to Profile#3080
Pausanias
110 - 180 (70 years)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.
Go to Profile#3081
Vilhelm Bjerknes
1862 - 1951 (89 years)
Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.
Go to Profile#3082
Erich von Drygalski
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Erich Dagobert von Drygalski was a German geographer, geophysicist and polar scientist, born in Königsberg, East Prussia. Between 1882 and 1887, Drygalski studied mathematics and natural science at the University of Königsberg, Bonn, Berlin and Leipzig. He graduated with a doctorate thesis about ice shields in Nordic areas. Between 1888 and 1891, he was an assistant at the Geodetic Institute and the Central Office of International Geodetics in Berlin.
Go to Profile#3083
Ernest Shackleton
1874 - 1922 (48 years)
Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Go to Profile#3084
Milutin Milanković
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Milutin Milanković was a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer and popularizer of science. Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the "Canon of the Earth's Insolation", which characterizes the climates of all the planets of the Solar System. The second contribution is the explanation of Earth's long-term climate changes caused by changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as Milankovitch cycles. This partly explained the ice ages occurring in the geological past of the Ea...
Go to Profile#3085
René Just Haüy
1743 - 1822 (79 years)
René Just Haüy FRS MWS FRSE was a French priest and mineralogist, commonly styled the Abbé Haüy after he was made an honorary canon of Notre Dame. Due to his innovative work on crystal structure and his four-volume Traité de Minéralogie , he is often referred to as the "Father of Modern Crystallography". During the French revolution he also helped to establish the metric system.
Go to Profile#3086
Walther Penck
1888 - 1923 (35 years)
Walther Penck was a geologist and geomorphologist known for his theories on landscape evolution. Penck is noted for criticizing key elements of the Davisian cycle of erosion, concluding that the process of uplift and denudation occur simultaneously, at gradual and continuous rates. Penck's idea of parallel slope retreat led to revisions of Davis's cycle of erosion.
Go to Profile#3087
Julius von Hann
1839 - 1921 (82 years)
Julius Ferdinand von Hann was an Austrian meteorologist. He is seen as a father of modern meteorology. Biography He was educated at the gymnasium of Kremsmünster and then studied mathematics, chemistry and physics at the University of Vienna, then geology and paleontology under Eduard Suess and physical geography under Friedrich Simony. From 1865 to 1868, he was master at the Oberrealschule at Linz, and in 1865 was invited by Karl Jelinek to become the first editor of the Zeitschrift für Meteorologie. In 1877, he succeeded Jelinek as the director of the Meteorologische Zentralanstalt and was appointed professor of meteorology at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#3088
Gerhard vom Rath
1830 - 1888 (58 years)
Gerhard vom Rath , was a German mineralogist, born at Duisburg in Prussia. Biography Rath was educated at Cologne, at Bonn University, and finally at Berlin, where he graduated Ph.D. in 1853. In 1856 he became assistant to Johann Jakob Nöggerath in the mineralogical museum at Bonn, and succeeded to the directorship in 1872. Meanwhile, in 1863 he was appointed extraordinary professor of geology, and in 1872 he became professor of geology and mineralogy in the university at Bonn.
Go to Profile#3089
Paul Vidal de La Blache
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Paul Vidal de La Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics. He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.
Go to Profile#3090
Friedrich Mohs
1773 - 1839 (66 years)
Carl Friedrich Christian Mohs was a German chemist and mineralogist. He was the creator of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Mohs also introduced a classification of the crystal forms in crystal systems independently of Christian Samuel Weiss.
Go to Profile#3091
Jovan Cvijić
1865 - 1927 (62 years)
Jovan Cvijić was a Serbian geographer and ethnologist, president of the Serbian Royal Academy of Sciences and rector of the University of Belgrade. Cvijić is considered the founder of geography in Serbia. He began his scientific career as a geographer and geologist, and continued his activity as a human geographer and sociologist.
Go to Profile#3092
Arnold Henry Guyot
1807 - 1884 (77 years)
Arnold Henry Guyot was a Swiss-American geologist and geographer. Early life Guyot was born on September 28, 1807, at Boudevilliers, near Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was educated at Chaux-de-Fonds, then at the college of Neuchâtel. In 1825, he went to Germany and resided in Karlsruhe where he met Louis Agassiz, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. From Karlsruhe he moved to Stuttgart, where he studied at the gymnasium. He returned to Neuchâtel in 1827. He determined to enter the ministry and started at the University of Berlin to attend lectures. While pursuing his studies, he also attended lectures on philosophy and natural science.
Go to Profile#3093
Adam Sedgwick
1785 - 1873 (88 years)
Adam Sedgwick was a British geologist and Anglican priest, one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Cambrian and Devonian period of the geological timescale. Based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata, he proposed the Cambrian period in 1835, in a joint publication in which Roderick Murchison also proposed the Silurian period. Later in 1840, to resolve what later became known as the Great Devonian Controversy about rocks near the boundary between the Silurian and Carboniferous periods, he and Murchison proposed the Devonian period.
Go to Profile#3094
Emil Wiechert
1861 - 1928 (67 years)
Emil Johann Wiechert was a German physicist and geophysicist who made many contributions to both fields, including presenting the first verifiable model of a layered structure of the Earth and being among the first to discover the electron. He went on to become the world's first Professor of Geophysics at the University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#3095
Douglas Mawson
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Sir Douglas Mawson OBE FRS FAA was an Australian geologist, Antarctic explorer, and academic. Along with Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, he was a key expedition leader during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Go to Profile#3096
M. King Hubbert
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Marion King Hubbert was an American geologist and geophysicist. He worked at the Shell research lab in Houston, Texas. He made several important contributions to geology, geophysics, and petroleum geology, most notably the Hubbert curve and Hubbert peak theory , with important political ramifications. He was often referred to as "M. King Hubbert" or "King Hubbert".
Go to Profile#3097
Muhammad al-Idrisi
1111 - 1166 (55 years)
Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Idrisi al-Qurtubi al-Hasani as-Sabti, or simply al-Idrisi , was a Muslim geographer and cartographer who served in the court of King Roger II at Palermo, Sicily. Muhammed al-Idrisi was born in Ceuta, then belonging to the Almoravid dynasty. He created the , one of the most advanced medieval world maps.
Go to Profile#3098
James Dwight Dana
1813 - 1895 (82 years)
James Dwight Dana FRS FRSE was an American geologist, mineralogist, volcanologist, and zoologist. He made pioneering studies of mountain-building, volcanic activity, and the origin and structure of continents and oceans around the world.
Go to Profile#3099
Enrico Clerici
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Enrico Clerici was an Italian mineralogist and geologist. From 1903 on he worked at the University of Rome. He published in 1907 the composition of a solution with a density of 4.25 g/cm3 at 20 °C, to determine the density of minerals. The Clerici solution is a mixture of thallium formate and thallium malonate in water.
Go to Profile#3100
Ellen Churchill Semple
1863 - 1932 (69 years)
Ellen Churchill Semple was an American geographer and the first female president of the Association of American Geographers. She contributed significantly to the early development of the discipline of geography in the United States, particularly studies of human geography. She is most closely associated with work in anthropogeography and environmentalism, and the debate about "environmental determinism".
Go to Profile