The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3551
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.
Go to Profile#3552
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.
Go to Profile#3553
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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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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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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Dimitri Nalivkin
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
#3557
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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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#3561
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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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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Hisakatsu Yabe
1878 - 1969 (91 years)
Hisakatsu Yabe was a Japanese paleontologist and geologist. He is from Tokyo and is a graduate of the University of Tokyo. He was an emeritus professor at Tohoku University. Yabe contributed to the development of geology in Japan. In 1918, He advocated Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line.
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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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Ernst Antevs
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Ernst Valdemar Antevs was a Swedish-American geologist and educator who made significant contributions to Quaternary geology, particularly geomorphology and geochronology. Ernst Valdemar Antevs was born on a farm in the Vartofta-Åsaka parish of Skaraborg, , Sweden. He attended Stockholm University where in 1917, he was awarded his Ph.D. in geology. He was employed as a docent at the University of Stockholm from 1917 to 1935. He was also a research associate for the American Geographical Society , the Carnegie Institution of Washington , Geological Survey of Canada , and Harvard University .
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Thomas Lyttleton Lyon
1869 - 1938 (69 years)
Thomas Lyttleton Lyon was an American soil scientist who wrote on the nitrogen cycle. He was secretary of the American Society of Agronomy from 1907 to 1909. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Chemical Society. His Principle of Soil Management went through 10 editions.
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E. J. Bowen
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Edmund John Bowen FRS was a British physical chemist. Early life and wartime career E. J. Bowen was the eldest of four born to Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen in 1898 in Worcester, England. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester.
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Walter Hermann Bucher
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Walter Hermann Bucher was a German-American geologist and paleontologist. He was born in Akron, Ohio, to Swiss-German parents. The family then returned to Germany, where he was raised. In 1911 he was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Heidelberg with a focus on geology and paleontology. The same year he returned to the U.S. and joined the University of Cincinnati as a lecturer. By 1924 he was a professor of geology at the institution.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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