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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

William Warntz

1922 - 1988 (66 years)

William Warntz was an American mathematical geographer based at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis. He was a "pioneer in mathematical approaches to spatial analysis". Life Warntz studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania, gaining a PhD there. His papers are held at Cornell University Library.

#3852

William John McCallien

1902 - 1981 (79 years)

William John McCallien FRSE FGS OBE was a 20th-century Scottish geologist and artist. He is known generally as William J. McCallien as an author, a common misconception is that he was also the artist known as W. J. McCallien , this was in fact his father.

#3853

Adolph Knopf

1882 - 1966 (84 years)

Adolph Knopf was an American geologist. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, he held professional appointments at the United States Geological Survey, Yale University, and Stanford University. He was primarily a petrologist and mineralogist, though later in his career contributed to geochronology. He performed much of his field work in the western United States, investigating mineral deposits in Alaska, the Boulder Batholith in Montana, and the Gold Country of California.

#3854

Guy D. Smith

1907 - 1981 (74 years)

Guy Donald Smith was a distinguished international soil scientist, who was born in Atlantic, Iowa. Biography Guy graduated from the University of Illinois circa 1929, earned his master's degree from the University of Missouri in 1934, and received his PhD in 1940 from the University of Illinois.

#3855

Adolf Pabst

1899 - 1990 (91 years)

Adolf Pabst was an American mineralogist and geologist. Biography Pabst received in 1925 his bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and in 1928 his Ph.D. in geology and mineralogy at the University of California, Berkeley under George D. Louderbeck with a thesis on mineral inclusionss in the granitic plutons of the Sierra Nevada. For the academic year 1928/29 he won an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship for postdoctoral study; on this postdoc under Victor Moritz Goldschmidt in Oslo, Pabst married Gudrun Lisabeth Bert. After returning to Berkeley, he became in 1929 an instructor, in 1931 an assistant professor, in 1936 an associate professor, and in 1944 a full professor.

#3856

Johan Gunnar Andersson

Johan Gunnar Andersson

1874 - 1960 (86 years)

Johan Gunnar Andersson was a Swedish archaeologist, paleontologist and geologist, closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s. Early life and polar research After studies at Uppsala University, and research in the polar regions, Andersson served as Director of Sweden's National Geological Survey.

#3857

Edward Henry Kraus

1875 - 1973 (98 years)

Edward Henry Kraus was a professor of mineralogy at the University of Michigan and also served as Dean of the Summer Session, 1915–1933, Dean of the College of Pharmacy, 1923–1933, and Dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, 1933–1945.

#3858

Martin Gerard Rutten

1910 - 1970 (60 years)

Martin Gerard Rutten was a Dutch geologist, paleontologist, and biologist. He worked as a professor of geology at the universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht. Rutten was born in Jombang, Indonesia to geologist Louis Martin Robert and biologist Johanna Catharina Pekelharing. He joined the Dutch Youth Association for Nature Study and took an early interest in birds and published briefly on birds observed during his later travels. Like his father, who was a geologist in the oil industry, he took an interest in geology and natural history travelling around the world. He studied at the University of...

#3859

Serge von Bubnoff

Serge von Bubnoff

1888 - 1957 (69 years)

Sergius Nikolajewitsch von Bubnoff was a geologist and geotechnical engineer with Germano-Baltic ancestry who made important contributions to the rebuilding of geological research in East Germany after World War II. Starting in 1922, he was a professor at the University of Breslau. In 1929 he became a professor at the University of Greifswald and in 1950, he started his professorship at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. The Bubnoff unit, which is the unit of measure for the speed of geological processes, is named after him.

#3860

James Edwin Hawley

1897 - 1965 (68 years)

James Edwin Hawley was a Canadian geologist and distinguished Professor of Mineralogy at Queen's University. Biography Hawley was raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master's degree from Queen’s University in 1918 and 1920, respectively. After completing his Masters, Hawley spent three years working in petroleum geology in Alberta, Ecuador, Burma and India. In 1926, he earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He stayed there for three years as an Assistant Professor.

#3861

Julius Büdel

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Julius Büdel was a German geomorphologist noted for his work on the influence of climate in shaping landscapes and landforms. In his work Büdel stressed the importance of inherited landforms in present-day landscapes and argued that many landforms are the result of a combination of processes, and not of a single process. Büdel estimated that 95% of mid-latitude landforms are relict. Büdel studied both cold-climate processes in Svalbard and "tropical" weathering processes in India to understand the origin of the relief of Central Europe, which he argued was a palimpsest of landforms formed at different times and under different climates.

#3862

George Louderback

1874 - 1957 (83 years)

George Davis Louderback was an American geologist, known for identifying and describing benitoite and joaquinite. Biography Louderback was born in San Francisco, and received an A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1896, followed by a Ph.D. in 1899. He married Clara Augusta Henry on October 3, 1899.

#3863

Andrew O'Dell

1909 - 1966 (57 years)

Andrew Charles O'Dell FRSE FRGS FRSGS was a Scottish geographer and antiquarian. A keen railway enthusiast he left a large collection of railway memorabilia to Aberdeen University, known as the O'Dell Collection. He was joint founder of the Institute of British Geographers in 1933.

#3864

Walter George Woolnough

1876 - 1958 (82 years)

Walter George Woolnough was an Australian geologist. Woolnough was born in Brushgrove, Grafton, New South Wales, and attended Sydney Boys High School , Newington College and the University of Sydney. In 1897, as an undergraduate, he accompanied Edgeworth David's expedition to Funafuti Atoll, where Charles Darwin's theory of the formation of coral reefs was tested.

#3865

Percy Viosca

1892 - 1961 (69 years)

Percy Viosca Jr. was a freshwater and marine biologist who specialized in the fauna of Louisiana and in the aquaculture of sportfish. He identified four species of native Louisiana iris and experimented extensively with iris breeding, much like his contemporary Caroline Dormon. He was awarded bachelor's and master's degrees in science at Tulane University, where he was also appointed lecturer.

#3866

Llewellyn Ivor Price

1905 - 1980 (75 years)

Llewellyn Ivor Price was one of the first Brazilian paleontologists. His work contributed not only to the development of Brazilian but also to global paleontology. He collected Staurikosaurus in 1936, the first dinosaur discovered in Brazil.

#3867

George Kish

1914 - 1989 (75 years)

Professor George Kish was an internationally recognized authority known for work in geography and the history of cartography. His professional papers are held at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor.

#3868

Elinor Wight Gardner

1892 - 1980 (88 years)

Elinor Wight Gardner , a geology lecturer at Bedford College, London and research fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, is best known for her field surveys with Gertrude Caton–Thompson of the Kharga Oasis which are now recognized as pioneering interdisciplinary research in Africa.

#3869

Fritiof Fryxell

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

Fritiof M. Fryxell was an American educator, geologist and mountain climber, best known for his research and writing on the Teton Range of Wyoming. Upon the establishment of Grand Teton National Park in 1929, he was named the park’s first naturalist, a position he held for six summers. He was also an accomplished biographer, publishing works on several artists and explorers of the American West.

#3870

Maurice Hill

1919 - 1966 (47 years)

Maurice Neville Hill FRS was a British marine geophysicist. Background Hill was the son of Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Vivian Hill and his wife Margaret Hill, the daughter of John Neville Keynes and sister of John Maynard Keynes. His sister was Polly Hill and his brother the biophysicist David Keynes Hill.

#3871

Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia

Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia

1883 - 1969 (86 years)

Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia FRS was a pioneering geologist in India and among the first Indian scientists to work in the Geological Survey of India. He is remembered for his work on the stratigraphy of the Himalayas. He helped establish geological studies and investigations in India, specifically at the Institute of Himalayan Geology, which was renamed in 1976 after him as the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology. His textbook on the Geology of India, first published in 1919, continues to be in use.

#3872

Noel Benson

1885 - 1957 (72 years)

William Noel Benson FRS FRGS was an English-born research geologist and academic active first in Australia and then New Zealand. After studying geology at the University of Sydney, Benson worked temporarily at the University of Adelaide before returning to Sydney as a demonstrator. After winning an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship in 1910 he left Sydney to study at the University of Cambridge, where he worked until 1913. He returned to Sydney in 1914 as the Macleay Fellow in Geology, leaving in 1917 to become Chair of the Geology Department at the University of Otago, where for many years he was the only lecturer.

#3873

Clarence Glacken

1909 - 1989 (80 years)

Clarence James Glacken was Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He was known for a 1967 magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, that demonstrated how perceptions of the natural environment shaped the course of human events over millennia. He is recognised as a key contributor to the field of environmental history.

#3874

George Jobberns

1895 - 1974 (79 years)

George Jobberns was a New Zealand geographer and educator. Born in 1895 at Te Moana near Geraldine in the foothills of South Canterbury, New Zealand, Jobberns taught the first Geography I course at Canterbury University College in 1934. In 1937 he was appointed lecturer-in-charge of the first independent Department of Geography in New Zealand and in 1942 was elected to the first chair of Geography in New Zealand. On his retirement in May 1960, he was made Professor emeritus of the University of Canterbury. In the 1963 New Year Honours, Jobberns was appointed a Commander of the Order of the B...

#3875

Leif Størmer

1905 - 1979 (74 years)

Leif Størmer was a Norwegian paleontologist and geologist. He was professor of historical geology at the University of Oslo from 1946 to 1975. His father was the mathematician Carl Størmer, and his son the mathematician Erling Størmer.

#3876

Heinrich von Ficker

1881 - 1957 (76 years)

Heinrich von Ficker was a German-Austrian meteorologist and geophysicist who was a native of Munich. He was the son of historian Julius von Ficker . Career From 1911 he was a professor of meteorology at the University of Graz, and from 1923 to 1937 was a professor at the University of Berlin. During his tenure at Berlin, he also spent several years as director of the Prussian Meteorological Institute. From 1937 until his retirement in 1952, he was a professor at University of Vienna and director of the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik .

#3877

Alexei Vasilievich Shubnikov

1887 - 1970 (83 years)

Alexei Vasilievich Shubnikov was a Soviet crystallographer and mathematician. Shubnikov was the founding director of the Institute of Crystallography of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in Moscow. Shubnikov pioneered Russian crystallography and its application.

#3878

Marius Jeuken

1916 - 1983 (67 years)

Marius Jeuken was professor of theoretical biology at the Institute of Theoretical Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, from 1968 until his death. Jeuken was also a member of the Society of Jesus; he joined the Dutch Jesuits in 1934 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946 in Maastricht.

#3879

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.

#3880

Dimitri Nalivkin

1889 - 1982 (93 years)

#3881

Robert Charles Wallace

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 .

#3882

Berend George Escher

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 .

#3883

Giuseppina Aliverti

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.

#3884

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

#3885

Elizabeth Alexander

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...

#3886

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.

#3887

Ida Helen Ogilvie

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.

#3888

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.

#3889

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.

#3890

Johannes Walther

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.

#3891

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...

#3892

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...

#3893

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.

#3894

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...

#3895

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.

#3896

Werner Janensch

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.

#3897

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.

#3898

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.

#3899

Kathleen Sherrard

1898 - 1975 (77 years)

Kathleen Margaret Maria Sherrard was an Australian geologist and paleontologist. Early life and education The daughter of John McInerny, a medical practitioner, and Margaratta Wright , she was born Kathleen McInerny in North Carlton, Melbourne, and later lived in Beijing.

#3900

Gustaaf Adolf Frederik Molengraaff

Gustaaf Adolf Frederik Molengraaff

1860 - 1942 (82 years)

Gustaaf Adolf Frederik Molengraaff was a Dutch geologist, biologist and explorer. He became an authority on the geology of South Africa and the Dutch East Indies. Gustaaf Molengraaff studied mathematics and physics at Leiden University. From 1882 he studied at Utrecht University. As a student he made his first journey overseas when he joined the 1884–1885 expedition to the Dutch Antilles led by Willem Frederik Reinier Suringar and Karl Martin. He became PhD with a thesis on the geology of Sint Eustatius. He studied crystallography in Munich, where he also took the opportunity to study the geo...

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