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,
#3351
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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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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".
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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.
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William Buckland
1784 - 1856 (72 years)
William Buckland DD, FRS was an English theologian who became Dean of Westminster. He was also a geologist and palaeontologist. Buckland wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus. His work proved that Kirkdale Cave in North Yorkshire had been a prehistoric hyena den, for which he was awarded the Copley Medal. It was praised as an example of how scientific analysis could reconstruct events in the distant past. He pioneered the use of fossilised faeces in reconstructing ecosystems, coining the term coprolites.
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Konstantin Glinka
1867 - 1927 (60 years)
Konstantin Dmitrievich Glinka was a Russian soil scientist. He was Director of the Agricultural College of Leningrad and Experimental Station, and the first director of the Dokuchaev Soil Science Institute. He authored over 150 works on soil, geography, mineralogy, and geology. He is known for having published the first world soil map in 1906.
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Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler
1770 - 1843 (73 years)
Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler was a Swiss-American surveyor who is considered the forefather of both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology for his achievements as the first Superintendent of the U.S. Survey of the Coast and the first U.S. Superintendent of Weights and Measures.
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Matthew Flinders
1774 - 1814 (40 years)
Captain Matthew Flinders was a British navigator and cartographer who led the first inshore circumnavigation of mainland Australia, then called New Holland. He is also credited as being the first person to utilise the name Australia to describe the entirety of that continent including Van Diemen's Land , a title he regarded as being "more agreeable to the ear" than previous names such as Terra Australis.
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Otto Nordenskjöld
1869 - 1928 (59 years)
Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskjöld was a Fenno-Swedish geologist, geographer, and polar explorer. Early life Nordenskjöld was born in Hässleby in Småland in eastern Sweden, in a Fenno-Swedish family that included his maternal uncle, the polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, and cousin Gustaf Nordenskiöld. His father and mother were cousins, but his father's family name was "Nordenskjöld", while his mother's family name was spelled "Nordenskiöld".
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Tadeusz Banachiewicz
1882 - 1954 (72 years)
Tadeusz Julian Banachiewicz was a Polish astronomer, mathematician and geodesist. Scientific career Banachiewicz was educated at University of Warsaw and his thesis was on "reduction constants of the Repsold heliometer". In 1905, after the closure of the University by the Russians, he moved to Göttingen and in 1906 to the Pulkovo Observatory. He also worked at the Engelhardt Observatory at Kazan University from 1910 to 1915.
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Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld
1832 - 1901 (69 years)
Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld was a Finland-Swedish aristocrat, geologist, mineralogist and Arctic explorer. He was a member of the Fenno-Swedish Nordenskiöld family of scientists and held the title of a friherre . His ethnicity was Finnish-Swedish.
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Gerardus Mercator
1512 - 1594 (82 years)
Gerardus Mercator was a Flemish geographer, cosmographer and cartographer. He is most renowned for creating the 1569 world map based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing as straight lines—an innovation that is still employed in nautical charts.
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Henry Fairfield Osborn
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society.
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Sven Hedin
1865 - 1952 (87 years)
Sven Anders Hedin, KNO1kl RVO, was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, travel writer and illustrator of his own works. During four expeditions to Central Asia, he made the Transhimalaya known in the West and located sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej Rivers. He also mapped lake Lop Nur, and the remains of cities, grave sites and the Great Wall of China in the deserts of the Tarim Basin. In his book Från pol till pol , Hedin describes a journey through Asia and Europe between the late 1880s and the early 1900s. While traveling, Hedin visited Turkey, the Caucasus, Tehran, Iraq, lands of the Kyrgyz people and the Russian Far East, India, China and Japan.
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Jens Esmark
1763 - 1839 (76 years)
Jens Esmark was a Danish-Norwegian professor of mineralogy who contributed to many of the initial discoveries and conceptual analyses of glaciers, specifically the concept that glaciers had covered larger areas in the past.
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Karl Bernhard Zoeppritz
1881 - 1908 (27 years)
Karl Bernhard Zoeppritz was a German geophysicist who made important contributions to seismology, in particular the formulation of the Zoeppritz equations. These equations relate the amplitudes of P-waves and S-waves at each side of an interface, between two arbitrary elastic media, as a function of the angle of incidence and are largely used in reflection seismology for determining structure and properties of the subsurface.
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Georgius Agricola
1494 - 1555 (61 years)
Georgius Agricola was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest in the mining and refining of metals. For his groundbreaking work De Natura Fossilium published in 1546, he is generally referred to as the Father of Mineralogy.
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Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen
1778 - 1852 (74 years)
Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen was a cartographer, explorer, and naval officer of the Russian Empire, who ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. He participated in the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe, and subsequently became a leader of another circumnavigation expedition that discovered the continent of Antarctica. Like Otto von Kotzebue and Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Bellingshausen belonged to the cohort of prominent Baltic German navigators who helped Russia launch its naval expeditions.
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Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin
1843 - 1928 (85 years)
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin was an American geologist and educator. In 1893 he founded the Journal of Geology, of which he was editor for many years. Biography Chamberlin was born September 25, 1843, in Mattoon, Illinois. When he was three years old his family moved north to near Beloit, Wisconsin. His father was a Methodist circuit minister and farmer. He attended a preparatory academy before entering Beloit College, where he received a classical education in Greek and Latin, while becoming interested in natural science. While a student at Beloit he directed a church choir and participated in...
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Frank Debenham
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Frank Debenham, OBE was Emeritus Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography, Cambridge University and first director of the Scott Polar Research Institute. Biography Debenham was born in Bowral, New South Wales, Australia in December 1883, the younger twin and third child of Rev. John Willmott Debenham and Edith . He attended the school run by his father before attending The King's School, Parramatta where he was the top academic and sporting student of his year. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a BA in English and philosophy, then joined the staff at the Anglican Ar...
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Reginald Aldworth Daly
1871 - 1957 (86 years)
Reginald Aldworth Daly was a Canadian geologist. Biography Reginald Daly was educated at the University of Toronto, where geologist A.P. Coleman persuaded him away from teaching mathematics and into Earth Sciences. He obtained his PhD at Harvard, and did postgraduate work in Germany and France. After working as a field geologist for the International Boundary Commission, he was a professor, and headed the Department of Geology at Harvard University from 1912 until 1942. Daly was president of The Geological Society of America in 1932.
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Georg Amadeus Carl Friedrich Naumann
1797 - 1873 (76 years)
Georg Amadeus Carl Friedrich Naumann , also known as Karl Friedrich Naumann, was a German mineralogist and geologist. The crater Naumann on the Moon is named after him. Life Naumann was born at Dresden, the son of a distinguished musician and composer. He received his early education at Pforta, studied at Freiberg under Werner, and afterwards at Leipzig and Jena. He graduated at Jena, and was occupied in 1823 in teaching in that town and in 1824 at Leipzig. In 1826 he succeeded Mohs as professor of crystallography, in 1835 he became professor also of geognosy at Freiberg; and in 1842 he was appointed professor of mineralogy and geognosy in the University of Leipzig.
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Giuseppe Mercalli
1850 - 1914 (64 years)
Giuseppe Mercalli was an Italian volcanologist and Catholic priest. He is known best for the Mercalli intensity scale for measuring earthquake intensity. Biography Born in Milan, Mercalli was ordained a Roman Catholic priest and soon became a professor of Natural Sciences at the seminary of Milan. The Italian government appointed him a professor at Domodossola, followed by a job at Reggio di Calabria. He was professor of geology at the University of Catania during the late 1880s and finally was given a job at Naples University. He was also director of the Vesuvius Observatory until the time ...
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Ardito Desio
1897 - 2001 (104 years)
Count Ardito Desio was an Italian explorer, mountain climber, geologist, and cartographer. Early life Desio was born in Palmanova, Friuli, Italy. He attended the Middle Schools of Udine and Cividale and the University of Florence , graduating with a degree in Natural Sciences . During the First World War also served in the military corps of the alpini and was captured by the Austrians on Mount Pasubio. He made advanced studies in Geology at the same University from 1921 to 1923, and was also assistant in that matter in that university, as well as in those of Pavia and Milan . He was lecturer...
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Gaius Julius Solinus
300 - Present (1726 years)
Gaius Julius Solinus, better known simply as Solinus, was a Latin grammarian, geographer, and compiler who probably flourished in the early 3rd century AD. Historical scholar Theodor Mommsen dates him to the middle of the 3rd century.
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Gustav Rose
1798 - 1873 (75 years)
Prof Gustavus Rose FRSFor HFRSE was a German mineralogist who was a native of Berlin. He was President of the German Geological Society from 1863 to 1873. Life He was born in Berlin the son of pharmacologist Valentin Rose.
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Ferdinand von Hochstetter
1829 - 1884 (55 years)
Christian Gottlieb Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter was a German-Austrian geologist. Career Having received his early education at the evangelical seminary at Maulbronn, Ferdinand proceeded to the University of Tübingen and the Tübinger Stift; there, under Friedrich August von Quenstedt, the interest he already felt in geology became permanently fixed, and he obtained his doctor's degree and a travelling scholarship.
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Hilding Köhler
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Hilding Köhler was a professor of meteorology at the University of Uppsala in Uppsala, Sweden who performed groundbreaking research in cloud physics. In particular, he performed both theoretical and experimental studies on the growth and condensation of water droplets on hygroscopic nuclei. One important and often quoted result of his theoretical research resulted in the well-known Köhler curve. He also made important contributions to theoretical studies on turbulence in the atmosphere.
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Pavle Vujević
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Pavle Vujević was a Serbian geographer and meteorologist, professor of climatology, meteorology, and mathematical geography at the University of Belgrade. He was a founder of the science of micro-climatology, and one of the first in the science of potamology, the study of rivers.
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Julius Bartels
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
Julius Bartels was a German geophysicist and statistician who made notable contributions to the physics of the Sun and Moon; to geomagnetism and meteorology; and to the physics of the ionosphere. He also made fundamental contributions to statistical methods for geophysics. Bartels was the first President of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy . With Sydney Chapman, he wrote the influential book Geomagnetism.
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David T. Ansted
1814 - 1880 (66 years)
David Thomas Ansted FRS was an English professor of geology and author of numerous books on geology. His role as a teacher at Addiscombe Military Seminary, where future East India Company army officers were trained, had an influence on the study of geology in the colonies.
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Antonio Stoppani
1824 - 1891 (67 years)
Antonio Stoppani was an Italian Catholic priest, patriot, geologist and palaeontologist. He studied the geology of the Italian region and wrote a popular treatise, Il Bel Paese , on geology and natural history. He was among the first to propose a geological epoch dominated by human activities that altered the shape of the land.
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Charles Marie de La Condamine
1701 - 1774 (73 years)
Charles Marie de La Condamine was a French explorer, geographer, and mathematician. He spent ten years in territory which is now Ecuador, measuring the length of a degree of latitude at the equator and preparing the first map of the Amazon region based on astro-geodetic observations. Furthermore he was a contributor to the Encyclopédie.
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Pentti Eskola
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Pentti Elias Eskola was a Finnish geologist who specialised in the petrology of granites and developed the concept of metamorphic facies. He won the Wollaston Medal in 1958, the Vetlesen Prize in 1964, and was given a state funeral upon his death. The mineral eskolaite is named in his honor.
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Curtis F. Marbut
1863 - 1935 (72 years)
Curtis Fletcher Marbut served as Director of the Soil Survey Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1913 until his death in 1935. Marbut developed the first formal soil classification scheme for the United States.
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John Walter Gregory
1864 - 1932 (68 years)
John Walter Gregory, , was a British geologist and explorer, known principally for his work on glacial geology and on the geography and geology of Australia and East Africa. The Gregory Rift in the Great Rift Valley is named in his honour.
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