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,
#3651
John Phillips
1800 - 1874 (74 years)
John Phillips FRS was an English geologist. In 1841 he published the first global geologic time scale based on the correlation of fossils in rock strata, thereby helping to standardize terminology including the term Mesozoic, which he invented.
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Erik Palmén
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Erik Herbert Palmén was a Finnish meteorologist, born in Vaasa. He worked at the University of Chicago in the Chicago school of meteorology on cyclones and weather fronts with Vilhelm Bjerknes. He contributed to the explanation of the dynamics of the jet stream and the analysis of data collected by radiosondes; his preprocessed and quality checked datasets were widely used by other researchers. Palmen was a multisided researcher who published articles in meteorology, geophysics and oceanography. The 1969 book by Palmen and Chester W. Newton, "Atmospheric Circulation Systems: Their Structure ...
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Antoine Vacher
1873 - 1920 (47 years)
Antoine Vacher was a French geographer, mainly interested in physical geography, and particularly in hydrography. Early years Antoine Vacher was the brilliant son of a family of tailors from Montluçon, Allier. His paternal grandfather was a farmer in the Allier, while his maternal grandfather was a craftsman. His father experienced serious financial difficulties and had to go into debt to save his small business. Antoine Vacher was an honorary scholar at the Lycée de Lyon , and a scholar at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris . He studied at the École Normale Supérieure . While at the ENS he had to work in various casual jobs during the summer holidays to help repay the family loans.
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Charles Doolittle Walcott
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Charles Doolittle Walcott was an American paleontologist, administrator of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927, and director of the United States Geological Survey. He is famous for his discovery in 1909 of well-preserved fossils, including some of the oldest soft-part imprints, in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada.
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Friedrich Johann Karl Becke
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Friedrich Johann Karl Becke was an Austrian mineralogist and petrographer. Biography After studying at the University of Vienna, where he specialized in the natural sciences, he became there a lecturer on geology. In 1882 he was appointed professor at the University of Czernowitz. Eight years later he received a similar appointment at Prague, but soon after went to Vienna, where he became professor of mineralogy, succeeding Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg as such, of whose periodical Mineralogische und Petrographische Mittheilungen he became editor. He published many papers on the science of g...
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Harry Fielding Reid
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Harry Fielding Reid was an American geophysicist. He was notable for his contributions to seismology, particularly his theory of elastic rebound that related faultss to earthquakes. Early life Harry Fielding Reid was the fourth child of seven born to Andrew Reid and Fanny Brooke Gwathmey Reid. HF Reid's mother was a descendant of Betty Washington Lewis, sister of the first US President; his father was a successful sugar merchant. The younger Reid's early education took him for at least one year to Switzerland; he is also known to have attended and graduated from the Pennsylvania Military Academy.
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Theobald Fischer
1846 - 1910 (64 years)
Theobald Fischer was a German geographer. Biography He was educated at the universities of Heidelberg, Halle, Bonn and Vienna and at first devoted himself to history. A traveling tutorship directed his attention to geography, and he visited many parts of Europe in the pursuit of this study, but especially the Mediterranean lands, including North Africa , e.g. the Tunisian Sahara , Morocco and Algeria . The “Mediterranean region,” an example in the study of regional geography, is a conception the world owes to Fischer: his thesis for the rank of Privatdozent in the University of Bonn was enti...
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Otto Krümmel
1854 - 1912 (58 years)
Otto Krümmel was a German geographer influential in awakening public interest in oceanography. Biography He was educated principally at the University of Göttingen, where he was a student of Johann Eduard Wappäus and Karl von Seebach. He approached the subject of geography at first through the study of classics and history. In 1882/83 he was associated with the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg, and in 1883, became an associate professor of geography at the University of Kiel . In that seaport he found the connection of his subject with marine investigations which directed his subsequent career.
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Friedrich Martin Berwerth
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Friedrich Martin Berwerth was an Austrian mineralogist and petrographer known for his work with meteorites. He was a student at the Universities of Vienna, Graz and Heidelberg, and following graduation, worked as an assistant to Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg at the Mineralogisch-Petrographischen Institut in Vienna . Later the same year, he began work as an assistant at the Imperial Hofmineralien Cabinet. In 1888 he became a curator, followed by titles of leiter and director of the mineralogy-petrography department.
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Leo Africanus
1483 - 1600 (117 years)
Johannes Leo Africanus was a Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his 1526 book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell'Africa in 1550, centered on the geography of the Maghreb and Nile Valley. The book was regarded among his scholarly peers in Europe as the most authoritative treatise on the subject until the modern exploration of Africa. For this work, Leo became a household name among European geographers. He converted from Islam to Christianity and changed his name to Johannes Leo de Medicis .
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Charles Vélain
1845 - 1925 (80 years)
Charles Vélain was a French geologist and geographer. He was born in Château-Thierry. Charles Vélain's route to the field of geology was an unusual one. He was a student of pharmacy. He studied geology later at the Sorbonne. He was part of several explorations, during which he studied various geological factors that would later bring him fame. Vélain's major contributions in the field of geology were in petrography and physical geography. He was an authority on volcanism. His works in this particular field earned him numerous accolades such as the price-Delalande Guérineau of the French Acade...
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Axel Hamberg
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Axel Hamberg was a Swedish mineralogist, geographer and explorer. Biography Hamberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He was the son of Nils Peter Hamberg and Emma Augusta Christina Härnström . Hamberg became a student at Uppsala University in 1881, philosophy candidate in 1888 and was awarded a Licentiate degree in 1893.
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Francis Ronalds
1788 - 1873 (85 years)
Sir Francis Ronalds FRS was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 he laid an eight-mile length of iron wire between wooden frames in his mother's garden and sent pulses using electrostatic generators.
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Arthur Smith Woodward
1864 - 1944 (80 years)
Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, FRS was an English palaeontologist, known as a world expert in fossil fish. He also described the Piltdown Man fossils, which were later determined to be fraudulent. He is not related to Henry Woodward, whom he replaced as curator of the Geology Department of the British Museum of Natural History.
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Daniel Coit Gilman
1831 - 1908 (77 years)
Daniel Coit Gilman was an American educator and academic. Gilman was instrumental in founding the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale College, and subsequently served as the second president of the University of California, Berkeley, as the first president of Johns Hopkins University, and as founding president of the Carnegie Institution.
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James Fairgrieve
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
James Fairgrieve was a British geographer, educator, and geopolitician. He is best known for his books Geography and World Power and Geography in School . Biography James Fairgrieve was born in 1870 in Scotland, son to a Scottish Presbyterian minister. His education was undertaken at Aberystwyth University, graduating in 1889, and then at Jesus College, Oxford, reading mathematics.
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Wiktor Ormicki
1898 - 1941 (43 years)
Wiktor Ormicki was a Polish geographer and cartographer, and a university professor. He was of Jewish descent. A specialist in economical geography and demography, he served at various posts in the Jagiellonian University, Wolna Wszechnica, Higher Trade School of Kraków and Lwów University. Arrested by the Germans during World War II in Sonderaktion Krakau, he was murdered in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
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Konrad Mannert
1756 - 1834 (78 years)
Konrad Mannert was a Prussian historian and geographer. Mannert was born in Altdorf bei Nürnberg, where he did his studies. In 1784 he became a teacher at the Sebaldusschule in Nuremberg, and in 1788 at the Ägidiusgymnasium there. In 1796 he became professor of history at the University of Altdorf, in 1805 at the University of Würzburg, in 1807 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich , and from 1826 at the same university in its new location in Munich. He died in Munich in 1834. His historical work was known in particular for its focus on studying primary sources.
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Hermann Wagner
1840 - 1929 (89 years)
Hermann Wagner was a German geographer and cartographer who was a native of Erlangen. He was the son of anatomist Rudolf Wagner and brother to economist Adolph Wagner . Wagner received his education at the Universities of Göttingen and Erlangen, and from 1864 to 1876, taught classes in mathematics and natural history at the Ernestine Gymnasium, Gotha. When the Freies Deutsches Hochstift
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Raphael Pumpelly
1837 - 1923 (86 years)
Raphael Pumpelly was an American geologist and explorer. Biography Early life and ancestors He was born on September 8, 1837, in Owego, New York, into a family with deep New England roots that trace back to Thomas Welles , who arrived in Massachusetts in 1635 and was the only man in Connecticut's history to hold all four top offices: governor, deputy governor, treasurer, and secretary; John Deming, an early Puritan settler and original patentee of the Connecticut Colony; and Honor Treat, the daughter of Richard Treat an early New England settler, Deputy to the Connecticut Legislature and a...
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Władysław Szafer
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Prof Władysław Szafer PAS HFRSE was a Polish botanist, palaeobotanist, quaternary geologist and professor of botany at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He was a world pioneer in nature conservation.
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Kenneth Mason
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Lieut-Colonel Kenneth Mason MC was a British soldier and explorer notable as the first statutory professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His work surveying the Himalayas was rewarded in 1927 with a Royal Geographical Society Founder's Medal, the citation reading for his connection between the surveys of India and Russian Turkestan, and his leadership of the Shaksgam Expedition.
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Karl Cäsar von Leonhard
1779 - 1862 (83 years)
Karl Cäsar von Leonhard was a German mineralogist and geologist. His son, Gustav von Leonhard, was also a mineralogist. From 1797 he studied at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen, where Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was an important influence to his career. He collected many mineralogical specimens on scientific excursions in Saxony and Thuringia, continued by travel to the Austrian Alps . During his journeys he made the acquaintance of Friedrich Mohs and Karl von Moll. In 1818, through assistance from Baden minister of state Sigismund von Reitzenstein, he was appointed professor of mine...
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Dicaearchus
350 BC - 280 BC (70 years)
Dicaearchus of Messana , also written Dikaiarchos , was a Greek philosopher, geographer and author. Dicaearchus was a student of Aristotle in the Lyceum. Very little of his work remains extant. He wrote on geography and the history of Greece, of which his most important work was his Life of Greece. Although modern scholars often consider him a pioneer in the field of cartography, this is based on a misinterpretation of a reference in Cicero to Dicaearchus' tabulae, which does not refer to any maps made by Dicaearchus but is a pun on account books and refers to Dicaearchus' Descent into the Sanctuary of Trophonius.
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Hans Steffen
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Hans Steffen Hoffman was a German geographer and explorer of the Aysén Region in western Patagonia. Steffen also worked as a teacher, encyclopedist and historian. Steffen Glacier on the Northern Patagonian Ice Field is named after him.
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Alfred Kirchhoff
1838 - 1907 (69 years)
Alfred Kirchhoff was a German geographer and naturalist. Biography He was educated at Jena and Bonn, and for several years was an instructor at schools in Mülheim an der Ruhr and Erfurt. From 1871 to 1873 he was a lecturer on geography at the Kriegsakademie of Berlin, and in the latter year was appointed to the chair of geography in the University of Halle. He was an editor of the zur deutschen Landes- und Volksforschung.
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Viktor Uhlig
1857 - 1911 (54 years)
Viktor Karl Uhlig was an Austrian geologist and paleontologist. Biography He studied geology and mineralogy at the universities of Graz and Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1879. Afterwards he worked as a research assistant under Melchior Neumayr in Vienna, and in 1891 was named an associate professor of geology and mineralogy at the German Polytechnic in Prague. Two years later he became a full professor, and in 1900 returned to Vienna as a professor of geology and paleontology. In 1907 he was a co-founder of the Geologischen Gesellschaft in Wien.
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Bertram Boltwood
1870 - 1927 (57 years)
Bertram Borden Boltwood was an American pioneer of radiochemistry. Boltwood attended Yale University, became a professor there and in 1910 was appointed chair of the first academic department of radiochemistry. He established that lead was the final decay product of uranium, noted that the lead-uranium ratio was greater in older rocks and, acting on a suggestion by Ernest Rutherford, was the first to measure the age of rocks by the decay of uranium to lead, in 1907. He got results of ages of 400 to 2200 million years, the first successful use of radioactive decay by Pb/U chemical dating. More...
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Gavril Tanfilyev
1857 - 1928 (71 years)
Gavril Ivanovich Tanfilyev was a Russian and Soviet soil scientist and botanist who worked on biogeography and aspects of plants ecology associated with soil and climate and examined the distributional limits of plants. He also produced a classification of the marshes.
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Arnold von Lasaulx
1839 - 1886 (47 years)
Arnold Constantin Peter Franz von Lasaulx was a German mineralogist and petrographer. Life He was born at Kastellaun near Coblenz, and educated at the University of Berlin, where he took his Ph.D. in 1868. In 1875, he became an associate professor of mineralogy at Breslau, and in 1880, a professor of mineralogy and geology at Bonn. He was distinguished for his researches on minerals and on crystallography, and he was one of the earlier workers on microscopic petrography. He described in 1878 the eruptive rocks of the district of Saar and Moselle.
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Anton Melik
1890 - 1966 (76 years)
Anton Melik was a Slovene geographer. Biography Melik was born in the village of Črna Vas in Carniola, part of Austria-Hungary. Before and during World War I, he studied at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1916 in history and geography. Later he was employed as a secondary school teacher. In 1926–1927 he became an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, in 1932 a senior lecturer, and then in 1938 a professor.
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Louis de Loczy
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Louis de Loczy . He was the son of Lajos Lóczy, probably the most famous Hungarian geologist. Lajos de Loczy was the first western geologist to describe the structure, geomorphology and stratigraphy of mountain chains bordering the Tibetan Plateau that links the Kunlun Mountains with the north-south-oriented belt of mountains and gorges in central China.
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Robert DeCourcy Ward
1867 - 1931 (64 years)
Robert DeCourcy Ward was an American climatologist, author, educator and leading eugenics and immigration reform advocate in the early 20th Century. He became the first ever professor of climatology in the United States and made contributions to the study of the climate. His advocacy for immigration reform and eugenics led him to co-found the Immigration Restriction League which was instrumental in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 which reduced Jewish and Italian immigration to the U.S. by over 95% and completely barred Asian immigration until 1952.
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Olaf Holtedahl
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Prof Olaf Holtedahl ForMemRS FRSE was a Norwegian geologist . He became a senior lecturer at the University of Oslo in 1914, and was Professor of Geology there from 1920 to 1956. Career Olaf Holtedahl was born in Kristiania , Norway, the son of Arne H. Holtedahl, superintendent of pauper administration, and his wife, Mathilde Madsen.
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Paulus Merula
1558 - 1607 (49 years)
Paulus Merula, or Paul van Merle was a Dutch jurist, classicist, historian, geographer and librarian. In 1592 he was appointed professor of history at Leiden University, and was elevated to full professor in 1593. From 1597 until his death he was librarian to Leiden University Library, and in 1603 he was appointed rector magnificus of the university. He was friends with Janus Dousa and Daniël Heinsius, and was a Leiden contemporary of the humanist Joseph Justus Scaliger.
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Ivan Batakliev
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Ivan Batakliev is a Bulgarian geographer, historian and geopolitician. Professor, Head of the Department of General Geography and Cultural and Political Geography, Dean of the Faculty of History and Philology and Director of the Geographical Institute of Sofia University ″St. Kliment Ohridski″, co-founder and chairman of the Bulgarian Geographical Society, corresponding member of the geographical societies in Berlin, Prague, Belgrade, Würzburg, Greifswald, the Bulgarian Archaeological Institute and a full member of the Thracian Scientific Institute and the Union of Scientists.
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Albrecht Schrauf
1837 - 1897 (60 years)
Albrecht Schrauf was an Austrian mineralogist and crystallographer. Biography Schrauf studied mathematics, physics and mineralogy at the University of Vienna, where one of his instructors was Wilhelm Josef Grailich. Several years later, he became "custos-adjunct" at the "Imperial Hofmineralien Cabinet" in Vienna. In 1867 he was named first curator of the mineral cabinet, and in 1874 was appointed professor and director of the mineralogical museum at the University of Vienna.
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William Walden Rubey
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
William Walden Rubey was an American geologist. He was born in Moberly, Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri, and in 1920 he graduated with an A.B. degree. During the same year he married Susan Elsie Manovill, and joined the U.S. Geological Survey. He performed his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University.
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Wang Chong
27 - 97 (70 years)
Wang Chong , courtesy name Zhongren , was a Chinese astronomer, meteorologist, naturalist, philosopher, and writer active during the Eastern Han dynasty. He developed a rational, secular, naturalistic and mechanistic account of the world and of human beings and gave a materialistic explanation of the origin of the universe. His main work was the Lunheng . This book contained many theories involving early sciences of astronomy and meteorology, and Wang Chong was even the first in Chinese history to mention the use of the square-pallet chain pump, which became common in irrigation and public works in China thereafter.
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Hugo Hergesell
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Hugo Emil Hergesell was a German meteorologist. Works He co-founded "Beiträge zur Physik der freien Atmosphäre" Ergebnisse aerologischer Beobachtungen an internationalen Tagen, 1900–1913, 1925–1928
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Henri Coudreau
1859 - 1899 (40 years)
Henri Anatole Coudreau was a French professor of history and geography, explorer and geographer of French Guiana and the tributaries of the Amazon. Exploration of the Amazon At the time of the "contesté franco-brésilien" boundary dispute between colonial France and Brazil, Coudreau worked in the service of Governors of the states of Brazil, mapping the Amazon's tributaries and identifying possible resources for farmers and foresters. On behalf of the State of Pará, Coudreau was charged with exploring the Trombetas river, shortly after he married Octavie Coudreau.
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Carsten Niebuhr
1733 - 1815 (82 years)
Carsten Niebuhr, or Karsten Niebuhr , was a German mathematician, cartographer, and explorer in the service of Denmark. He is renowned for his participation in the Danish Arabia expedition . He was the father of the Danish-German statesman and historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who published an account of his father's life in 1817.
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Maurycy Pius Rudzki
1862 - 1916 (54 years)
Maurycy Pius Rudzki was the first person to call himself a professor of geophysics. He held the Chair of Geophysics at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and established the Institute of Geophysics there in 1895. His research specialty was elastic anisotropy, as applied to wave propagation in the earth, and he established many of the fundamental results in that arena.
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William Smith
1790 - 1847 (57 years)
William Smith was an English captain born in Blyth, Northumberland, who discovered the South Shetland Islands, an archipelago off the Graham Land in Antarctica. His discovery was the first ever made south of 60° south latitude, in the present Antarctic Treaty area.
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Elisabeth Gottschalk
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Maria Karoline Elisabeth Gottschalk was a German-born Dutch historical geographer and professor. She was noted for Stormvloeden en rivieroverstromingen in Nederland , a three volume study into the historical storm surges and river floods, which is considered a standard work which corrected the existing theories behind storm surges.
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Johan Georg Forchhammer
1794 - 1865 (71 years)
Johan Georg Forchhammer was a Danish mineralogist and geologist. Early life and education Forchhammer was born at Husum, Schleswig. He studied at the universities of Kiel and Copenhagen from 1815 to 1818.
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Friedrich Burmeister
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Friedrich Burmeister was a German geophysicist. He was director of the Munich University’s Geomagnetic Observatory. Burmeister studied mathematics and physics at the University of Munich under Hugo von Seeliger and Arnold Sommerfeld, and he received his doctorate in 1919. Upon graduation, he became Director of the Munich Geomagnetic Observatory, of the Geomagnetism Branch of the Munich Earth Observatory, under the Geophysics Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Munich. Due to the industrialization of Munich, operation of the observatory became more and more dif...
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Johann Carl Gehler
1732 - 1796 (64 years)
Johann Carl Gehler was a German physician, mineralogist, and anatomist. Born 17 May 1732 in Görlitz, Gehler studied medicine from 1751 to 1758 at the University of Leipzig, where he was a pupil of physician and botanist Christian Gottlieb Ludwig. While a student at Leipzig, he furthered his interest in natural sciences, publishing the mineralogical treatise, De characteribus fossilium externis , as a result. Following graduation, he continued his education by studying mineralogy in Freiberg and obstetrics in Strasbourg as a student of Johann Jakob Fried .
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Gabriel Auguste Daubrée
1814 - 1896 (82 years)
Gabriel Auguste Daubrée MIF FRS FRSE was a French geologist, best known for applying experimental methods to structural geology. He served as the director of the École des Mines as well as the president of the French Academy of Sciences.
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Frederik Johnstrup
1818 - 1894 (76 years)
Johannes Frederik Johnstrup was a Danish professor, geologist and paleontologist. He was the founder of the Danish scientific periodical Meddelelser om Grønland. Biography Johnstrup was born at Christianshavn, Denmark. He attended the Technical University of Denmark where he received B.Sc. in 1844. He became an associate professor of mineralogy and natural science at Sorø Academy in 1846. When the academy closed in 1848, he became assistant lecturer in Kolding. Three years later, he taught in Sorø and in 1866, he became professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of Copenhagen ...
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