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
William Phipps Blake
1826 - 1910 (84 years)
William Phipps Blake was an American geologist, mining consultant, and educator. Among his best known contributions include being the first college trained chemist to work full-time for a United States chemical manufacturer , and serving as a geologist with the Pacific Railroad Survey of the Far West , where he observed and detailed a theory on erosion by wind-blown sand on the geologic formations of southern California, one of his many scientific contributions. He started several western mining enterprises that were premature, including a mining magazine in the 1850s and the first school o...
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Grove Karl Gilbert
#3453
Robert Norman
1560 - 1584 (24 years)
Robert Norman was a 16th-century-English mariner, compass builder, and hydrographer who discovered magnetic inclination, the deviation of the Earth's magnetic field from the vertical. Work Robert Norman is noted for The Newe Attractive, a pamphlet published in 1581 describing the lodestone and practical aspects of navigation. More importantly, it included Norman's measurement of magnetic dip, the incline at an angle from the horizon by a compass needle discovered by Georg Hartmann in 1544. This effect is caused by the Earth's magnetic field not running parallel to the planet's surface. Norman demonstrated magnetic dip by creating a compass needle that pivoted on a horizontal axis.
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Arved von Schultz
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Arved Carl Ludwig von Schultz was a German geographer. Life Arved von Schultz was born in Latvia to landowner Erich von Schultz , who in 1892 was the inspector of goods in the city of Riga, and his wife Valerie of Moczulski. During his holidays from 1901 to 1904 Schultz led study tours in the Caucasus and the Russian Central Asia. Schultz attended the German Eltz'sche Privatgymnasium in Riga and in 1904 passed his exams at Alexander High School. Beginning in 1904 he studied in Moscow and Dorpat and in 1906 Schultz enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin. His studied were interrupted in 1905 due to riots in Tartu and he spent half a year traveling through Central Asia.
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George Chisholm
1850 - 1930 (80 years)
George Goudie Chisholm FRSE FRSGS LLD was a Scottish geographer. He authored the first English-language textbook on economic geography: Handbook on Commercial Geography and the World Gazetteer, later to become known as The Times Gazetteer.
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Samuel James Shand
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Prof Samuel James Shand was a British mineralogist and petrologist, specialising in silicate analysis and igneous petrology. Life He was born in Edinburgh on 29 October 1882 the son of James Shand , originally from Sandsting in Shetland, and Catherine Grant Hunter from Lerwick in Shetland. In 1881 the family had moved from Shetland to Taap Hall, a curious Georgian tenement on Ferry Road in the Leith district. However they moved to "Selivoe" on Park Road in the Newhaven district and James was born there.
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Børge Fristrup
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Børge Fristrup was a Danish geographer. He studied glaciology, specialising in the Greenland ice sheet, at the University of Copenhagen and at Stockholm University, receiving a Hans Egede Medal for his research in 1971.
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Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger
1856 - 1936 (80 years)
Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger was a Croatian geologist, paleontologist, and archeologist. Education Dragutin finished his elementary education in Zagreb, Croatia, as well as two years of preparandija . He started studying paleontology in Zürich, Switzerland. Soon, he moved to München, where his lecturer was Karl Zittel, a world-renowned expert in the areas of anatomy and paleontology. He received a doctoral degree in 1879, , with work related to fossilized fishes.
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William Otis Crosby
1850 - 1925 (75 years)
William Otis Crosby - American geologist and engineer, Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Biography He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , receiving a bachelor's degree.
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Albert Herrmann
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Albert Herrmann was a German archaeologist and geographer. His specialty was the geography of the ancient Mediterranean and Chinese geography. He also published a number of works theorizing on the location of Atlantis.
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Edward William Brayley
1801 - 1870 (69 years)
Edward William Brayley FRS was an English geographer, librarian, and science author. Early life Brayley was born in London, the son of Edward Wedlake Brayley, a notable antiquary, and his wife Anne . His early schooling, in the company of his brothers Henry and Horatio was private and sheltered. His upbringing was austere with little contact with other children or the world outside his home. He later studied at the London Institution and the Royal Institution under William Thomas Brande.
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Paolo Pizzetti
1860 - 1918 (58 years)
Paolo Pizzetti was an Italian geodesist, astronomer, geophysicist and mathematician. He studied engineering in Rome, graduating in 1880. He remained in Rome and assisted Giuseppe Pisati and Enrico Pucci with their absolute determination of gravity. In 1886, he became Associate Professor of Geodesy at the University of Genoa where he stayed until becoming Professor of Geodesy at the University of Pisa in 1900. He stayed in Pisa until his death in 1918.
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Henry Chamberlain Russell
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Henry Chamberlain Russell was an Australian astronomer and meteorologist. Early life Russell was born at West Maitland, New South Wales, the fourth son of the Hon. Bourn Russell and his wife Jane, née Mackreth. Russell was educated at West Maitland Grammar school and the University of Sydney, .
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Thomas A. Mutch
1931 - 1980 (49 years)
Thomas A. Mutch was an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was a professor at Brown University from 1960 until his death. He disappeared during descent from Mount Nun in the Kashmir Himalayas.
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Dietrich Ludwig Gustav Karsten
1768 - 1810 (42 years)
Dietrich Ludwig Gustav Karsten was a German mineralogist. Among the most notable of Karsten's writings is a mineralogy book published in 1789 when he was only 21 years old. In later years Karsten held senior government positions in mining and mineralogy in the Kingdom of Prussia at Berlin.
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Ilan Kelman
#3467
Santiago Roth
1850 - 1924 (74 years)
Santiago Roth was a Swiss Argentine paleontologist and academic known for his fossil collections and Patagonian expeditions. Life Kaspar Jakob was born and raised in Herisau, Canton Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland, as the oldest of 12 children. He attended school in the nearby town of St. Gallen, where his teacher Bernhard Wartmann raised his interest in the science of nature. Wartmann was a well known botanist and director of the Museum of History of Nature in St. Gallen.
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Justus Ludwig Adolf Roth
1818 - 1892 (74 years)
Justus Ludwig Adolf Roth was a German geologist and mineralogist. Biography In 1844 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Jena and spent the next few years working as a pharmacist in Hamburg. In 1848 he relocated to Berlin, where he came under the influence of Gustav Rose and Heinrich Ernst Beyrich. In 1867 he became an associate professor of mineralogy at the University of Berlin.
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Karl von Fritsch
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Karl Wilhelm Georg von Fritsch was a German geologist and paleontologist. He studied forestry at the academy in Eisenach, followed by studies in natural sciences at the University of Göttingen, where he obtained his degree in 1862. Following graduation, he embarked on a scientific journey to Madeira and the Canary Islands. In 1863 he received his habilitation at Zurich, working as a lecturer at the "Polytechnikum". While in Zurich, he produced an accurate geological map of the Saint-Gotthard Massif. In 1867 he relocated to the Senckenberg Nature Research Society in Frankfurt as a geologist an...
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Hans Reck
1886 - 1937 (51 years)
Hans Gottfried Reck was a German volcanologist and paleontologist. In 1913 he was the first to discover an ancient skeleton of a human in the Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania. He collaborated with Louis Leakey in a return expedition to the site in 1931.
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Mahmud al-Kashgari
1029 - 1101 (72 years)
Mahmud ibn Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Kashgari was an 11th-century Kara-Khanid scholar and lexicographer of the Turkic languages from Kashgar. His father, Husayn, was the mayor of Barsgan, a town in the southeastern part of the lake of Issyk-Kul and related to the ruling dynasty of Kara-Khanid Khanate. Around 1057 C.E. Mahmud al-Kashgari became a political refugee, before settling down in Baghdad.
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Henry Yule Oldham
1862 - 1951 (89 years)
Henry Yule Oldham, was a teacher and geographer who, in 1901, conducted the definitive version of the Bedford Level experiment, a proof that the Earth is a sphere. Early life Oldham was born in Düsseldorf, Kingdom of Prussia, the younger son of Thomas Oldham, the director of the Geological Survey of India. He was educated at Rugby and Jesus College, Oxford, matriculating at Jesus College as a commoner in 1882. Whilst at Oxford, he rowed in the college boat and was president of the Debating Society. He graduated in 1886 with a second class honours degree in Animal Morphology.
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Alexander Newton Winchell
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Alexander Newton Winchell was an American geologist who pioneered spectroscopic and X-ray crystallographic studies on minerals. He wrote an influential textbook, the Elements of optical mineralogy which went into several editions.
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Esper Signius Larsen
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Esper Signius Larsen, Jr. was an American geologist and petrologist who contributed to techniques for age estimation using the lead-uranium ratio or Larsen method and the petrological study of non-opaque minerals using optical microscopy techniques. He served as a professor of petrology at Harvard University from 1923 to 1949. The mineral Esperite was named after him.
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Catherine Raisin
1855 - 1945 (90 years)
Catherine Alice Raisin was one of the most important early female geologists in Britain. Her research was primarily in the field of microscope petrology and mineralogy. She was the head of the geology department at Bedford College for Women, in London for 30 years, and strived for women's equality in education. Raisin was the first woman in Britain to lead a university geology department. She was also the head of the botany department at the Bedford College for Women.
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Constant Prévost
1787 - 1856 (69 years)
Louis-Constant Prévost was a French geologist. Early life and education Prévost was born in Paris to Louis Prévost, a tax farmer, receiver of the rentes of Paris. He was educated there at the Central Schools, where, inspired by the lectures of Georges Cuvier, his particular mentor Alexandre Brongniart, and André Marie Constant Duméril, he determined to devote himself to natural science. He took his degree in Letters and Sciences in 1811, and for a time pursued the study of medicine and anatomy.
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Helmut Winkler
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Helmut Gustav Franz Winkler was a German geologist who worked on experimental approaches to petrology, making use of high-pressure and temperature to examine metamorphic processes. The mineral Helmutwinklerite is named in his honour.
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Michael Tuomey
1805 - 1857 (52 years)
Michael Tuomey was the State Geologist of South Carolina from 1844 to 1847, and the first State Geologist of Alabama, appointed in 1848 and serving until his death. His early descriptions and maps of the Birmingham District's unique coincidence of mineral resources for the making of steel opened the way for the early industrial development of the state.
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Alexander George McAdie
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Alexander George McAdie was an American meteorologist. McAdie was born in New York City. While in college he joined the Army Signal Service, the predecessor of the U.S. Weather Bureau. He graduated from Harvard University in 1885.
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Nathanael Gottfried Leske
1751 - 1786 (35 years)
Nathanael Gottfried Leske was a German natural scientist and geologist. After his studies at Bergakademie of Freiberg in Saxony and the Franckeschen Stiftungen in Halle, Leske became a special professor of natural history at the University of Leipzig in 1775.
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Israel Russell
1852 - 1906 (54 years)
Israel Cook Russell, LL.D. was an Americann geologist and geographer who explored Alaska in the late 19th century. Early life and education Russell was born at Garrattsville, New York, on December 10, 1852. He received B.S. and C.E. degrees in 1872 from the University of the City of New York , and later studied at the School of Mines, Columbia College.
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Frank Charles Schrader
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Frank Charles Schrader was an American geologist, mineralogist, and entomologist. Born in Sterling, Illinois he received degrees from the University of Kansas and Harvard University , before teaching at Harvard.
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Frederick Leslie Ransome
1868 - 1935 (67 years)
Frederick Leslie Ransome, Ph.D. was a British-born American geologist. Ransome was born in Greenwich, England and educated at the University of California . Ransome described and named the mineral Lawsonite after Andrew Lawson. Ransome was employed by the United States Geological Survey. Ransome's many official reports and bulletins dealt mainly with phases of economic geology. Ransome helped found the journal Economic Geology in 1905, and was associate editor of the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. Ransome was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and served as NAS Treasurer in 1919.
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Eugen Geinitz
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Franz Eugen Geinitz was a German geologist and mineralogist best known for his geological studies of the Mecklenburg region. He was the son of geologist Hanns Bruno Geinitz. Biography In 1876 he obtained his PhD from the University of Leipzig with a dissertation on mineral pseudomorphs. During the following year he received his habilitation from the University of Göttingen, and shortly afterwards, became an associate professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Rostock. In 1881 he became a full professor and director of the mineralogical-geological institute at Rostock. In 1903/04...
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Marshman Edward Wadsworth
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
Marshman Edward Wadsworth was an American geologist and educator. He served as the first president of Michigan Technological University and was State Geologist of Michigan from 1888 through 1893. Biography Wadsworth was born on May 6, 1847, in East Livermore, Maine, and spent on his childhood on the family farm. He enrolled at Bowdoin College in 1865 and graduated in 1869, after which he taught for four years in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 1872, he received his Master of Arts from Bowdoin. In 1873, he was elected Professor of Chemistry at Boston Dental College and he enrolled at Harvard University for graduate studies.
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Heinrich Adolph Baumhauer
1848 - 1926 (78 years)
Heinrich Adolph Baumhauer was a German chemist and mineralogist. Baumhauer was the son of lithographer and merchant Mathias Baumhauer and Anna Margaretha Käuffer of Bonn. He studied in Bonn from 1866 to 1869 with Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, Hans Heinrich Landolt and Gerhard vom Rath, receiving his doctorate for the dissertation “Die Reduction des Nitrobenzols durch Chlor-und Bromwasserstoff.” He spent an additional year studying at Göttingen in 1870.
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Gheorghe Macovei
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Gheorghe Macovei was a Romanian geologist. Born in Tansa, Iași County, he attended primary school in his native village, where his father was a teacher. He graduated from the National College in 1899 and from the science faculty of the University of Iași in 1905, where his mentor was Ion Th. Simionescu. He then worked as an assistant in the geology and paleontology laboratory, beginning field studies in Bahna and Broșteni. In 1908, he was an intern at the Vienna Museum of Natural History. He defended a doctoral thesis about the geology of the tertiary basin at Bahna in 1909. Macovei was then ...
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Alfred Church Lane
1863 - 1948 (85 years)
Alfred Church Lane was an American geologist and teacher. Born in Boston, Alfred C. Lane was educated at Harvard University and received his A.B. degree in 1883. Between 1883 and 1885 he taught mathematics at Harvard, then studied at the University of Heidelberg until 1887 before returning to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in 1888. The following year he joined the Michigan State Geologic Survey as a petrographer, and he remained in that post into 1892 while also serving as an instructor at the Michigan College of Mines. He became assistant state geologist for Michigan in 1892, and from 1899 to 1909 he was the state geologist.
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George Brown Barbour
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
George Brown Barbour FGS FRSE FRSSA was an internationally renowned Scottish geologist and educator. Life He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, 22 August 1890. He was the son of the eminent gynaecologist, Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour and Margaret Nelson Brown.
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Karl Weule
1864 - 1926 (62 years)
Karl Weule was a German geographer, ethnologist and museum director. Biography Weule studied history, geography and German philology at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen. In 1891, he moved to Berlin, where he served as assistant geographer to Ferdinand von Richthofen, followed by work as assistant to Adolf Bastian at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. In 1899, he was appointed assistant director at the Leipzig Museum of Ethnography .
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Louis V. Pirsson
1860 - 1919 (59 years)
Louis Valentine Pirsson was an American geologist and petrologist, best known for devising the CIPW norm for classifying igneous rocks. His 1915 "Textbook of Geology" was for decades the most widely used in the United States.
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William C. Krumbein
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
William Christian Krumbein was a notable geologist, after whom the Krumbein Medal of the International Association for Mathematical Geology was named. This medal was established at the 25th International Geological Congress in Sydney, in 1976. Krumbein was a founding officer of the IAMG.
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William Lewis
1847 - 1926 (79 years)
William James Lewis F.R.S. was a Welsh mineralogist. Life and career Lewis was born in Llanwyddelan, Montgomeryshire, the second son of clergyman John Lewis, and educated at Llanrwst grammar school and Jesus College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1865. He obtained first-class degrees in mathematics and in natural science . After a short spell as a tutor at Cheltenham College , he was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford – a position he retained until his death. He carried out some research at Cambridge University before holding a position at the British Museum from 1875 to 1877; he resigned on the grounds of ill-health.
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Alexander Tornquist
1868 - 1944 (76 years)
Alexander Tornquist was a German-Austrian geologist, who is known for his work on the northern part of the Trans European Suture Zone and on Mediterranean geology. Biography Alexander Tornquist was son of the merchant Alexander Heinrich Tornquist and Minna Mathilde Tornquist, née Fett. He studied at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Göttingen. In 1892 he received a PhD in geology and paleontology at the university of Göttingen. In 1901 he obtained an associate professorship for geology and paleontology at Strasbourg, and in 1907 became a full professor at Königsberg. In Königsberg he also served as director of the famous Prussian amber collection and of the institute of seismology.
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Aksel Arstal
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Aksel Kristian Andersen Arstal was a Norwegian theologian, schoolteacher and geographer. He was born in Christiania to city engineer Oluf Martin Andersen and Annette Fredrikke Sontum, and was a brother of pianist Hildur Andersen.
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William Williams Mather
1804 - 1859 (55 years)
William Williams Mather was an American geologist. Biography He was a lineal descendant of Richard Mather's son Timothy. He was admitted to the U.S. Military Academy in 1823. In 1826 and 1827 he led his class in the newly established department of chemistry and mineralogy, and to him were submitted the proof sheets of Webster's A Manual of Chemistry, then in process of publication. He also invented an apparatus for drawing water from the lowest depths of the Hudson River, and noting its temperature.
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Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt
1825 - 1884 (59 years)
Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt was a German astronomer and geophysicist. He was the director of the National Observatory of Athens in Greece from 1858 to 1884. Julius Schmidt was tireless in his work, it was suggested by William Henry Pickering that he perhaps devoted more of his life than any other man to the study of the Moon. During his lifetime, he made some of the most complete lunar maps of the 19th century.
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John Wood
1812 - 1871 (59 years)
John Wood was a Scottish naval officer, surveyor, cartographer and explorer, principally remembered for his exploration of central Asia. Biography Wood was born in Perth, Scotland. After schooling at Perth Academy, he joined the British Indian Navy, was made a Lieutenant, and soon demonstrated a flair for surveying. Many of the maps of southern Asia which he compiled remained standard for the rest of the 19th century.
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Arthur Edmund Seaman
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Arthur Edmund Seaman was a professor at the Michigan College of Mines and curator of the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum which bears his name. Biography Seaman was born in Casnovia, Michigan, near Grand Rapids. He moved to the Upper Peninsula in the 1880s and began working in the timber industry as a "land looker" estimating timber. Because of his abilities, he was hired by the Michigan Geological Survey under Charles E. Wright and later Marshman E. Wadsworth, who was also president of the Michigan College of Mines. Seaman became an assistant at the college in 1890 and began earning his bachelor's degree.
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Joseph LeConte
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Joseph Le Conte was a physician, geologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and early California conservationist. Early life Of Huguenot descent, he was born in Liberty County, Georgia, to Louis Le Conte, patriarch of the noted LeConte family, and Ann Quarterman. He was educated at Franklin College in Athens, Georgia , where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. After graduation in 1841, he studied medicine and received his degree at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1845. After practising for three or four years in Macon, Georgia, he entered Harvard University and studied natural history under Louis Agassiz.
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