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,
#3151
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber. Education and early life Wilson was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian to Annie Clark Harper and John Wilson, a sheep farmer. After his father died in 1873, he moved with his family to Manchester. With financial support from his step-brother he studied biology at Owens College, now the University of Manchester, with the intent of becoming a doctor. In 1887, he graduated from the College with a BSc. He won a scholarship to attend Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he became interested in physics and chemistry.
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Georg Gürich
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Georg Julius Ernst Gürich was a German geologist, paleontologist and university teacher, who wrote on Paleozoic geological formations in Poland and ranged through Guinea, Tanzania and Southern Africa , in search of unrecorded new species.
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William Trevelyan Harry
1911 - 1964 (53 years)
William Trevelyan Harry FRSE FGS was a British geologist and academic author. He specialised in the geology of Greenland and north-east Canada. Life He was born in Yorkshire in northern England around 1911.
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Cornelis Hendrik Edelman
1903 - 1964 (61 years)
Cornelis Hendrik "Kees" Edelman was a Dutch geologist and soil scientist who worked at the Agricultural College in Wageningen. He is credited with popularizing the use of the so-called Edelman soil auger to study soil profiles. Using studies of soil profiles he compiled a very high resolution soil-types map of the Netherlands.
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George Jobberns
1895 - 1974 (79 years)
George Jobberns was a New Zealand geographer and educator. Born in 1895 at Te Moana near Geraldine in the foothills of South Canterbury, New Zealand, Jobberns taught the first Geography I course at Canterbury University College in 1934. In 1937 he was appointed lecturer-in-charge of the first independent Department of Geography in New Zealand and in 1942 was elected to the first chair of Geography in New Zealand. On his retirement in May 1960, he was made Professor emeritus of the University of Canterbury. In the 1963 New Year Honours, Jobberns was appointed a Commander of the Order of the B...
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Leif Størmer
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Leif Størmer was a Norwegian paleontologist and geologist. He was professor of historical geology at the University of Oslo from 1946 to 1975. His father was the mathematician Carl Størmer, and his son the mathematician Erling Størmer.
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Heinrich von Ficker
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Heinrich von Ficker was a German-Austrian meteorologist and geophysicist who was a native of Munich. He was the son of historian Julius von Ficker . Career From 1911 he was a professor of meteorology at the University of Graz, and from 1923 to 1937 was a professor at the University of Berlin. During his tenure at Berlin, he also spent several years as director of the Prussian Meteorological Institute. From 1937 until his retirement in 1952, he was a professor at University of Vienna and director of the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik .
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Alexei Vasilievich Shubnikov
1887 - 1970 (83 years)
Alexei Vasilievich Shubnikov was a Soviet crystallographer and mathematician. Shubnikov was the founding director of the Institute of Crystallography of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in Moscow. Shubnikov pioneered Russian crystallography and its application.
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Marius Jeuken
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Marius Jeuken was professor of theoretical biology at the Institute of Theoretical Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, from 1968 until his death. Jeuken was also a member of the Society of Jesus; he joined the Dutch Jesuits in 1934 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946 in Maastricht.
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Emyr Estyn Evans
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Emyr Estyn Evans CBE was a geographer and archaeologist, whose primary field of interest was the Irish neolithic. Early life He was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the son of a Welsh Presbyterian minister, George Owen Evans. He was educated at Welshpool Intermediate School and University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he read Geography and Anthropology. Illness forced him to turn down a post at Oxford University and worked instead for geographer and zoologist H. J. Fleure, preparing contributions for the 14th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
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Dimitri Nalivkin
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
#3170
Robert Charles Wallace
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Robert Charles Wallace was a Scots-Canadian geologist, educator, and administrator who served as president of the University of Alberta , the principal of Queen's University , and the head of the Arctic Institute of North America .
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Berend George Escher
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Berend George Escher was a Dutch geologist. Escher had a broad interest, but his research was mainly on crystallography, mineralogy and volcanology. He was a pioneer in experimental geology. He was a half-brother of the artist M. C. Escher, and had some influence on his work due to his knowledge of crystallography. M.C. Escher created a woodcut ex libris for his brother 'Beer' with a stylized image of a volcano around 1922 .
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Giuseppina Aliverti
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Giuseppina Aliverti was an Italian geophysicist specializing in several fields of terrestrial physics. She is remembered for developing the Aliverti-Lovera method of measuring the radioactivity of water.
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Erich Obst
1886 - 1981 (95 years)
Karl August Erich Obst was a German geographer and geopolitician. Between 1924 and 1944 he was the editor of the German geopolitical magazine "Zeitschrift für Geopolitik". External links
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Elizabeth Alexander
1908 - 1958 (50 years)
Frances Elizabeth Somerville Alexander was a British geologist, academic, and physicist, whose wartime work with radar and radio led to early developments in radio astronomy and whose post-war work on the geology of Singapore is considered a significant foundation to contemporary research. Alexander earned her PhD from Newnham College, Cambridge, and worked in Radio Direction Finding at Singapore Naval Base from 1938 to 1941. In January 1941, unable to return to Singapore from New Zealand, she became Head of Operations Research in New Zealand's Radio Development Lab, Wellington. In 1945, Alex...
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George Etzel Pearcy
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
George Etzel Pearcy was an American geographer known for his plan to re-draw the United States map to have only 38 states. He also published influential work on America's global role in stewardship over the air.
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Ida Helen Ogilvie
1874 - 1963 (89 years)
Ida Helen Ogilvie was a United States educator and notable early twentieth century woman geologist. Early life and education Ida Helen Ogilvie was born in New York City to Clinton Ogilvie and Helen Ogilvie, who were both artists. Her first language was French, then English. She was raised in a wealthy family with roots tracing back to the Mayflower, and was well travelled, attending schools in Europe before studying at The Brearley School.
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W. J. Varley
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
William Jones Varley, FSA was a British geographer and archaeologist, particularly known for his excavations of English Iron Age hillforts, including Maiden Castle and Eddisbury hillfort in Cheshire, Old Oswestry hillfort in Shropshire, and Castle Hill in West Yorkshire. He was also a pioneer of geographical research and education in colonial Ghana where he worked from 1947 to 1956, and was involved in historical conservation there.
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Robin Allan
1900 - 1966 (66 years)
Robin Sutcliffe Allan was a New Zealand geologist and university professor. The university professor William Salmond was his grandfather. In 1953, Allan was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal. The Allan Hills in Antarctica, mapped by the New Zealand party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, were named in his honour.
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Johannes Walther
1860 - 1937 (77 years)
Johannes Walther was a German geologist who discovered important principles of stratigraphy, including Walther's Law. Early life and work Walther came from a religious home and studied botany, zoology, and philosophy at the University of Jena. In 1882 he successfully completed this course with a doctorate. Then he studied geology and palaeontology in Leipzig and later Munich.
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Ernst Neef
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Ernst Neef was a German geographer. Together with Carl Troll and Josef Schmithüsen , he is considered one of the founders of landscape ecology. Neef's concept of landscape and landscape ecology can be summarized as follows: "Neef holds the classical geographical view that all components of the geosphere exist interdependently at every point on the earth’s surface by virtue of lawful relations . However, he rejects the classical assumption of natural landscape units, contending instead that landscapes are not objectively given entities. Instead, they are sections within the uninterrupted ear...
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Wataru Ishijima
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Wataru Ishijima was a paleontologist and geologist. Ishijima was one of the most prolific researchers of fossil calcareous algae. After graduating from the Imperial Fisheries Institute in 1927, Ishijima joined the Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Faculty of Science, Tohoku Imperial University from 1927–1931. He then worked at the Institute of Geology, Taihoku Imperial University during 1942–1945 and then at the Rikkyo University from 1945–1980. His doctoral dissertation was submitted to Tohoku University and was privately published by Yūhodō . He described a total of 139 taxa of foss...
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Julie Moschelesová
1892 - 1956 (64 years)
Julie Moschelesová , also known as Julie Moscheles, was a Jewish German-speaking Czechoslovak geographer. Moschelesová was brought up in London by her uncle, the English painter Felix Moscheles. While on a trip to North Africa with him, she met the Norwegian geologist Hans Henrik Reusch who invited her to work in Oslo, Norway. While there, her interest in geography was noticed by of the German University of Prague who persuaded her to study there. Earning a Ph.D. in 1916, she later moved to the Czech University in Prague obtaining habilitation in anthropogeography in 1934. In 1939, she fled the Nazi occupation and moved to Australia, where she lectured at the University of Melbourne.
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Otto Maull
1887 - 1957 (70 years)
Otto Maull was a German geographer and geopolitician. He taught human geography at University of Graz, in Austria, and was the author of several books, including . He spent time in Latin America, about which he wrote extensively in a series of papers. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Zeitschrift, and subscribed to the theory of the organic state as a collection of spatial cells , each with a life of its own. Maull was at one time part of a team led by former military commander and political geographer Karl Haushofer. Haushofer was a close associate of Rudolf Hess and called for Nazi G...
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George Walter Tyrrell
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
George Walter Tyrrell FRSE FGS was a 20th-century British geologist, glaciologist and petrologist. A specialist in Arctic and Antarctic landscapes he was the first to describe the recticular glaciers of Spitzbergen.
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Werner Janensch
1878 - 1969 (91 years)
Werner Ernst Martin Janensch was a German paleontologist and geologist. Biography Janensch was born at Herzberg . In addition to Friedrich von Huene, Janensch was probably Germany's most important dinosaur specialist from the early and middle twentieth century. His most famous and significant contributions stemmed from the expedition undertaken to the Tendaguru Beds in what is now Tanzania. As leader of an expedition set up by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where he worked as a curator, Janensch helped uncover an enormous quantity of fossils of late Jurassic period dinosaurs, including several complete Brachiosaurus skeletons, then the largest animal ever known.
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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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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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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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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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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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