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,
#3851
Wilhelm Sievers
1860 - 1921 (61 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Sievers was a German geologist and geographer. He served as professor of geography at the University of Giessen. His field work focussed on South America, and his Allgemeine Länderkunde was for several decades a standard work on world geography.
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Carl Owen Dunbar
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Carl Owen Dunbar was an American paleontologist who specialized in invertebrate fossils. He was a Professor of Geology at Yale University from 1920 until 1959. He was also Director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University from 1942 until 1959. As editor of a textbook series on historical geology from the 1920s through the 1950s, his work was published and sold in over 1 million books.
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Léon Teisserenc de Bort
1855 - 1913 (58 years)
Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort was a French meteorologist and a pioneer in the field of aerology. Together with Richard Assmann , he is credited as co-discoverer of the stratosphere, as both men announced their discovery during the same time period in 1902. Teisserenc de Bort pioneered the use of unmanned instrumented balloons and was the first to identify the region in the atmosphere around 8-17 kilometers of height where the lapse rate reaches zero, known today as the tropopause.
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Wincenty Okołowicz
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Wincenty Okołowicz was a Polish geographer and an expert in geomorphology and climatology. He is best known as the author of the 1965 major Polish classification of world's climates, Climatic Zones of the World .
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Ewald Banse
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Ewald Banse was a German geographer. Banse was a professor at the technical college in his native city. Allied propaganda cited Banse's main work, Raum und Volk im Weltkriege , as proof of Germany's war lust. Banse advocated the union of all areas settled by Germans in a Great German Reich extending far beyond the 1914 frontiers. To achieve this he expressly demanded military action. The warrior was to be the carrier of the coming rule of "Nordic nobility".
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Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg
1836 - 1927 (91 years)
Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg was an Austrian mineralogist. Biography He was born in Litovel, Moravia, and studied at the University of Vienna, where he obtained a teaching degree. He studied mineralogy at Heidelberg and Tübingen and obtained a PhD. He returned to Vienna as a lecturer in mineralogy and chemistry and, in 1862 was appointed second vice curator of the Imperial Mineralogical Cabinet, becoming director in 1868. He resigned as director in 1877. He was also professor of petrography at the University of Vienna. He was appointed professor in 1873 and a member of the Imperial Academy ...
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Shiba P. Chatterjee
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Shiba Prasad Chatterjee was a Professor of Geography at the University of Calcutta, India. He served as President of the International Geographical Union from 1964 until 1968, Chatterjee received a Murchison Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1959, and a Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 1985. He coined the name 'Meghalaya' for one of India's states.
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Heinrich Seilkopf
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Heinrich Seilkopf was a German meteorologist. From March 1916 to March 1919 he was a research assistant at the weather office in Berlin and until the end of the year scientific assistant at the Meteorological Observatory in Essen.
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August Tammekann
1894 - 1959 (65 years)
August Ferdinand Tammekann was an Estonian geographer. In 1923 he graduated from the University of Tartu. He started teaching at the University of Tartu in 1926. During his Tartu years, he lived in Villa Tammekann, designed in 1936 by Alvar Aalto.
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Wilhelm von Branca
1844 - 1928 (84 years)
Carl Wilhelm Franz von Branca Until 1895: Wilhelm Branco; 1895-1907: Wilhelm von Branco was a German geologist and paleontologist. Biography Von Branca was born in Potsdam. After having been an officer, and then a farmer, Branca studied geology in Halle and Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate in 1876. He did postdoctoral work in Straßburg, Berlin, Munich, and in Rome with Karl Alfred von Zittel. In 1881 he received his habilitation from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Berlin , where he then worked as a lecturer. After a short stint as a lecturer in Aachen, von Branca became State Geologist at the Prussian Geological State Service in Berlin.
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Albrecht Penck
1858 - 1945 (87 years)
Albrecht Penck was a German geographer and geologist and the father of Walther Penck. Biography Born in Reudnitz near Leipzig, Penck became a university professor in Vienna, Austria, from 1885 to 1906, and in Berlin from 1906 to 1927. There he was also the director of the Institute and Museum for Oceanography by 1918. He dedicated himself to geomorphology and climatology, and he raised the international profile of the Vienna school of physical geography.
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Ferdinand Zirkel
1838 - 1912 (74 years)
Prof Ferdinand Zirkel FRS HFRSE was a German geologist and petrographer. Biography Zirkel was born in Bonn. Educated in his native town, he graduated PhD from the University of Bonn in 1861. His training and initial interest was in mining. In 1860 he traveled to Iceland with William Thierry Preyer, and in 1862 they published Reise nach Island im Sommer 1860.
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Robert George Spencer Hudson
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Robert George Spencer Hudson was an English geologist and paleontologist. He was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, the eldest son of Robert Spencer Hudson. Education Hudson was educated at St Matthew's School and then Lawrence Sheriff School, where his interest in geology was started through a schoolmaster taking the students fossil hunting in the strata used for cement making.
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August Rothpletz
1853 - 1918 (65 years)
Friedrich August Rothpletz was a German geologist and paleontologist. Biography From 1875 to 1880 he conducted geological mapping in Saxony as part of the Sächsischen Geologischen Landesanstalt , afterwards receiving his doctorate from the University of Leipzig . Two years later he obtained his habilitation at the University of Munich, where he taught classes in geology, Alpine tectonics and paleobotany. In 1894 he became an associate professor and in 1904 succeeded Karl von Zittel as professor of geology and paleontology at Munich. From 1904 to 1918 he was director of the Bayerische Staatssa...
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Eleanora Knopf
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Eleanora Frances Knopf was an American geologist who worked for the United States Geological Survey and did research in the Appalachians during the first two decades of the twentieth century. She studied at Bryn Mawr College, and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry, a master's degree in geology, and a Ph.D. in geology in 1912. She was the first American geologist to use the new technique of petrography which she pioneered in her life's work - the study of Stissing Mountain.
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René Chudeau
1864 - 1921 (57 years)
René Chudeau was a French geologist. Formerly an instructor at the University of Besançon, from 1905 to 1914 he conducted a series of geological surveys in the Sahara . His interests included Quaternary deposits, the formation of sand dunes, processes of aeolian erosion, et al. In the Taoudeni basin, he investigated ancient volcanoes, and south of Agadez, he found the presence of dinosaur bones. In the Zinder region, he made a discovery of Lower Cretaceous rocks being overlain by Upper Cretaceous successions. His geological collections are housed at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in...
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Wilhelm Ule
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Wilhelm Ule, sometimes referred to as Willi Ule was a German geographer and limnologist. He was the son of science writer Otto Eduard Vincenz Ule . He studied mathematics and geography in Berlin and Halle, where he graduated in 1888 with a dissertation on the lakes of Mansfeld, Die Mansfelder Seen. The following year he obtained his habilitation with a study on the depth ratios of Masurian lakes. In 1889 he also became managing director of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
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Gaetano Rovereto
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Gaetano Rovereto was an Italian geologist and paleontologist who, though critical of the application of theories to geology, was in favour of cyclical processes to explain geological formations. He published on geomorphology apart from describing and cataloguing fossil molluscs. He worked in Argentina from 1909 to 1921, exploring the region while also serving as a consultant for irrigation and public works. Rovereto was born in Mele, Genoa, eldest son of Teresa Piccardo and Giuseppe Francesco belonging to the noble family of the Marquises of Rivanazzano and associated with the paper manufacturing industry.
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Rudolf Hoernes
1850 - 1912 (62 years)
Rudolf Hoernes was an Austrian geologist, born in Vienna, son of Moritz Hoernes. He studied under Eduard Suess and became a Professor of geology in Graz. He was known for his earthquake studies in 1878 and proposed a classification of earthquakes into subsidence earthquakes, volcanic earthquakes and tectonic earthquakes. In 1893, he published a detailed textbook on earthquake theory from a geological point of view.
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Hanns Bruno Geinitz
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
Hanns Bruno Geinitz was a German geologist, born at Altenburg, the capital of Saxe-Altenburg. He was educated at the universities of Berlin and Jena, and gained the foundations of his geological knowledge under Friedrich August von Quenstedt. In 1837 he took the degree of Ph.D. with a thesis on the Muschelkalk of Thuringia. In 1850 he became professor of geology and mineralogy in the Royal Polytechnic School at Dresden, and in 1857 he was made director of the Royal Mineralogical and Geological Museum; he held these posts until 1894.
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Ptolemy
100 - 170 (70 years)
Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treat...
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Strabo
64 BC - 23 (87 years)
Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived in Asia Minor during the transitional period of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Life Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus in around 64BC. His family had been involved in politics since at least the reign of Mithridates V. Strabo was related to Dorylaeus on his mother's side. Several other family members, including his paternal grandfather, had served Mithridates VI during the Mithridatic Wars. As the war drew to a close, Strabo's grandfather had turned several Pontic fortresses over to the Romans.
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Herodotus
484 BC - 425 BC (59 years)
Herodotus was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He is referred to as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero.
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Alexander von Humboldt
1769 - 1859 (90 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
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Alfred Wegener
1880 - 1930 (50 years)
Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German climatologist, geologist, geophysicist, meteorologist, and polar researcher. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth . His hypothesis was controversial and widely rejected by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.
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Eratosthenes
276 BC - 194 BC (82 years)
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable to what is now known as the study of geography, and he introduced some of the terminology still used today.
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Harold Jeffreys
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS was a British geophysicist who made significant contributions to mathematics and statistics. His book, Theory of Probability, which was first published in 1939, played an important role in the revival of the objective Bayesian view of probability.
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William Hallowes Miller
1801 - 1880 (79 years)
Prof William Hallowes Miller FRS HFRSE LLD DCL was a Welsh mineralogist and laid the foundations of modern crystallography. Miller indices are named after him, the method having been described in his Treatise on Crystallography . The mineral known as millerite is named after him.
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William Morris Davis
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Morris Davis was an American geographer, geologist, geomorphologist, and meteorologist, often called the "father of American geography". He was born into a prominent Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son of Edward M. Davis and Maria Mott Davis . Davis studied geology and geography at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and then joined the Harvard sponsored geographic exploration party to the Colorado territory, led by the inaugural Sturgis-Hooper professor of geology, Josiah Dwight Whitney. Wild stories had circulated since soon after the Louisiana Purchase about Rocky Mountains peaks 18,000 feet or higher.
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Vasily Dokuchaev
1846 - 1903 (57 years)
Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchaev was a geologist and geographer who is credited with laying the foundations of soil science. He was from the Russian Empire. The Ukrainian city of Dokuchaievsk is named after him.
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Carl Ritter
1779 - 1859 (80 years)
Carl Ritter was a German geographer. Along with Alexander von Humboldt, he is considered one of the founders of modern geography. From 1825 until his death, he occupied the first chair in geography at the University of Berlin.
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Eugeniusz Romer
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
Eugeniusz Mikołaj Romer was a distinguished Polish geographer, cartographer and geopolitician, whose maps and atlases are still highly valued by experts. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he graduated from a high school in Nowy Sącz and studied history, geology, geography and meteorology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, also attending courses in Lwów and Halle . In 1894, Romer earned a doctorate in philosophy at University of Lviv. He was a president of Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists .
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Edward Drinker Cope
1840 - 1897 (57 years)
Edward Drinker Cope was an American zoologist, paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, he distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science, publishing his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations.
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Hipparchus
190 BC - 120 BC (70 years)
Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry, but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, and probably died on the island of Rhodes, Greece. He is known to have been a working astronomer between 162 and 127 BC.
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James Hutton
1726 - 1797 (71 years)
James Hutton was a Scottish geologist, agriculturalist, chemical manufacturer, naturalist and physician. Often referred to as the "Father of Modern Geology," he played a key role in establishing geology as a modern science.
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Friedrich Robert Helmert
1843 - 1917 (74 years)
Friedrich Robert Helmert was a German geodesist and statistician with important contributions to the theory of errors. Career Helmert was born in Freiberg, Kingdom of Saxony. After schooling in Freiberg and Dresden, he entered the Polytechnische Schule, now Technische Universität, in Dresden to study engineering science in 1859. Finding him especially enthusiastic about geodesy, one of his teachers, Christian August Nagel, hired him while still a student to work on the triangulation of the Ore Mountains and the drafting of the trigonometric network for Saxony. In 1863 Helmert became Nagel's assistant on the Central European Arc Measurement.
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Charles Lyell
1797 - 1875 (78 years)
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish geologist who demonstrated the power of known natural causes in explaining the earth's history. He is best known today for his association with Charles Darwin and as the author of Principles of Geology , which presented to a wide public audience the idea that the earth was shaped by the same natural processes still in operation today, operating at similar intensities. The philosopher William Whewell dubbed this gradualistic view "uniformitarianism" and contrasted it with catastrophism, which had been championed by Georges Cuvier and was better accepted in Europe.
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Christian Samuel Weiss
1780 - 1856 (76 years)
Christian Samuel Weiss was a German mineralogist born in Leipzig. Following graduation, he worked as a physics instructor in Leipzig from 1803 until 1808. and in the meantime, conducted geological studies of mountain formations in Tyrol, Switzerland and France . In 1810 he became a professor of mineralogy at the University of Berlin, where in 1818/19 and 1832/33, he served as university rector. He died near Eger in Bohemia.
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Carl O. Sauer
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Carl Ortwin Sauer was an American geographer. Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957. He has been called "the dean of American historical geography" and he was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate school at Berkeley. One of his best known works was Agricultural Origins and Dispersals . In 1927, Carl Sauer wrote the article "Recent Developments in Cultural Geography," which considered how cultural landscapes are made up of "the forms superimposed on the physical landscape."
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Tor Bergeron
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Tor Bergeron was a Swedish meteorologist who proposed a mechanism for the formation of precipitation in clouds. In the 1930s, Bergeron and W. Findeisen developed the concept that clouds contain both supercooled water and ice crystals. According to Bergeron, most precipitation is formed as a consequence of water evaporating from small supercooled droplets and accreting onto ice crystals, which then fall as snow, or melt and fall as cold rain depending on the ambient air temperature. This process is known as the Bergeron Process, and is believed to be the primary process by which precipitation ...
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Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen
1809 - 1876 (67 years)
Wolfgang Sartorius Freiherr von Waltershausen was a German geologist. Life and work Waltershausen was born at Göttingen and educated at this city's university. There he devoted his attention to physical and natural science, and in particular to mineralogy. Waltershausen was named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was close friends with his parents. Waltershausen's father, Georg, was a writer, lecturer and professor of economics and history at Göttingen. Georg Sartorius is best known in his role of translator and popularizer of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. His son, August, was a well k...
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Väinö Auer
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Väinö Auer , the son of senator , was a Finnish geologist and geographer, chiefly remembered as an explorer of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. He is also noted for his pioneering studies on tephrochronology, desertification, and the development of bogs.
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Karl Alfred von Zittel
1839 - 1904 (65 years)
Karl Alfred Ritter von Zittel was a German palaeontologist best known for his Handbuch der Palaeontologie . Biography Karl Alfred von Zittel was born in Bahlingen in the Grand Duchy of Baden. His father, Karl was a leading liberal cleric in Baden. He was educated at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Paris and the University of Vienna. For a short period he served on the Geological Survey of Austria, and as assistant in the mineralogical museum at Vienna. In 1863, he became teacher of geology and mineralogy in the polytechnic at Karlsruhe, and three years later he succeeded Alber...
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Paul Heinrich von Groth
1843 - 1927 (84 years)
Paul Heinrich Ritter von Groth was a German mineralogist. His most important contribution to science was his systematic classification of minerals based on their chemical compositions and crystal structures.
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Otto Wilhelm Hermann von Abich
1806 - 1886 (80 years)
Otto Wilhelm Hermann von Abich was a German mineralogist and geologist. Full member of St Petersburg Academy of Sciences . Biography He was born in Berlin and educated at the local university. His earliest scientific work is related to spinels and other minerals. Later he made special studies of fumaroles, of the mineral deposits around volcanic vents, and of the structure of volcanoes. In 1842 he was appointed professor of mineralogy in the university of Dorpat , and henceforth gave attention to the geology and mineralogy of the Russian Empire. Residing for some time at Tiflis, he investigated the geology of the Armenian Highland and Caucasus.
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Florence Bascom
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Florence Bascom was an American pioneer for women as a geologist and educator. Bascom became an anomaly in the 19th century when she earned two bachelor's degrees. Earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1882, and a Bachelor of Science in 1884 both at the University of Wisconsin. Shortly after, in 1887, Bascom earned her master's degree in geology at the University of Wisconsin. Bascom was the second woman to earn her PhD in geology in the United States, in 1893. Receiving her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, this made her the first woman to earn a degree at the institution. After earning her doctora...
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Gustav Bischof
1792 - 1870 (78 years)
Karl Gustav Bischof was a German chemist, born in Nuremberg. He studied at Erlangen where he became a university lecturer in 1815. In 1819 he was appointed to the position of an extra-Ordinary Professor of Chemistry at Bonn, and in 1822 to that of a full professor. The University of Bonn was a leading center for geologists including Ferdinand von Roemer, Georg August Goldfuss, and Gerhard vom Rath as well as Bischof.
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Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
1829 - 1887 (58 years)
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was an American geologist noted for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century. He was also a physician who served with the Union Army during the Civil War.
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Lluís Solé
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Lluís Solé i Sabarís was a Spanish educator and geographer. Life Born in the city of Gavà, Solé's family moved to Lleida when he was still young. In 1926, he met Pau Vila, through whom he discovered geography, and graduated from the University of Barcelona in Natural Sciences three years later. In 1935, he helped found the Catalan Society of Geography, of which he was president from 1972 to 1981.
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Ibn Hawqal
943 - 988 (45 years)
Muḥammad Abū’l-Qāsim Ibn Ḥawqal , also known as Abū al-Qāsim b. ʻAlī Ibn Ḥawqal al-Naṣībī, born in Nisibis, Upper Mesopotamia; was a 10th-century Arab Muslim writer, geographer, and chronicler who travelled from AD 943 to 969. His famous work, written in 977, is called . The date of his death, known from his writings, was after 368 AH/978 AD.
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