The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3301
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.
Go to Profile#3302
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.
Go to Profile#3303
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.
Go to Profile#3304
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.
Go to Profile#3305
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.
Go to Profile#3306
Abraham Gottlob Werner
1749 - 1817 (68 years)
Abraham Gottlob Werner was a German geologist who set out an early theory about the stratification of the Earth's crust and propounded a history of the Earth that came to be known as Neptunism. While most tenets of Neptunism were eventually set aside, Werner is remembered for his demonstration of chronological succession in rockss; for the zeal with which he infused his pupils; and for the impulse he thereby gave to the study of geology. He has been called the "father of German geology".
Go to Profile#3307
Pausanias
110 - 180 (70 years)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.
Go to Profile#3308
Vilhelm Bjerknes
1862 - 1951 (89 years)
Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.
Go to Profile#3309
Erich von Drygalski
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Erich Dagobert von Drygalski was a German geographer, geophysicist and polar scientist, born in Königsberg, East Prussia. Between 1882 and 1887, Drygalski studied mathematics and natural science at the University of Königsberg, Bonn, Berlin and Leipzig. He graduated with a doctorate thesis about ice shields in Nordic areas. Between 1888 and 1891, he was an assistant at the Geodetic Institute and the Central Office of International Geodetics in Berlin.
Go to Profile#3310
Ernest Shackleton
1874 - 1922 (48 years)
Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Go to Profile#3311
Milutin Milanković
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Milutin Milanković was a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer and popularizer of science. Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the "Canon of the Earth's Insolation", which characterizes the climates of all the planets of the Solar System. The second contribution is the explanation of Earth's long-term climate changes caused by changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as Milankovitch cycles. This partly explained the ice ages occurring in the geological past of the Ea...
Go to Profile#3312
René Just Haüy
1743 - 1822 (79 years)
René Just Haüy FRS MWS FRSE was a French priest and mineralogist, commonly styled the Abbé Haüy after he was made an honorary canon of Notre Dame. Due to his innovative work on crystal structure and his four-volume Traité de Minéralogie , he is often referred to as the "Father of Modern Crystallography". During the French revolution he also helped to establish the metric system.
Go to Profile#3313
Walther Penck
1888 - 1923 (35 years)
Walther Penck was a geologist and geomorphologist known for his theories on landscape evolution. Penck is noted for criticizing key elements of the Davisian cycle of erosion, concluding that the process of uplift and denudation occur simultaneously, at gradual and continuous rates. Penck's idea of parallel slope retreat led to revisions of Davis's cycle of erosion.
Go to Profile#3314
Julius von Hann
1839 - 1921 (82 years)
Julius Ferdinand von Hann was an Austrian meteorologist. He is seen as a father of modern meteorology. Biography He was educated at the gymnasium of Kremsmünster and then studied mathematics, chemistry and physics at the University of Vienna, then geology and paleontology under Eduard Suess and physical geography under Friedrich Simony. From 1865 to 1868, he was master at the Oberrealschule at Linz, and in 1865 was invited by Karl Jelinek to become the first editor of the Zeitschrift für Meteorologie. In 1877, he succeeded Jelinek as the director of the Meteorologische Zentralanstalt and was appointed professor of meteorology at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#3315
Gerhard vom Rath
1830 - 1888 (58 years)
Gerhard vom Rath , was a German mineralogist, born at Duisburg in Prussia. Biography Rath was educated at Cologne, at Bonn University, and finally at Berlin, where he graduated Ph.D. in 1853. In 1856 he became assistant to Johann Jakob Nöggerath in the mineralogical museum at Bonn, and succeeded to the directorship in 1872. Meanwhile, in 1863 he was appointed extraordinary professor of geology, and in 1872 he became professor of geology and mineralogy in the university at Bonn.
Go to Profile#3316
Paul Vidal de La Blache
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Paul Vidal de La Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics. He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.
Go to Profile#3317
Friedrich Mohs
1773 - 1839 (66 years)
Carl Friedrich Christian Mohs was a German chemist and mineralogist. He was the creator of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Mohs also introduced a classification of the crystal forms in crystal systems independently of Christian Samuel Weiss.
Go to Profile#3318
Jovan Cvijić
1865 - 1927 (62 years)
Jovan Cvijić was a Serbian geographer and ethnologist, president of the Serbian Royal Academy of Sciences and rector of the University of Belgrade. Cvijić is considered the founder of geography in Serbia. He began his scientific career as a geographer and geologist, and continued his activity as a human geographer and sociologist.
Go to Profile#3319
Arnold Henry Guyot
1807 - 1884 (77 years)
Arnold Henry Guyot was a Swiss-American geologist and geographer. Early life Guyot was born on September 28, 1807, at Boudevilliers, near Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was educated at Chaux-de-Fonds, then at the college of Neuchâtel. In 1825, he went to Germany and resided in Karlsruhe where he met Louis Agassiz, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. From Karlsruhe he moved to Stuttgart, where he studied at the gymnasium. He returned to Neuchâtel in 1827. He determined to enter the ministry and started at the University of Berlin to attend lectures. While pursuing his studies, he also attended lectures on philosophy and natural science.
Go to Profile#3320
Adam Sedgwick
1785 - 1873 (88 years)
Adam Sedgwick was a British geologist and Anglican priest, one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Cambrian and Devonian period of the geological timescale. Based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata, he proposed the Cambrian period in 1835, in a joint publication in which Roderick Murchison also proposed the Silurian period. Later in 1840, to resolve what later became known as the Great Devonian Controversy about rocks near the boundary between the Silurian and Carboniferous periods, he and Murchison proposed the Devonian period.
Go to Profile#3321
Emil Wiechert
1861 - 1928 (67 years)
Emil Johann Wiechert was a German physicist and geophysicist who made many contributions to both fields, including presenting the first verifiable model of a layered structure of the Earth and being among the first to discover the electron. He went on to become the world's first Professor of Geophysics at the University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#3322
Douglas Mawson
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Sir Douglas Mawson OBE FRS FAA was an Australian geologist, Antarctic explorer, and academic. Along with Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, he was a key expedition leader during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Go to Profile#3323
M. King Hubbert
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Marion King Hubbert was an American geologist and geophysicist. He worked at the Shell research lab in Houston, Texas. He made several important contributions to geology, geophysics, and petroleum geology, most notably the Hubbert curve and Hubbert peak theory , with important political ramifications. He was often referred to as "M. King Hubbert" or "King Hubbert".
Go to Profile#3324
Muhammad al-Idrisi
1111 - 1166 (55 years)
Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Idrisi al-Qurtubi al-Hasani as-Sabti, or simply al-Idrisi , was a Muslim geographer and cartographer who served in the court of King Roger II at Palermo, Sicily. Muhammed al-Idrisi was born in Ceuta, then belonging to the Almoravid dynasty. He created the , one of the most advanced medieval world maps.
Go to Profile#3325
James Dwight Dana
1813 - 1895 (82 years)
James Dwight Dana FRS FRSE was an American geologist, mineralogist, volcanologist, and zoologist. He made pioneering studies of mountain-building, volcanic activity, and the origin and structure of continents and oceans around the world.
Go to Profile#3326
Enrico Clerici
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Enrico Clerici was an Italian mineralogist and geologist. From 1903 on he worked at the University of Rome. He published in 1907 the composition of a solution with a density of 4.25 g/cm3 at 20 °C, to determine the density of minerals. The Clerici solution is a mixture of thallium formate and thallium malonate in water.
Go to Profile#3327
Ellen Churchill Semple
1863 - 1932 (69 years)
Ellen Churchill Semple was an American geographer and the first female president of the Association of American Geographers. She contributed significantly to the early development of the discipline of geography in the United States, particularly studies of human geography. She is most closely associated with work in anthropogeography and environmentalism, and the debate about "environmental determinism".
Go to Profile#3328
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.
Go to Profile#3329
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.
Go to Profile#3330
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.
Go to Profile#3331
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.
Go to Profile#3332
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...
Go to Profile#3333
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.
Go to Profile#3334
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.
Go to Profile#3335
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".
Go to Profile#3336
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.
Go to Profile#3337
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.
Go to Profile#3338
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...
Go to Profile#3339
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.
Go to Profile#3340
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.
Go to Profile#3341
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.
Go to Profile#3342
Ferdinand von Richthofen
1833 - 1905 (72 years)
Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen , better known in English as was a German traveller, geographer, and scientist. He is noted for coining the terms "Seidenstraße" and "Seidenstraßen" = "Silk Road" or "Silk Route" in 1877. He also standardized the practices of chorography and chorology. He was an uncle of the World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, best known as the "Red Baron".
Go to Profile#3343
Émile Argand
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Émile Argand was a Swiss geologist. He was born in Eaux-Vives near Geneva. He attended vocational school in Geneva then worked as a draftsman. He studied anatomy in Paris, but gave up medicine to pursue his interest in geology.
Go to Profile#3344
Ellsworth Huntington
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
Ellsworth Huntington was a professor of geography at Yale University during the early 20th century, known for his studies on environmental determinism/climatic determinism, economic growth, and economic geography. He served as president of the Ecological Society of America in 1917, the Association of American Geographers in 1923 and president of the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society from 1934 to 1938.
Go to Profile#3345
Roderick Murchison
1792 - 1871 (79 years)
Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish geologist who served as director-general of the British Geological Survey from 1855 until his death in 1871. He is noted for investigating and describing the Silurian, Devonian and Permian systems.
Go to Profile#3346
Charles Schuchert
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Charles Schuchert was an American invertebrate paleontologist who was a leader in the development of paleogeography, the study of the distribution of lands and seas in the geological past. Biography He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 3, 1858, to Philip and Agatha Schuchert. He received a common school education up to the age of thirteen, and then he spent a number of years working in his father's furniture business. Schuchert possessed an aptitude for scientific investigation, and in 1878 he began to attend meetings of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History. Here he developed a friendship with fellow Cincinnati native Edward Oscar Ulrich.
Go to Profile#3347
Nikolay Baransky
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Baransky was a Soviet economic geographer, founder of Soviet Rayon school of economic geography, and corresponding member of Soviet Academy of Sciences ; he was a Hero of Socialist Labour and winner of the Stalin Prize .
Go to Profile#3348
Yaqut al-Hamawi
1178 - 1229 (51 years)
Yāqūt Shihāb al-Dīn ibn-ʿAbdullāh al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī was a Muslim scholar of Byzantine Greek ancestry active during the late Abbasid period . He is known for his , an influential work on geography containing valuable information pertaining to biography, history and literature as well as geography.
Go to Profile#3349
William Smith
1769 - 1839 (70 years)
William 'Strata' Smith was an English geologist, credited with creating the first detailed, nationwide geological map of any country. At the time his map was first published he was overlooked by the scientific community; his relatively humble education and family connections prevented him from mixing easily in learned society. Financially ruined, Smith spent time in debtors' prison. It was only late in his life that Smith received recognition for his accomplishments, and became known as the "Father of English Geology".
Go to Profile#3350
Pomponius Mela
15 - 100 (85 years)
Pomponius Mela, who wrote around AD 43, was the earliest known Roman geographer. He was born in Tingentera and died AD 45. His short work remained in use nearly to the year 1500. It occupies less than one hundred pages of ordinary print, and is described by the Encyclopædia Britannica as "dry in style and deficient in method, but of pure Latinity, and occasionally relieved by pleasing word-pictures." Except for the geographical parts of Pliny's Historia naturalis , the De situ orbis is the only formal treatise on the subject in Classical Latin.
Go to Profile