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,
#3501
Edward Waller Claypole
1835 - 1901 (66 years)
Edward Waller Claypole was a British American geologist and paleobotanist. Claypole was born in England and educated at the University of London, where he received the degrees of A.B. in 1862, S.B. in 1864, and Sc.D. in 1888. He came to America in 1872 and served as Professor of Natural Sciences in Antioch College, at Yellow Springs, Ohio, from 1873 to 1881. For two years he was paleontologist to the Pennsylvania Geological Survey. From 1883 to 1898 he was Professor of Natural Sciences in Buchtel College at Akron. On account of the failing health of his wife, he resigned this position and sought a southwestern climate.
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Howel Williams
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Howel Williams was an American geologist and volcanologist. Early life He was born of Welsh parents in Liverpool, England, on October 12, 1898. He received a BA in geography in 1923 and an MA in archaeology in 1924 from Liverpool University. He studied geology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Howel Williams moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1926. In 1928 he was awarded the degree of D.Sc. from the University of Liverpool and published his first papers on the geology of various California volcanic regions. Williams was a member of the National Aca...
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Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor was an English geographer and historian of science, the first woman to hold an academic chair of geography in the United Kingdom. Taylor was educated at the Camden School for Girls, the North London Collegiate School, and Royal Holloway College. In 1903 she obtained a first class BSc in chemistry from the University of London. While teaching chemistry she studied at the University of Oxford and from 1908 to 1910 acted as research assistant to A. J. Herbertson, head of the Oxford Geography School. She wrote school geography textbooks in collaboration with J. F. Un...
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J Harlen Bretz
1882 - 1981 (99 years)
J Harlen Bretz was an American geologist, best known for his research that led to the acceptance of the Missoula Floods and for his work on caves. Early life and education Bretz was born on 2 September 1882, in the small town of Saranac in Ionia County, Michigan. He was the first of Oliver Joseph Bretz and Rhoda Maria Howlett's five children. His father was a farmer, and proud descendant of early German settler in Ohio, John Bretz.
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John M. Wilcox
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
John Marsh Wilcox was an American geophysicist. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley at the Space Sciences Laboratory from 1964 to 1971. He was an adjunct professor at Stanford University from 1971 until his death.
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Carl-Gustaf Rossby
1898 - 1957 (59 years)
Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby was a Swedish-born American meteorologist who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. He identified and characterized both the jet stream and the long waves in the westerlies that were later named Rossby waves.
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Martin Glaessner
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Martin Fritz Glaessner AM was a geologist and palaeontologist. Born and educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he spent the majority of his life in working for geoscientific institutes in Austria, Russia, Australia, and studying the geology of the South Pacific in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Glaessner also did early work on the classification of the pre-Cambrian lifeforms now known as the Ediacaran biota, which he proposed were the early antecedents of modern lifeforms.
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Philip Kuenen
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
Philip Henry Kuenen was a Dutch geologist. Kuenen spent his earliest youth in Scotland, as his father was professor of physics at University College, Dundee until 1906. He studied geology at Leiden University, where he was a pupil of K. Martin and B.G. Escher. He finished his studies in 1925 and then became assistant to Escher. He worked on paleontology and experimental geology.
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Gordon Manley
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Gordon Valentine Manley, FRGS was a British climatologist who has been described as "probably the best known, most prolific and most expert on the climate of Britain of his generation". He assembled the Central England temperature series of monthly mean temperatures stretching back to 1659, which is the longest standardised instrumental record available for anywhere in the world. It provides a benchmark for proxy records of climatic change for the period covered, and is a notable example of scientific scholarship and perseverance . His two papers describing the work are available online.
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Jule Gregory Charney
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Jule Gregory Charney was an American meteorologist who played an important role in developing numerical weather prediction and increasing understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere by devising a series of increasingly sophisticated mathematical models of the atmosphere. His work was the driving force behind many national and international weather initiatives and programs.
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Ralph Early Grim
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Ralph Early Grim was an American geologist and scientist, often referred to as the "Father of Mineralogy" because he made many discoveries during his investigations of clay materials. He was one of the most outstanding mineralogists of his time and was well-known throughout the world in the field of clay science and technology. Grim's career spanned over 60 years and he received many honors and awards in the field of mineralogy. Some of the textbooks he wrote have been standard university textbooks in mineralogy for many years.
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Henry William Menard
1920 - 1986 (66 years)
Henry William Menard was an American geologist. Life and career He earned a B.S. and M.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 1942 and 1947, having served in the South Pacific during World War II as a photo interpreter. In 1949, he completed a Ph.D. in marine geology at Harvard University. Menard is perhaps best known for his promotion of the theory of plate tectonics before it was widely accepted in the scientific community. Menard served many roles during his career as a marine geologist. Field worker, theorist, educator, popularizer, entrepreneur and statesman.
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Helmut Landsberg
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Helmut Erich Landsberg was a noted and influential climatologist. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, February 9, 1906 and died December 6, 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland while attending a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization. Landsberg was an important figure in meteorology and atmospheric science in education, public service and administration. He authored several notable works, particularly in the field of particulate matter and its influence on air pollution and human health. He is the first to write in English about the use of statistical analysis in the field of climatology and implemented such statistical analysis in aiding military operations during World War II.
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Chester Ray Longwell
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Chester Ray Longwell was an American geologist who conducted extensive research into the geology of the Basin and Range province in Nevada. His fieldwork led to a more complete understanding of Paleozoic and lower Mesozoic stratigraphic sequence in the southern Great Basin.
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Richard Foster Flint
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
Richard Foster Flint was an American geologist. Biography He was born in Chicago on March 1, 1902. Flint graduated from the University of Chicago and earned his Ph.D. in geology at the University of California graduating in 1925. He then joined Yale as a member of the faculty, becoming a full professor in 1945.
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Norman L. Bowen
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Norman Levi Bowen FRS was a Canadian geologist. Bowen "revolutionized experimental petrology and our understanding of mineral crystallization". Beginning geology students are familiar with Bowen's reaction series depicting how different minerals crystallize under varying pressures and temperatures."
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Charles Francis Richter
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist. Richter is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at the California Institute of Technology.
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Francis Parker Shepard
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Francis Parker Shepard was an American sedimentologist most associated with his studies of submarine canyons and seafloor currents around continental shelves and slopes. Early life and education Shepard was born to a moderately wealthy family in Marbleheard, Massachusetts. He studied geology under R. A. Daly at Harvard University, a period that was interrupted by service in the US Navy during the First World War. After meeting his future wife, Elizabeth Buchner, he chose to study for his doctorate at the University of Chicago, close to her Milwaukee home. There he worked alongside J. Harlan Bretz, Rollin D.
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Kirk Bryan
1888 - 1950 (62 years)
Kirk Bryan was an American geologist on the faculty of Harvard University from 1925 until his death in 1950. The son of R.W.D. Bryan , Bryan received his undergraduate education at the University of New Mexico and later obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University.
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Hans Jenny
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Hans Jenny was a Swiss-born soil scientist and expert on pedology , particularly the processes of soil formation. He served as 1949 President of the Soil Science Society of America. Overview Hans Jenny was born in Basel, Switzerland. He earned a diploma in agriculture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1922, and a D. Sc. degree in 1927 for a thesis on ion exchange reactions.
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Raymond Cecil Moore
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Raymond Cecil Moore was an Americann geologist and paleontologist. He is known for his work on Paleozoic crinoids, bryozoans, and corals. Moore was a member of US Geological Survey from 1913 until 1949. In 1919 he became professor at the University of Kansas . In 1953 Professor Moore organized the launch and became the first editor of the still ongoing multi-volume work Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Contributors to the Treatise have included the world's specialists in the field. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1958. In 1970 he was awarded the Mary Clar...
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C. W. Thornthwaite
1899 - 1963 (64 years)
Charles Warren Thornthwaite was an American geographer and climatologist. He is best known for devising the Thornthwaite climate classification, a climate classification system modified in 1948 that is still in use worldwide, and also for his detailed water budget computations of potential evapotranspiration.
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Beno Gutenberg
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Beno Gutenberg was a German-American seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague and mentor of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.
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Thomas Griffith Taylor
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Thomas Griffith "Grif" Taylor was an English-born geographer, anthropologist and world explorer. He was a survivor of Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica . Taylor was a senior academic geographer at universities in Sydney, Chicago, and Toronto. His writings on geography and race were controversial.
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George Gaylord Simpson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
George Gaylord Simpson was an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution , The Meaning of Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution . He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. Simpson was extraordinarily knowledgeable about Mesozoic fossil mammals and fossil mammals of North and South America. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibrium and dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus.
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Percy Edward Kent
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Sir Percy Edward Kent was a British geologist who won the Royal Medal in 1971. Awarded the Bigsby Medal in 1955 and the Murchison Medal in 1969, he was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1973 Birthday Honours.
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Isaiah Bowman
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Isaiah Bowman, AB, Ph. D. , was an American geographer and President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1935–1948, controversial for his antisemitism and inaction in Jewish resettlement during WWII. Biography Bowman was born in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His family was Mennonite, and, at the age of eight weeks, Bowman's father moved his family to a log cabin in Brown City, Michigan, sixty miles north of Detroit. In 1900, Isaiah became an American citizen and began intensive study to prepare himself for admittance to Harvard. Studying first at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti , Bowman c...
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Arthur Francis Buddington
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Arthur Francis "Bud" Buddington was an American geologist. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he grew up there and in West Mystic, Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University and Princeton University.
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Hugo Benioff
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Victor Hugo Benioff was an American seismologist and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for his work in charting the location of deep earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean.
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Glenn Thomas Trewartha
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Glenn Thomas Trewartha was an American geographer of Cornish American descent. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a Ph.D. in 1924. He taught at the University of Wisconsin.
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James Gilluly
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
James Gilluly was an American geologist. Regarding the Cupriferous Porphyry Genesis, Gilluly integrated detailed observations of the Ajo porphyry between 1936 and 1936 with experimental data . Gilluly concluded that after the Ajo quartz monzonite intruded and crystallized, it was fractured by magmatic bypass solutions . Gilluly frequency experimental restrictions to estimate a paleo depth between 1000 and 3000 , consistent with solidus temperatures of 900 °C for granite, containing 4% by weight of water. He realized that the source magmatic content was water, sulfur and halogens, and that the binders can form complexes with metals to produce an aqueous fluid with larger volumes.
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Randy Read
1957 - 1983 (26 years)
Randy John Read is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and professor of protein crystallography at the University of Cambridge. Education Read was educated at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 followed by a PhD in 1986 for X-ray crystallography of serine proteases and their protein inhibitors supervised by Michael N. G. James.
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Preston E. James
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Preston Everett James was an American geographer. He was president of the American Association of Geographers from 1951 to 1952, and gave the annual presidential address at their 1966 banquet. James' work had a distinct focus on the geography of Latin America, and as such, the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers' Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award is named for him.
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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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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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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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Kirtley F. Mather
1888 - 1978 (90 years)
Kirtley Fletcher Mather was an American geologist and faculty member at Harvard University. An expert on petroleum geology and mineralogy, Mather was a prominent scholar, advocate for academic freedom, social activist, and critic of McCarthyism. He is known for his efforts to harmonize the dialogue between science and religion, his role in the Scopes "Monkey Trial", his faith-based liberal activism, support for adult education programs and advocacy for civil liberties.
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Louis J. Battan
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Louis Joseph Battan was an American atmospheric scientist who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1953, where he was hired to work in the field of the physics of clouds and precipitation. In 1958 he was appointed professor of meteorology and associate director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was a pioneer in cloud physics and radar meteorology.
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Irene Barnes Taeuber
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.
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Ray S. Bassler
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Ray Smith Bassler was an American geologist and paleontologist. Biography Bassler was born in 1878, in Philadelphia. When he was in high school he used to sell fossils for Edward Oscar Ulrich. He got his bachelor's degree in 1902 from the University of Cincinnati, and received master's degree in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1905 from George Washington University. Starting from 1904 to 1948 he was an assistant professor there. From 1905 to 1931 he was working with Ferdinand Canu of France on Tertiary Polyzoa of the Atlantic and Gulf coastss. Starting from 1910 to 1922 he was working as a curator for the...
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Charles Bungay Fawcett
1883 - 1952 (69 years)
Charles Bungay Fawcett was a British geographer, regarded as "one of the founders of modern British academic geography" and an early promoter of the idea of regional planning. He was born into a farming family in Staindrop, County Durham, and went to school in nearby Gainford. He studied science at University College, Nottingham and worked briefly as a schoolteacher before joining the staff under A. J Herbertson at the then-new School of Geography at Oxford University. He was later a lecturer at University College, Southampton, and Leeds University. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Geog...
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Charles L. Christ
1916 - 1980 (64 years)
Charles Louis Christ was an American scientist, geochemist and mineralogist. Education He received his Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, completing his Ph.D. in 1940.
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Merle Tuve
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Merle Anthony Tuve was an American geophysicist who was the Chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development's Section T, which was created in August 1940. He was founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the main laboratory of Section T during the war from 1942 onward. He was a pioneer in the use of pulsed radio waves whose discoveries opened the way to the development of radar and nuclear energy.
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Gabrielle Donnay
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Gabrielle Donnay, née Hamburger , was a German-born American crystallographer and historian of science. Life Gabrielle Donnay was born in Landeshut, Germany on 21 March 1920 and emigrated to the United States in 1937. She received her B.A. from UCLA with highest honors in chemistry in 1941 and was awarded her Ph.D in 1949 from MIT. She then went to work for Carnegie Institution of Washington where she met and married Jose Donnay that same year. When he retired from Johns Hopkins in 1970, she was hired as a faculty member by McGill University in Canada.
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Charles Fleming
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Sir Charles Alexander Fleming was a New Zealand geologist, ornithologist, molluscan palaeontologist and environmentalist. He spent the last twenty years of his life studying the evolution and systematics of New Zealand cicadas.
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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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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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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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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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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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