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,
#3301
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 - 1859 (90 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
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Alfred Wegener
1880 - 1930 (50 years)
Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German climatologist, geologist, geophysicist, meteorologist, and polar researcher. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth . His hypothesis was controversial and widely rejected by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.
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Eratosthenes
276 BC - 194 BC (82 years)
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable to what is now known as the study of geography, and he introduced some of the terminology still used today.
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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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Christopher Hansteen
1784 - 1873 (89 years)
Christopher Hansteen was a Norwegian geophysicist, astronomer and physicist, best known for his mapping of Earth's magnetic field. Early life and career Hansteen was born in Christiania as the son of Johannes Mathias Hansteen and his wife Anne Cathrine Treschow . He was the younger brother of writer Conradine Birgitte Dunker, and through her the uncle of Bernhard Dunker and Vilhelmine Ullmann, and granduncle of Mathilde Schjøtt, Ragna Nielsen and Viggo Ullmann. His mother was a first cousin of Niels Treschow.
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Israel C. White
1848 - 1927 (79 years)
Israel Charles White was a geologist and professor, internationally known, and the first state geologist of West Virginia. White was born on a farm in the Battelle district of Monongalia County, Virginia, United States, of western Monongalia County and grew up in Morgantown. White graduated from West Virginia University in June 1872 with a bachelor's degree in geology and did postgraduate studies in Geology and Chemistry from Columbia School of Mines and received a doctoral degree from the University of Arkansas in 1880. He began his career in 1875 as an assistant geologist in Pennsylvania. I...
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Albert Defant
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Albert Joseph Maria Defant was an Austrian meteorologist, oceanographer and climatologist. He published fundamental works on the physics of the atmosphere and ocean and is regarded as one of the founders of physical oceanography.
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Emmanuel de Margerie
1862 - 1953 (91 years)
Emmanuel Marie Pierre Martin Jacquin de Margerie ForMemRS was a French geographer after whom the Margerie Glacier was named, which he visited in 1913. Early life and family He is the son of French catholic writer , and a member of the , a French family of nobility dating back to 17th-century royal administrators of Picardy under rule of Louis XIV.
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Juan Ignacio Molina
1737 - 1829 (92 years)
Fr. Juan Ignacio Molina He was one of the precursors of the theory of the gradual evolution of species, 44 years before Darwin, who repeatedly quoted him in "The Origin of Species". Biography Early years Molina was born at Guaraculén, a big farm located near Villa Alegre , where he lived until he was 5 years old. In the current province of Linares, in the Maule Region of Chile. His parents were Agustín Molina and Francisca González Bruna. From an early age he was attracted to the nature of his environment, and in addition to his school work, he enjoyed observing nature on the family farm, which he visited periodically, alternating with his studies.
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James Hector
1834 - 1907 (73 years)
Sir James Hector was a Scottish-New Zealand geologist, naturalist, and surgeon who accompanied the Palliser Expedition as a surgeon and geologist. He went on to have a lengthy career as a government employed man of science in New Zealand, and during this period he dominated the colony's scientific institutions in a way that no single man has since.
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Sjur Aasmundsen Sexe
1808 - 1888 (80 years)
Sjur Aasmundsen Sexe was a Norwegian mineralogist and educator. Biography Sexe was from Ullensvang parish in Hordaland, Norway. He was the son of Aamund Sjursen Sexe and Brita Torsteinsdatter Mæland. He grew up on a farm with pietist parents who were members of the Haugean movement. He attended Bergen Cathedral School and took the examen artium in 1834. Sexe studied rock science at the University of Christiania and graduated with a cand.miner. degree in 1840. During the years 1843–1844 he received a state scholarship to complete study trips at mines in Sweden and Germany and at the Un...
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Samuel Haughton
1821 - 1897 (76 years)
Samuel Haughton was an Irish clergyman, medical doctor, and scientific writer. Biography The scientist Samuel Haughton was born in Carlow, the son of another Samuel Haughton and grandson of the three-times-married Samuel Pearson Haughton , a Quaker.
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Jean Brunhes
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Jean Brunhes was a French geographer. His most famous book is La géographie humaine . He was the director of The Archives of the Planet, an international photographic project sponsored by Albert Kahn.
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Josiah Whitney
1819 - 1896 (77 years)
Josiah Dwight Whitney was an American geologist, professor of geology at Harvard University , and chief of the California Geological Survey . Through his travels and studies in the principal mining regions of the United States, Whitney became the foremost authority of his day on the economic geology of the U.S. Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous 48 United States, and the Whitney Glacier, the first confirmed glacier in the United States, on Mount Shasta, were both named after him by members of the Survey.
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Otto Volger
1822 - 1897 (75 years)
Georg Heinrich Otto Volger was a German geologist from Lüneburg. He was the founder and first chairman of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, which he led from 1859 to 1882. Life Volger was born to , a teacher and school director in Lüneburg, and his wife Rosalie Franziska, on 30 January 1822. After attending the Johanneum gymnasium, Volger began studying law at the University of Göttingen in 1842, but changed in 1843 to study natural sciences. Volger obtained his PhD in geology from Gottingen in 1845. Volger was a member of the Corps Hannovera Göttingen during his studies.
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Abbott Lawrence Rotch
1861 - 1912 (51 years)
Abbott Lawrence Rotch was an American meteorologist and founder of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, the longest continually operating observation site in the United States and an important site for world climatology.
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Rollin D. Salisbury
1858 - 1922 (64 years)
Rollin Daniel Salisbury was an American geologist and educator. Biography Salisbury was born at Spring Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1858. He studied at Whitewater State Normal School in Whitewater, Wisconsin, graduating in 1877 after completing the four-year course in just two-and-one-half years. He taught in a village school in Port Washington, Wisconsin, for one year before entering Beloit College as a sophomore in the fall of 1878. At Beloit, he studied geology with T.C. Chamberlin as his professor. After graduating from Beloit in 1881, he spent one year working for the U.S. Geological Survey as Chamberlin's field assistant, during which time he lived in the Chamberlin household.
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John Edward Marr
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
John Edward Marr FGS FRS was a British geologist. After studying at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, he matriculated to St John's College, Cambridge, graduating with First Class Honours in 1878. Following undergraduate work in the Lake District, he travelled to Bohemia to investigate the fossil collection of Joachim Barrande, where his work won him the Sedgwick Prize in 1882. In 1886, Marr became lecturer at the University of Cambridge Department of Geology, a position he held for 32 years until he succeeded Thomas McKenny Hughes as Woodwardian Professor of Geology in 1917.
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George Jarvis Brush
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
George Jarvis Brush was an American mineralogist and academic administrator who spent most of his career at Yale University in the Sheffield Scientific School. Career Brush was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 15, 1831. He studied at Cream Hill Agricultural School and commenced his studies at Yale in 1848 with courses from Benjamin Silliman, Jr. and John Pitkin Norton on practical chemistry and agriculture. He also studied chemistry, metallurgy and mineralogy. He left in 1850 to work with Benjamin Silliman, Jr. but received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1852 by special examination. From 1852 to 1855, Brush worked and studied at the University of Virginia and in Munich and Freiberg.
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Alexander Kruber
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Kruber was a Soviet geographer, professor, the founder of the Russian and Soviet karstology. Alexander Kruber was born in Istra , Russia. He graduated from the Moscow University in 1897. He became chairman of the Geography Department of the Moscow University in 1919 and director of the Scientific Research Institute of Geography during 1923-1927. Since 1927 he could no longer work due to grave health problems.
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Ernst Reinhold von Hofmann
1801 - 1871 (70 years)
Ernst Reinhold von Hofmann was a Russian geologist, geographer, explorer, and lecturer. He was a geologist who accompanied Otto von Kotzebue and his crew during his travels around the world from 1823 to 1826. After that, he made several travels to regions such as the Uralss and Continental Europe and made note of orography and general geography. He was also a professor at Saint Petersburg State University and an associate professor at the University of Kyiv.
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Leonard Johnston Wills
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Professor Leonard Johnston Wills – known as 'Jack' to friends and family – was one of the leading British geologists of his generation. He held the Chair of Geology at the University of Birmingham from 1932 to 1949, and received many honours including the Geological Society of London's highest award, the Wollaston Medal, in 1954.
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Baltazar Mathias Keilhau
1797 - 1858 (61 years)
Balthazar Mathias Keilhau was a Norwegian geologist and mountain pioneer. He is regarded as the founder of the discipline of geology in Norway, and has also been credited for the discovery of the Jotunheimen mountain range.
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William Roy
1726 - 1790 (64 years)
Major-General William Roy was a Scottish military engineer, surveyor, and antiquarian. He was an innovator who applied new scientific discoveries and newly emerging technologies to the accurate geodetic mapping of Great Britain. His masterpiece is usually referred to as Roy's Map of Scotland.
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George Vâlsan
1885 - 1935 (50 years)
George Vâlsan was a Romanian geographer and writer. Biography Education and career Born in Bucharest, he attended primary school in Iași and Craiova, and began high school in Pitești. He completed secondary education at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Bucharest, graduating in 1904. He then attended the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, obtaining his diploma in 1908. Encouraged by Titu Maiorescu and Simion Mehedinți, he continued his studies of geography in Berlin and, under Emmanuel de Martonne, in Paris.
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George R. Stewart
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
George Rippey Stewart Jr. was an American historian, toponymist, novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His 1959 book, Pickett's Charge, a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg, was called "essential for an understanding of the Battle of Gettysburg". His 1949 post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951.
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Bernhard von Cotta
1808 - 1879 (71 years)
Carl Bernhard von Cotta, known as Bernhard von Cotta , was a German geologist. Life He was born in a forester's lodge at Kleine Zillbach, Meiningen, near Eisenach, the son of Heinrich von Cotta, founder of the Tharandt Forestry Academy near Dresden. He was educated first at the Tharnadt Academcy, then at the Bergakademie Freiberg and the University of Heidelberg. Botany at first attracted him and he was one of the earliest to use the microscope in determining the structure of fossil plants. Later on he gave his attention to geology, to the study of ore-deposits, of rockss and metamorphism. He studied deposits of minerals in the Austrian Alps, Hungary, and Romania.
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Karl Georg von Raumer
1783 - 1865 (82 years)
Karl Georg von Raumer was a German geologist and educator. Biography Raumer was born in Wörlitz, in Anhalt-Dessau. He was educated at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, and at the mining academy in Freiberg as a student of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1811 he became professor of mineralogy at Breslau, and two years later, participated in the German Campaign of 1813. In 1819 he relocated as a professor to the University of Halle, then in 1827 settled at the University of Erlangen as a professor of natural history and mineralogy. Raumer died in Erlangen.
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William Thomas Blanford
1832 - 1905 (73 years)
William Thomas Blanford was an English geologist and naturalist. He is best remembered as the editor of a major series on The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Biography Blanford was born in London to William Blanford and Elizabeth Simpson. His father owned a factory next to their house on Bouverie street, Whitefriars. He was educated in private schools in Brighton and Paris . He joined his family business in carving and gilding and studied at the School of Design in Somerset House. Suffering from ill health, he spent two years in a business house at Civitavecchia owned by a friend of his father.
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Gabriel Delafosse
1796 - 1878 (82 years)
Gabriel Delafosse was a French mineralogist who worked at the Natural History Museum in Paris and for sometime at the University of Paris. He contributed to development of the idea of unit cells in crystallography. The mineral Delafossite is named after him. He was one of the founding members of the Société Geologique de France.
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Hans Wilhelmsson Ahlmann
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Hans Jakob Konrad Wilhelmsson Ahlmann was a Swedish geographer, glaciologist, and diplomat. Born in Karlsborg, Sweden, Ahlmann grew up in Stockholm. He studied with Professor Gerard De Geer at Stockholm University, and gained his doctorate in 1915 on a doctoral thesis on Sweden's Lake Ragundasjön. The same year, he became an associate professor of geography at the University of Stockholm. He was appointed Associate Professor of Geography at Uppsala University in 1920 and professor at the Stockholm University from 1929 until 1950.
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Johann Ernst Fabri
1755 - 1825 (70 years)
Johann Ernst Fabri was a German geographer and statistician. Fabri was born in Oels, Silesia. In 1776, he began his studies in theology at the University of Halle, but his focus soon turned to geography and history. Later, he served as privat-docent at the University of Göttingen, where he was influenced by distinguished scholars that included Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig von Schlözer and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
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Constance Tipper
1894 - 1995 (101 years)
Constance Tipper was an English metallurgist and crystallographer. She investigated brittle fracture and the ductile-brittle transition of metals used in the construction of warships, and was the first female full-time faculty member at Cambridge University Department of Engineering.
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Henrik Mohn
1835 - 1916 (81 years)
Henrik Mohn was a Norwegian astronomer and meteorologist. Although he enrolled in theology studies after finishing school, he is credited with founding meteorological research in Norway, being a professor at the Royal Frederick University and director of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute from 1866 to 1913.
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August Karl Rosiwal
1860 - 1923 (63 years)
August Karl Rosiwal was an Austrian geologist. Rosiwal was born and died in Vienna. From 1885 to 1891, he worked as an assistant to Franz Toula. In 1892 he began lecturing in mineralogy and petrography and then from 1898 finally earning fees from his lectures. Many of the studies self conducted. From 1918 until his death in 1923, he was administrator of the "Geological Institute of the University of Vienna", following his mentor Franz Toula. He conducted a comprehensive dating, geological details of Austria.
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Gemma Frisius
1508 - 1555 (47 years)
Gemma Frisius was a Dutch physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker. He created important globes, improved the mathematical instruments of his day and applied mathematics in new ways to surveying and navigation. Gemma's rings, an astronomical instrument, are named after him. Along with Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, Frisius is often considered one of the founders of the Netherlandish school of cartography, and significantly helped lay the foundations for the school's golden age .
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Heinrich Vater
1859 - 1930 (71 years)
Heinrich August Vater was a German soil scientist and forestry scientist. Vater was a pioneer in the areas of forest soil science, land evaluation, and forest fertilization. In 1884, he received his doctorate at Leipzig with the dissertation Die fossilen Hölzer der Phosphoritlager des Herzogthums Braunschweig. He was an employee of the Royal Saxon Geological Survey, and in 1886, qualified as a lecturer of mineralogy and geology at the Polytechnic Institute in Dresden. During the following year, he became a professor at the Academy of Forestry in Tharandt. In 1898, he became a member of the De...
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