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.
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#3751
George Mercer Dawson
1849 - 1901 (52 years)
George Mercer Dawson was a Canadian geologist and surveyor. He performed many early explorations in western North America and compiled numerous records of the native peoples. Biography He was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, the eldest son of Sir John William Dawson, Principal of McGill University and a noted geologist, and his wife, Lady Margaret Dawson. By age 11, he was afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine that resulted in a deformed back and stunted growth. Physical limitations, however, did not deter Dawson from becoming one of Canada's greatest scientists.
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Wilhelm Jordan
1845 - 1899 (54 years)
Wilhelm Jordan was a German geodesist who conducted surveys in Germany and Africa and founded the German geodesy journal. Biography Jordan was born in Ellwangen, a small town in southern Germany. He studied at the polytechnic institute in Stuttgart and after working for two years as an engineering assistant on the preliminary stages of railway construction he returned there as an assistant in geodesy. In 1868, when he was 26 years old, he was appointed a full professor at Karlsruhe. In 1874 Jordan took part in the expedition of Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs to Libya. From 1881 until his death he was professor of geodesy and practical geometry at the Technical University of Hannover.
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Paul Ramdohr
1890 - 1985 (95 years)
Paul A. Ramdohr , was a German mineralogist, ore deposit-researcher and a pioneer of ore microscopy. Life After attending school at the "Alten Gymnasium" of Darmstadt and studying at the University of Heidelberg, he earned his Doctorate in 1919 under the direction of Otto Mügge in Göttingen with a Dissertation on Basalts of the Blauen Kuppe near Eschwege. As a student in Heidelberg, Ramdohr joined the fraternity Leonensia. His Habilitation was completed soon thereafter under the direction of W. Bruhns on the topic of the Gabbros in the area of Böllstein/Brombachtal. In 1926, he took a position at the University of Aachen as Professor of Mineralogy, Petrography and Ore Geology.
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Harry O. Wood
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Harry Oscar Wood was an American seismologist who made several significant contributions in the field of seismology in the early twentieth-century. Following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, Wood expanded his background of geology and mineralogy and his career took a change of direction into the field of seismology. In the 1920s he co-developed the torsion seismometer, a device tuned to detect short-period seismic waves that are associated with local earthquakes. In 1931 Wood, along with another seismologist, redeveloped and updated the Mercalli intensity scale, a seismic int...
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Raoul Blanchard
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Raoul Blanchard was a French geographer. He taught at the University of Grenoble from 1906 and devoted most of his research to Alpine and Canadian geography. Early life The son of an inspector of the Department of Water of Orléans, Blanchard attended Holy Cross School and Pothier Secondary School, where he studied under the geographer Louis Gallouédec. He was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1897, he became excited by geography, which was taught by Paul Vidal de La Blache.
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Nicolas Auguste Tissot
1824 - 1907 (83 years)
Nicolas Auguste Tissot was a French cartographer, who in 1859 and 1881 published an analysis of the distortion that occurs on map projections. He devised Tissot's indicatrix, or distortion circle, which when plotted on a map will appear as an ellipse whose elongation depends on the amount of distortion by the map at that point. The angle and extent of the elongation represents the amount of angular distortion of the map. The size of the ellipse indicates the amount that the area is distorted.
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James Sowerby
1757 - 1822 (65 years)
James Sowerby was an English naturalist, illustrator and mineralogist. Contributions to published works, such as A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland or English Botany, include his detailed and appealing plates. The use of vivid colour and accessible texts were intended to reach a widening audience in works of natural history.
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Alfred Philippson
1864 - 1953 (89 years)
Alfred Philippson was a German geologist and geographer. He was born at Bonn, son of Ludwig Philippson. He received his education at the gymnasium and university of his native town and at the University of Leipzig . In 1892 he became Privatdozent at Bonn, was appointed assistant professor seven years later, and in 1904 he was called to Bern as professor of geography. Having made voyages through Italy , Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor, he published: Studien über Wasserscheiden, Berlin, 1886; Der Peloponnes, ib. 1892; Europa , Leipzig, 1894; Thessalien und Epirus, Berlin, 1897; Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Griechischen Inselwelt, Gotha, 1901; Das Mittelmeergebiet, Leipzig, 1904.
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Edward Salisbury Dana
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
Edward Salisbury Dana was an American mineralogist and physicist. He made important contributions to the study of minerals, especially in the field of crystallography. Life and career E. S. Dana was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of the geologist and mineralogist James Dwight Dana. He graduated from Yale College in 1870, where he had been a member of Scroll and Key, and then after two years with George J. Brush at the Sheffield Scientific School, spent another two years studying in Heidelberg and Vienna, specializing in crystal optics and crystallography. He then returned to Yale to take his M.A.
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Georgy Vysotsky
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Georgy Nikolaevich Vysotsky was a Ukrainian and Soviet soil scientist and forester who worked in the steppe, where he examined forest growth and the effects of soil factors. Vysotsky was born in Nikitovka and went to the St. Petersburg Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in 1886, where he came under the influence of Vasily Dokuchaev and Georgy Fedorovich Morozov. He worked from 1890 at the Berdyansk Reserve and in 1892 joined Dokuchaev on an expedition to Poltava and became manager of the Great Anatolian forest reserve. There, he experimented on the use of forest strips to manage droughts. From 1904, he worked on experimental forestry near Samara.
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Johannes Martin Bijvoet
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Johannes Martin Bijvoet was a Dutch chemist and crystallographer at the van 't Hoff Laboratory at Utrecht University. He is famous for devising a method of establishing the absolute configuration of molecules. In 1946, he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Theodor Liebisch
1852 - 1922 (70 years)
Theodor Liebisch was a German mineralogist and crystallographer. Biography In 1874 he received his doctorate from the University of Breslau, then worked as an assistant to Gerhard vom Rath at the University of Bonn. After several years spent as a curator at the mineralogical museum of the University of Berlin, he became an associate professor of mineralogy at Breslau . Afterwards he successively served as a full professor of mineralogy at the universities of Greifswald , Königsberg , Göttingen and Berlin . He was an editor of the periodical "Jahrbuch für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontolog...
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Heinrich Kiepert
1818 - 1899 (81 years)
Heinrich Kiepert was a German geographer. Early life and education Kiepert was born in Berlin. He traveled frequently as a youth with his family and documented his travels by drawing. His family was friends with Leopold von Ranke, who inspired Kiepert's creative endeavors. Kiepert was taught by August Meineke in school. Meineke influenced Kiepert's interest in classical antiquity. He attended Humboldt University of Berlin. He studied history, philology, and geography.
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Hubert Wilkins
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Sir George Hubert Wilkins MC & Bar , commonly referred to as Captain Wilkins, was an Australian polar explorer, ornithologist, pilot, soldier, geographer and photographer. He was awarded the Military Cross after he assumed command of a group of American soldiers who had lost their officers during the Battle of the Hindenburg Line, and became the only official Australian photographer from any war to receive a combat medal. He narrowly failed in an attempt to be the first to cross under the North Pole in a submarine, but was able to prove that submarines were capable of operating beneath the polar ice cap, thereby paving the way for future successful missions.
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Albrecht Haushofer
1903 - 1945 (42 years)
Albrecht Georg Haushofer was a German geographer, diplomat, author and member of the German Resistance to Nazism. Life Haushofer was born in Munich, the son of the retired World War I general and geographer Karl Haushofer and his wife Martha, née Mayer-Doss . Albrecht had one brother, Heinz. He studied geography and history at Munich University. In 1924 he graduated with his thesis Paß-Staaten in den Alpen, Erich von Drygalski was his supervisor. Haushofer then worked as an assistant for Albrecht Penck.
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David Thompson
1770 - 1857 (87 years)
David Thompson was an Anglo-Canadian fur trader, surveyor, and cartographer, known to some native people as "Koo-Koo-Sint" or "the Stargazer". Over Thompson's career, he travelled across North America, mapping of the continent along the way. For this historic feat, Thompson has been described as the "greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced".
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William Hopkins
1793 - 1866 (73 years)
William Hopkins FRS was an English mathematician and geologist. He is famous as a private tutor of aspiring undergraduate Cambridge mathematicians, earning him the sobriquet the "senior-wrangler maker."
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Alexis Clairaut
1713 - 1765 (52 years)
Alexis Claude Clairaut was a French mathematician, astronomer, and geophysicist. He was a prominent Newtonian whose work helped to establish the validity of the principles and results that Sir Isaac Newton had outlined in the Principia of 1687. Clairaut was one of the key figures in the expedition to Lapland that helped to confirm Newton's theory for the figure of the Earth. In that context, Clairaut worked out a mathematical result now known as "Clairaut's theorem". He also tackled the gravitational three-body problem, being the first to obtain a satisfactory result for the apsidal precession of the Moon's orbit.
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Leo Picard
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Leo Picard , was an Israeli geologist and an expert in the field of hydrogeology. Biography Yehuda Leo Picard was born in Germany in 1900, and studied at universities in Freiburg and Berlin, in Germany, and in Paris and London, and taught at the University of Florence, Italy.
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Vladimir Sobolev
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Sobolev, Vladimir Stepanovich was a Russian geologist, working in mineralogy, petrology and theory of metamorphism. He was born in Lugansk, and died in Moscow. Sobolev predicted deposits of diamonds in Eastern Siberia.
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Bartolomeo Gastaldi
1818 - 1879 (61 years)
Bartolomeo Gastaldi was an Italian geologist and palæontologist, and one of the founders of the Club Alpino Italiano. Gastaldi was born in Turin, then capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia. As a child he developed a passion for fossils; the finds he made during excursions in the areas around Turin and Asti were to form the basis for his extensive collection of fossils and geological specimens. Under pressure from his father he studied law at the University of Turin, Faculty of Law; after graduating in 1839 he entered the legal profession.
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Hamdallah Mustawfi
1281 - 1339 (58 years)
Hamdallah Mustawfi Qazvini was a Persian official, historian, geographer and poet. He lived during the last era of the Mongol Ilkhanate, and the interregnum that followed. A native of Qazvin, Mustawfi belonged to family of mustawfis , thus his name. He was a close associate of the prominent vizier and historian Rashid al-Din Hamadani, who inspired him to write historical and geographical works. Mustawfi is the author of three works; Tarikh-i guzida , Zafarnamah and Nuzhat al-Qulub , respectively. A highly influential figure, Mustawfi's way of conceptualizing the history and geography of Iran...
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Philipp Clüver
1580 - 1622 (42 years)
Philipp Clüver was an Early Modern German geographer and historian. Life Clüver was born in Danzig , in Royal Prussia, a province of the Kingdom of Poland. After spending some time at the Polish court of Sigismund III Vasa, he began the study of law at the University of Leiden , but soon he turned his attention to history and geography, which were then taught there by Joseph Scaliger.
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Anna Missuna
1868 - 1922 (54 years)
Anna Boleslavovna Missuna was a Russian-born Polish geologist, mineralogist, and paleontologist. Early life Missuna was born in the Vitebsk Region . Her parents were Polish. She was educated in Riga, where she learned to speak German, and in Moscow, where she had a scholarship for higher education from 1893 to 1896. She pursued further study in mineralogy with Vladimir Vernadsky and crystallographer Evgraf Fedorov.
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Jean de Charpentier
1786 - 1855 (69 years)
Jean de Charpentier or Johann von Charpentier was a German-Swiss geologist who studied Swiss glaciers. He was born in Freiberg, Saxony, Germany and died in Bex, Switzerland. Life After following in his father's footsteps as a mining engineer he excelled in his field while working in the copper mines in the Pyrénées and salt mines in western Switzerland.
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John Joly
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
John Joly FRS was an Irish physicist and professor of geology at the University of Dublin, known for his development of radiotherapy in the treatment of cancer. He is also known for developing techniques to more accurately estimate the age of a geological period, based on radioactive elements present in minerals, the uranium–thorium dating.
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Richard Francis Burton
1821 - 1890 (69 years)
Sir Richard Francis Burton was a British explorer, writer, orientalist scholar, and soldier. He was famed for his travels and explorations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke twenty-nine languages.
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Hugh Miller
1802 - 1856 (54 years)
Hugh Miller was a self-taught Scottish geologist and writer, folklorist and an evangelical Christian. Life and work Miller was born in Cromarty, the first of three children of Harriet Wright and Hugh Miller , a shipmaster in the coasting trade. Both parents were from trading and artisan families in Cromarty. His father died in a shipwreck in 1807, and he was brought up by his mother and uncles. He was educated in a parish school where he reportedly showed a love of reading. It was at this school that Miller was involved in an altercation with a classmate in which he stabbed his peer's thigh.
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Émile-Félix Gautier
1864 - 1940 (76 years)
Émile-Félix Gautier or Gauthier was a French geographer. Gautier was born in Clermont-Ferrand. His studies focused on northern Africa, especially Algeria, the Sahara desert and the territories of French Africa. He also conducted research in the French colony of Madagascar. He died, aged 75, in Pontivy .
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Johann Jakob Nöggerath
1788 - 1877 (89 years)
Johann Jakob Nöggerath , German mineralogist and geologist, was born at Bonn. In 1814-1815 he became a commissioner of mines for some of the Rhine provinces, and in 1818 became an associate professor at the newly established University of Bonn. In 1821 he was named a full professor of mineralogy and mining sciences at Bonn, where he also served as director of the university's natural history museum. He obtained a very fine collection of minerals for the museum, was eminently successful as a teacher, and achieved a wide reputation among mining engineers.
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Eugene W. Hilgard
1833 - 1916 (83 years)
Eugene Woldemar Hilgard was a German-American expert on pedology . An authority on climate as a soil forming factor, soil chemistry and reclamation of alkali soils, he is considered as the father of modern soil science in the United States.
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Maria Klenova
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Maria Vasilyevna Klenova was a Russian and Soviet marine geologist and one of the founders of Russian marine science and contributor to the first Soviet Antarctic atlas. Klenova studied to become a professor and later on worked as a member of the Council for Antarctic Research of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. During that time she spent nearly thirty years researching in the Polar Regions and become the first woman scientist to do research in Antarctica. She joined in the First Soviet Antarctic Expedition and worked with ANARE at Macquarie Island.
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Friedrich Hopfner
1881 - 1949 (68 years)
Friedrich Hopfner was an Austrian geodesist, geophysicist and planetary scientist. As an officer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire he began his scientific work at the Bureau of Meteorology. In 1921 he became Chief Astronomer at the new Geodetic Survey of Austria . From 1936 to 1942 and from 1945 to 1949 he was a professor at the Vienna University of Technology and over the 1948-9 term he was the university's rector.
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Charles Palache
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Charles Palache was an American mineralogist and crystallographer. In his time, he was one of the most important mineralogists in the United States. Background Charles Palache came from the Pallache family of Sephardic Jews. His grandfather, John Palache, had a plantation in Jamaica. His father, James Palache, was born in New York and moved to San Francisco as a merchant. His mother was Helen Whitney. His memorial at the National Academy of Sciences reports: For political reasons he [John Palache] abandoned that home in 1834, and put his wife and three daughters on a ship sailing for New York, but he died before he could follow them on the next boat.
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Harry Wexler
1911 - 1962 (51 years)
Harry Wexler was an American meteorologist, born in Fall River, Massachusetts. Biography Wexler attended Harvard University, and in 1939 he was awarded a Ph.D. in meteorology under Carl-Gustaf Rossby from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Maximilien Sorre
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Maximilien Sorre , known as Max Sorre, was a French geographer whose work was mainly in the areas of biological and human geography. Life Maximilien Sorre, who signed his works "Max Sorre", was born in Rennes, Brittany, on 16 July 1880. He studied at the École Normale de Rennes. From 1899 to 1901 he studied at the École normale de Saint Cloud, which trained teachers for the departmental écoles normales. On 6 August 1901 he was awarded a certificate to teach as a professor at the Écoles Normales and the Écoles primaires supérieures. In 1902 he was appointed professor at the École Normale de La ...
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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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