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,
#3101
Harold Jeffreys
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS was a British geophysicist who made significant contributions to mathematics and statistics. His book, Theory of Probability, which was first published in 1939, played an important role in the revival of the objective Bayesian view of probability.
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William Hallowes Miller
1801 - 1880 (79 years)
Prof William Hallowes Miller FRS HFRSE LLD DCL was a Welsh mineralogist and laid the foundations of modern crystallography. Miller indices are named after him, the method having been described in his Treatise on Crystallography . The mineral known as millerite is named after him.
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William Morris Davis
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Morris Davis was an American geographer, geologist, geomorphologist, and meteorologist, often called the "father of American geography". He was born into a prominent Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son of Edward M. Davis and Maria Mott Davis . Davis studied geology and geography at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and then joined the Harvard sponsored geographic exploration party to the Colorado territory, led by the inaugural Sturgis-Hooper professor of geology, Josiah Dwight Whitney. Wild stories had circulated since soon after the Louisiana Purchase about Rocky Mountains peaks 18,000 feet or higher.
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Vasily Dokuchaev
1846 - 1903 (57 years)
Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchaev was a geologist and geographer who is credited with laying the foundations of soil science. He was from the Russian Empire. The Ukrainian city of Dokuchaievsk is named after him.
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Carl Ritter
1779 - 1859 (80 years)
Carl Ritter was a German geographer. Along with Alexander von Humboldt, he is considered one of the founders of modern geography. From 1825 until his death, he occupied the first chair in geography at the University of Berlin.
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Eugeniusz Romer
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
Eugeniusz Mikołaj Romer was a distinguished Polish geographer, cartographer and geopolitician, whose maps and atlases are still highly valued by experts. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he graduated from a high school in Nowy Sącz and studied history, geology, geography and meteorology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, also attending courses in Lwów and Halle . In 1894, Romer earned a doctorate in philosophy at University of Lviv. He was a president of Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists .
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Edward Drinker Cope
1840 - 1897 (57 years)
Edward Drinker Cope was an American zoologist, paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, he distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science, publishing his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations.
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Hipparchus
190 BC - 120 BC (70 years)
Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry, but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, and probably died on the island of Rhodes, Greece. He is known to have been a working astronomer between 162 and 127 BC.
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James Hutton
1726 - 1797 (71 years)
James Hutton was a Scottish geologist, agriculturalist, chemical manufacturer, naturalist and physician. Often referred to as the "Father of Modern Geology," he played a key role in establishing geology as a modern science.
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Friedrich Robert Helmert
1843 - 1917 (74 years)
Friedrich Robert Helmert was a German geodesist and statistician with important contributions to the theory of errors. Career Helmert was born in Freiberg, Kingdom of Saxony. After schooling in Freiberg and Dresden, he entered the Polytechnische Schule, now Technische Universität, in Dresden to study engineering science in 1859. Finding him especially enthusiastic about geodesy, one of his teachers, Christian August Nagel, hired him while still a student to work on the triangulation of the Ore Mountains and the drafting of the trigonometric network for Saxony. In 1863 Helmert became Nagel's assistant on the Central European Arc Measurement.
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Charles Lyell
1797 - 1875 (78 years)
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish geologist who demonstrated the power of known natural causes in explaining the earth's history. He is best known today for his association with Charles Darwin and as the author of Principles of Geology , which presented to a wide public audience the idea that the earth was shaped by the same natural processes still in operation today, operating at similar intensities. The philosopher William Whewell dubbed this gradualistic view "uniformitarianism" and contrasted it with catastrophism, which had been championed by Georges Cuvier and was better accepted in Europe.
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Christian Samuel Weiss
1780 - 1856 (76 years)
Christian Samuel Weiss was a German mineralogist born in Leipzig. Following graduation, he worked as a physics instructor in Leipzig from 1803 until 1808. and in the meantime, conducted geological studies of mountain formations in Tyrol, Switzerland and France . In 1810 he became a professor of mineralogy at the University of Berlin, where in 1818/19 and 1832/33, he served as university rector. He died near Eger in Bohemia.
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Carl O. Sauer
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Carl Ortwin Sauer was an American geographer. Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957. He has been called "the dean of American historical geography" and he was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate school at Berkeley. One of his best known works was Agricultural Origins and Dispersals . In 1927, Carl Sauer wrote the article "Recent Developments in Cultural Geography," which considered how cultural landscapes are made up of "the forms superimposed on the physical landscape."
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Tor Bergeron
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Tor Bergeron was a Swedish meteorologist who proposed a mechanism for the formation of precipitation in clouds. In the 1930s, Bergeron and W. Findeisen developed the concept that clouds contain both supercooled water and ice crystals. According to Bergeron, most precipitation is formed as a consequence of water evaporating from small supercooled droplets and accreting onto ice crystals, which then fall as snow, or melt and fall as cold rain depending on the ambient air temperature. This process is known as the Bergeron Process, and is believed to be the primary process by which precipitation ...
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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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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.
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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.
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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".
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Wilhelm von Bezold
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm von Bezold was a German physicist and meteorologist born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria. He is best known for discovering the Bezold effect and the Bezold–Brücke shift. Bezold studied mathematics and physics at the University of Munich and the University of Göttingen. He taught meteorology in Munich from 1861, becoming a professor in 1866. In 1868 he began teaching at the Technical University of Munich. In 1875, he was named a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
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Emmanuel de Martonne
1873 - 1955 (82 years)
Emmanuel de Martonne was a French geographer. He participated in the Paris Peace Conference. Early life and education Martonne was born on 1 April 1873 in Chabris, Indre, France, and was the son-in-law of Paul Vidal de la Blache. In 1892, he entered the École Normale Supérieure. He graduated three years later with a degree in history and geography. After that, he worked with Ferdinand von Richthofen and Albrecht Penck.
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Henryk Arctowski
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
Henryk Arctowski , born Henryk Artzt, was a Polish scientist and explorer. Living in exile for a large part of his life, Arctowski was educated in Belgium and France. He was one of the first humans to winter in Antarctica, as part of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, and became an internationally renowned meteorologist, also working for over 10 years in the United States. Arctowski was instrumental in restoring Polish independence after the First World War, after which he returned to Poland, where he continued a prolific academic career, having even declined an offer to become Minister of Education.
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Nathaniel Shaler
1841 - 1906 (65 years)
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler was an American paleontologist and geologist who wrote extensively on the theological and scientific implications of the theory of evolution, whose work is now considered scientific racism.
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Nicolas Steno
1638 - 1686 (48 years)
Niels Steensen was a Danish scientist, a pioneer in both anatomy and geology who became a Catholic bishop in his later years. Steensen was trained in the classical texts on science; however, by 1659 he seriously questioned accepted knowledge of the natural world. Importantly he questioned explanations for tear production, the idea that fossils grew in the ground and explanations of rock formation. His investigations and his subsequent conclusions on fossils and rock formation have led scholars to consider him one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and modern geology. The importance of Ste...
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Stephanus of Byzantium
501 - 600 (99 years)
Stephanus or Stephen of Byzantium was a Byzantine grammarian and the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled Ethnica . Only meagre fragments of the dictionary survive, but the epitome is extant, compiled by one Hermolaus, not otherwise identified.
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Fred K. Schaefer
1904 - 1953 (49 years)
Fred Kurt Schaefer was a geographer. He is considered one of the pioneers of quantitative revolution. Life Fred K. Schaefer was born in Berlin, Germany in the family of metal worker. He was involved in politics as a member of Social Democratic party and after the rise of fascism he fled from Nazi Germany. He attended the University of Berlin pursuing both undergraduate and postgraduate studies from 1928 through 1932. As an undergraduate he studied economics, economic geography, and political geography. As a graduate student he studied mathematics and population statistics.
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Francis Galton
1822 - 1911 (89 years)
Sir Francis Galton was a British polymath and the originator of the eugenics movement during the Victorian era. Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also developed the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveyss for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He coined the phrase "nature versus nurture".
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Otto Schlüter
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Otto Schlüter was a German geographer. Schlüter was a professor of geography at the University of Halle from 1911 until his death. He is credited with creation of the term cultural landscape, which is one of the turning points of geographical history.
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Carl Troll
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Carl Troll , was a German geographer, brother of botanist Wilhelm Troll. From 1919 until 1922 Troll studied biology, chemistry, geology, geography and physics at the Universität in München. In 1921 he obtained his doctorate in botany and in 1925 his habilitation in geography. Between 1922 and 1927 he worked as an assistant at the Geography Institute in Munich. Troll was engaged in research in the ecology and geography of mountainous lands: between 1926 and 1929 went on a research journey throughout South American Andean countries where he visited northern Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama.
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Friedrich Simony
1813 - 1896 (83 years)
Friedrich Simony was an Austrian geographer and Alpine researcher. Initially trained as a pharmacist, from 1836 he studied natural sciences at the University of Vienna by way of influence from botanist Joseph Franz von Jacquin. In 1848 he became a curator at the natural history museum in Klagenfurt, and during the following year, served as chief geologist at the Imperial Geological Institute in Vienna. In 1851, at the University of Vienna, he attained the first professorship for geography in Austria. In this role, he conducted research in the fields of glaciology, climatology, speleology, eco...
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Evgraf Fedorov
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Evgraf Stepanovich Fedorov was a Russian mathematician, crystallographer and mineralogist. Fedorov was born in the Russian city of Orenburg. His father was a topographical engineer. The family later moved to Saint Petersburg. From the age of fifteen, he was deeply interested in the theory of polytopes, which later became his main research interest. He was a distinguished graduate of the Gorny Institute, which he joined at the age of 26. He was elected the first Director of the Institute in 1905.
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Lewis Fry Richardson
1881 - 1953 (72 years)
Lewis Fry Richardson, FRS was an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them. He is also noted for his pioneering work concerning fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration.
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Georg von Neumayer
1826 - 1909 (83 years)
Georg Balthazar von Neumayer , was a German polar explorer and scientist who was a proponent of the idea of international cooperation for meteorology and scientific observation. Biography Early years Born in Kirchheimbolanden, Palatinate, Neumayer finished his education in geophysics and hydrography in Munich, Bavaria in 1849; and becoming much interested in polar exploration, continued his studies in terrestrial magnetism, oceanography, navigation, and nautical astronomy. To obtain practical experience he made a voyage to South America, and after his return gave a series of lectures at Hamburg on Maury's theories of the ocean, and recent improvements in navigation.
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