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.
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3051
J Harlen Bretz
1882 - 1981 (99 years)
J Harlen Bretz was an American geologist, best known for his research that led to the acceptance of the Missoula Floods and for his work on caves. Early life and education Bretz was born on 2 September 1882, in the small town of Saranac in Ionia County, Michigan. He was the first of Oliver Joseph Bretz and Rhoda Maria Howlett's five children. His father was a farmer, and proud descendant of early German settler in Ohio, John Bretz.
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Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor was an English geographer and historian of science, the first woman to hold an academic chair of geography in the United Kingdom. Taylor was educated at the Camden School for Girls, the North London Collegiate School, and Royal Holloway College. In 1903 she obtained a first class BSc in chemistry from the University of London. While teaching chemistry she studied at the University of Oxford and from 1908 to 1910 acted as research assistant to A. J. Herbertson, head of the Oxford Geography School. She wrote school geography textbooks in collaboration with J. F. Un...
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Siegfried Passarge
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Otto Karl Siegfried Passarge was a German geographer from East Prussia. Life Siegfried Passarge was born in Königsberg, the son of travel writer Ludwig Passarge. He attended Collegium Fridericianum, and after graduation studied geography in Berlin and Jena. He also trained in medicine, and worked as a doctor during his military service.
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Paul F. Kerr
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Dr. Paul F. Kerr , was a Professor of Mineralogy at Columbia University. During the second World War, he was tasked with locating and procuring supplies of uranium for the Manhattan Project. Kerr had an academic interest in the geology of tungsten, uranium and clay minerals. He pioneered the use of X-rays in the process of mineral identification and is considered to be one of the fathers of applied mineralogy. At Columbia University he was instrumental in the founding of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.
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Katsutada Sezawa
1895 - 1944 (49 years)
Katsutada Sezawa was a Japanese geophysicist . Sezawa's key work was on the mathematical aspects of wave transmission in media of different viscosities and the Sezawa wave mode of surface waves is named after him.
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Naomasa Yamasaki
1870 - 1929 (59 years)
Naomasa Yamasaki was a Japanese geographer and regarded as the father of modern Japanese geography. He was a professor at Tokyo Imperial University from 1911 to 1929, where he created the department of geography and founded The Association of Japanese Geographers. The latter is the primary academic geographic society in Japan.
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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.
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Reinout Willem van Bemmelen
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, also known as Rein van Bemmelen, was a Dutch geologist whose interests were structural geology, economic geology and volcanology. He is known for his work on these subjects and the geology of Indonesia.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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