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.
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3451
Johan Gunnar Andersson
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Johan Gunnar Andersson was a Swedish archaeologist, paleontologist and geologist, closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s. Early life and polar research After studies at Uppsala University, and research in the polar regions, Andersson served as Director of Sweden's National Geological Survey.
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Adolf Pabst
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Adolf Pabst was an American mineralogist and geologist. Biography Pabst received in 1925 his bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and in 1928 his Ph.D. in geology and mineralogy at the University of California, Berkeley under George D. Louderbeck with a thesis on mineral inclusionss in the granitic plutons of the Sierra Nevada. For the academic year 1928/29 he won an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship for postdoctoral study; on this postdoc under Victor Moritz Goldschmidt in Oslo, Pabst married Gudrun Lisabeth Bert. After returning to Berkeley, he became in 1929 an instructor, in 1931 an assistant professor, in 1936 an associate professor, and in 1944 a full professor.
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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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Guy D. Smith
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Guy Donald Smith was a distinguished international soil scientist, who was born in Atlantic, Iowa. Biography Guy graduated from the University of Illinois circa 1929, earned his master's degree from the University of Missouri in 1934, and received his PhD in 1940 from the University of Illinois.
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Fred B. Kniffen
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Fred Bowerman Kniffen was an American geographer and distinguished professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University for over 64 years. Kniffen had a background in anthropology, geography, and geology when he arrived at Louisiana State University in the late 1920s. While there, he made great strides in the Department of Geography and Anthropology that led to the development of new research areas, additional courses, and well trained graduate students. Kniffen stressed the importance of learning and understanding the history of geography, along with blending physical geography and anthropology with cultural geography.
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Edgar W. Woolard
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Edgar William Woolard was an American meteorologist, mathematician and planetary scientist. He was born in El Paso, Texas and received his college education from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. During World War I, Woolard served in the U.S. Army. In 1919, he was employed at the U.S. Weather Bureau as an assistant meteorologist, where he would remain until 1928. He resigned to join the faculty of George Washington University as a mathematics instructor. Woolard was granted his Ph.D. from the university with a thesis titled, On the Geometrical Theory of Halos, published in 1929.
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Myra Keen
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Angeline Myra Keen was an American malacologist and invertebrate paleontologist. She was an expert on the evolution of marine mollusks. With a PhD in psychology. Keen went from being a volunteer, identifying shells at Stanford, and having no formal training in biology or geology, to being one of the world's foremost malacologists. She was called the "First Lady of Malacology".
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Dimitri Nalivkin
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
#3459
Erling Dorf
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Erling Dorf was an American geologist. He was born July 19, 1905, and died in April 1984. He was hired in 1928 as a professor of geology at Princeton University. He retired from Princeton in 1974. He was a renowned paleobotanist working on the floras of the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene. He was married to Ruth Kemmerer Dorf. They had three sons and a daughter: Thomas Alfred Dorf , Norman Kemmerer Dorf , Robert "Bob" Erling Dorf and Molly Dorf Purrington .
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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.
Go to Profile#3463
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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Siemon Muller
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Siemon William Muller was an American paleontologist and geologist, known for his studies on Triassic paleontology and stratigraphy, and for his work on permafrost. Siemon Muller was born in Blagoveshchensk on May 9, 1900 . Siemon attended the Russian Naval Academy until the Russian Revolution overtook the nation, when he moved to Shanghai to work with an American company. He sailed to the United States in 1921, and enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he studied geology. He graduated in 1927, and married Vera Vilamovsky the next year. Muller earned his master's degree from Stanford Un...
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James Wordie
1889 - 1962 (73 years)
Sir James Mann Wordie CBE FRS FRSGS LLD was a Scottish polar explorer and geologist. Friends knew him as Jock Wordie. He was President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1951 to 1954. Early life and education Wordie was born at Partick, Glasgow, the son of Jane Catherine and John Wordie, owner of Wordie & Co., a major carrier and carting contractor, with multiple premises throughout Glasgow. He had a sister, Helen. The family lived at 4 Buckingham Terrace in the Hillhead district. The house, which still stands, is a mid-terraced 19th-century three-storey and basement house facing Great W...
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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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Howard Meyerhoff
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Howard Augustus Meyerhoff was an American geologist who taught geology at Smith College from 1925 to 1949. He served as administrative secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , as well as editor-in-chief of its journal, Science, from 1949 to 1953. He conducted research on the geology of Puerto Rico, which led to him publishing the book Geology of Porto Rico in 1933.
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Felix Andries Vening Meinesz
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
Felix Andries Vening Meinesz was a Dutch geophysicist and geodesist. He is known for his invention of a precise method for measuring gravity . Thanks to his invention, it became possible to measure gravity at sea, which led him to the discovery of gravity anomalies above the ocean floor. He later attributed these anomalies to continental drift. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Winfried Otto Schumann
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Winfried Otto Schumann was a German physicist and electrical engineer who predicted the Schumann resonances, a series of low-frequency resonances caused by lightning discharges in the atmosphere. Biography Winfried Schumann was born in Tübingen, Germany, the son of a physical chemist. His early years were spent in Kassel and in Berndorf, a town near Vienna. He majored in electrical engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 1912, he gained a doctorate with a thesis on high-voltage technology under the supervision of Engelbert Arnold. Prior to the First World War, he managed the ...
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Alfred Woodford
1890 - 1990 (100 years)
Alfred Oswald Woodford was an American geologist. He was the founding director of the geology department at Pomona College, where he taught for four decades. He was nicknamed "Woody". Early life and education Woodford was born in Upland, California, on February 27, 1890, to a family of successful citrus farmers. He moved with his family to neighboring Claremont in 1909, and graduated from Pomona College with a degree in chemistry in 1913. He subsequently pursued graduate work in soil chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his doctorate in 1921.
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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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Robert Wallace Webb
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Robert Wallace Webb was a professor of geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and during World War II was Coordinator of Veterans Affairs for the University of California system. After World War II, Santa Barbara State College became a branch of the University of California and he transferred there in 1948 where he was one of the original professors of earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara .
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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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John Leighly
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
John Leighly was a 20th-century American geographer and professor.
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Alan Mara Bateman
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.
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William Dickson Lang
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
William Dickson Lang was Keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum from 1928 until 1938. Early life Lang was born at Kurnal, India the second son of Edward Tickle Lang and Hebe, the daughter of John Venn Prior. At the age of 1, the family returned to England from the Punjab region of India. Lang's father was a civil servant, who had been working on the Jumna Canal in the Punjab.
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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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Erwin Raisz
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Erwin Raisz was a Hungarian-born American cartographer, best known for his physiographic maps of landforms. Early life and education Born in Lőcse, Hungary in 1893, Raisz was the son of a civil engineer who introduced him to maps through his work. He received his degree in civil engineering and architecture from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Budapest in 1914.
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Frederic Brewster Loomis
1873 - 1937 (64 years)
Frederic Brewster Loomis was an American paleontologist. Educated at Amherst College and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he spent his entire professional career at Amherst. His specialty was vertebrate paleontology. Many fossils he uncovered during his extensive field work are still exhibited at Amherst's Beneski Museum of Natural History. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Geological Society of America, and president of the Paleontological Society.
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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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Harold Masursky
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...
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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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Doris Reynolds
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Doris Livesey Reynolds FRSE FGS was a British geologist, best known for her work on metasomatism in rocks and her role in the "Granite Controversy". She was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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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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W. B. R. King
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
William Bernard Robinson King was a British geologist. Education King was educated at the University of Cambridge graduating a first-class Honours degree in geology in 1912 Career He joined the British Geological Survey and distinguished himself on field studies in Wales. In 1914 he was commissioned as a second-lieutenant in the Territorial Army and in 1915 was rapidly trained as a hydrologist and sent to France to assist the Chief Engineer of the British Expeditionary Force establish potable water supplies from boreholes. He has been called "the first British military hydrogeologist"
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Sidney William Wooldridge
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Professor Sidney William Wooldridge CBE, FRS, FGS , geologist, geomorphologist and geographer, was a pioneer in the study of the geomorphology of south-east England and the first professor of geography at King's College London. He collaborated with Dudley Stamp and with David Linton.
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Ruth Harris
Ruth Harris is a scientist at the United States Geological Survey known for her research on large earthquakes, especially on how they begin, end, and cause the ground to shake. In 2019, Harris was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union who cited her "for outstanding contributions to earthquake rupture dynamics, stress transfer, and triggering".
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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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Marshall Kay
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Marshall Kay was a geologist and professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his studies of the Ordovician of New York, Newfoundland, and Nevada, but his studies were global and he published widely on the stratigraphy of the middle and upper Ordovician. Kay's careful fieldwork provided much geological evidence for the theory of continental drift. He was awarded the Penrose Medal in 1971. Less well known is his work for the Manhattan Project, as a geologist searching for manganese deposits. Marshall's son Robert Kay of Cornell University, daughter Elizabeth Berner of University of Connecticut and son-in-law Robert Berner of Yale University are also geology professors.
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George Cressey
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
George Babcock Cressey was an American geographer, author, and academic. Born in Tiffin, Ohio, he attended Denison University and then the University of Chicago, where he received a PhD in geology. After receiving his degree, he taught at University of Shanghai and traveled widely in China. Upon his return to the United States in 1929, he completed a pioneering book on the country, China's Geographic Foundations.
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Louis B. Slichter
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Louis Byrne Slichter was an American physicist and geophysicist who directed the Institute of Geophysics at UCLA. Slichter was notable for, among other things, earth tides research, submarine detection, development of three-component short-period seismographs, studies of the earth temperature distribution, and the invention of a number of important geophysical devices. Slichter Foreland peninsula in Antarctica is named after him. The Institute of Geophysics building in UCLA where he used to work as a director of the Institute has been named Slichter Hall. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the chair of the Academy's Geophysics Section.
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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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Henry Hurd Swinnerton
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Henry Hurd Swinnerton was a British geologist. He was professor of geology at University College Nottingham from 1910 to 1946. Swinnerton was educated at the Royal College of Science, and earned a doctorate in zoology from the University of London in July 1902.
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Hans Cloos
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
Hans Cloos was a prominent German structural geologist. Born in Magdeburg, Germany, Hans Cloos earned his doctorate at Freiburg in 1910, then worked in Indonesia and Namibia up until the start of First World War. During the war his geological skills were put to use along the western front.
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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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Victor P. Starr
1909 - 1976 (67 years)
Victor Paul Starr was an American meteorologist and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1974. For his contributions to atmospheric science, he received the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal in 1961.
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