The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#451
Julian A. Dowdeswell
#78058
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Julian A. Dowdeswell ScD FLSW is a British glaciologist and a Professor of Physical Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and from 2002 to 2021 was the Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute.
Go to Profile#452
Arne Bjerhammar
#17205
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Arne Bjerhammar was a Swedish geodesist. He was professor at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He was born in Båstad, Scania in the south of Sweden. He developed a method used to determine the geoid in gravimetric data, as well as a system for electro-optical measuring of distances. He also did research about the Fennoscandian post-glacial rebound.
Go to Profile#453
Zbigniew Kundzewicz
#81030
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Zbigniew Władysław Kundzewicz – is a Polish hydrologist and climatologist, a professor of Earth Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and of Academia Europaea. Education and employment Zbigniew Kundzewicz earned his undergraduate degree from the Department of Electronics at the Warsaw University of Technology. He earned his doctorate in 1979, followed by his higher doctorate in 1985, both in the physical sciences with a specialization in geophysics and hydrology. Since 1993 he has held the rank of professor of Earth sciences. Since 2010 he has been a corresp...
Go to Profile#454
Mike Kirkby
#75395
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Michael J Kirkby is a British geographer and Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Leeds. Kirkby was educated at the University of Cambridge from which he holds the degrees of BA and PhD. After a lectureship in Geography at the University of Bristol, he was appointed Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Leeds in 1973 and was Chairman of the School of Geography at Leeds three times; from 1978 to 1981, 1984 to 1987 and 1992 to 1995. Kirkby retired from his chair with the title Emeritus Professor in 2002.
Go to Profile#455
Bob White
#42202
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Robert Stephen White is Professor of Geophysics in the Earth Sciences department at Cambridge University and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994. He is Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.
Go to Profile#456
Cynthia Rosenzweig
#79154
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Cynthia E. Rosenzweig is an American agronomist and climatologist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, located at Columbia University, "who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture." She is an adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School and has over 300 publications, over 80 peer-reviewed articles, has authored or edited eight books. She has also served in many different organizations working to develop plans to manage climate change, at the global level with the IPCC as well as in New York City after Hurricane Sandy.
Go to Profile#457
Jacques Bertin
#12493
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Jacques Bertin was a French cartographer and theorist, known from his book Sémiologie Graphique , published in 1967. This monumental work, based on his experience as a cartographer and geographer, represents the first and widest intent to provide a theoretical foundation to Information Visualization, with his most lasting contribution being his set of visual variables that can be used to construct map symbols and other graphical techniques one of then being the Bertin Projection, an innovative map projection type.
Go to Profile#458
David Gubbins
#76814
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
David Gubbins is a British former geophysicist concerned with the mechanism of the Earth's magnetic field and theoretical geophysics. He is Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at Leeds University. Career Gubbins graduated as a geophysicist from Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1968 and received his Ph.D. in 1972. He then studied as a post-doctoral student for three years in the United States at the University of Colorado, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was also assistant professor from 1974 to 1976. In 1976 he returned to...
Go to Profile#459
Martin Siegert
#80869
Overall Influence
Martin J. Siegert is a British glaciologist, a professor at Imperial College London, and co-director of the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and Environment. Born in Walthamstow in East London, Siegert was a pupil at Sudbury Upper Comprehensive School in Suffolk in the early 1980s. He earned a bachelor's degree in Geological Geophysics in 1989 from Reading University, and a PhD in the numerical modelling of large ice sheets from Cambridge University in 1994.
Go to Profile#460
Patrick Michaels
#16776
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Patrick J. Michaels was an American agricultural climatologist. Michaels was a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute until 2019. Until 2007, he was research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, where he had worked from 1980.
Go to Profile#461
John Imbrie
#39202
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
John Imbrie was an American paleoceanographer best known for his work on the theory of ice ages. He was the grandson of William Imbrie, an American missionary to Japan. After serving with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy during World War II, Imbrie earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University. He then went on to receive a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1951. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, and both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981. That same year, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He was awarded the Maurice Ewing Medal in 1986 by the AGU and the William H.
Go to Profile#462
Peter R. Buseck
#81257
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Peter R. Buseck is a Regents Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University . He is a pioneering researcher in the application of transmission electron microscopy to mineralogy, meteoritics, fullerenes and atmospheric chemistry. In 2019 Buseck was awarded the Roebling Medal, the highest award of the Mineralogical Society of America. The scientific journal Nature recognized Buseck's 1978 paper as a milestone in crystallography.
Go to Profile#463
Michael John O'Hara
#68318
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Michael John O'Hara FRS FRSE FLSW was a British geologist who specialised in igneous petrology. Born in Sydney, Australia, and raised in the UK, O'Hara began his geology studies at the UUniversity of Cambridge, earning his undergraduate and PhD degrees.
Go to Profile#464
Adolf Seilacher
#33709
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Adolf "Dolf" Seilacher was a German palaeontologist who worked in evolutionary and ecological palaeobiology for over 60 years. He is best known for his contributions to the study of trace fossils; constructional morphology and structuralism; biostratinomy, Lagerstätten and the Ediacaran biota.
Go to Profile#465
Brian Tucker
#20480
Overall Influence
Brian E. Tucker is an American seismologist specializing in disaster prevention. He is also the founder of GeoHazards International , a non-profit dedicated to ending preventable death and suffering caused by natural disasters in the world’s most vulnerable communities.
Go to Profile#466
Francis J. Pettijohn
#67556
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Francis John Pettijohn was an American geologist who served for many years on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. Pettijohn received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1923 based on a study of Precambrian sedimentology and structure of an area around Abram Lake, Ontario. In 1929 he obtained a position at the University of Chicago. He became a full professor there in 1949. In 1943 he published an important work on Archaean sedimentation. In 1952 he moved to Johns Hopkins University where he remained until retirement in 1973.
Go to Profile#467
Kent Condie
#80581
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Kent Condie is an American geologist and Professor Emeritus of Geochemistry at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He specializes in the origin and evolution of plate tectonics and the continental crust and pioneered work on 'big data' geochemistry.
Go to Profile#468
Katsuhiko Ishibashi
#20037
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
is a professor in the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security in the Graduate School of Science at Kobe University, Japan and a seismologist who has written extensively in the areas of seismicity and seismotectonics in and around the Japanese Islands. He also coined the term genpatsu-shinsai , from the Japanese words for "nuclear power" and "quake disaster".
Go to Profile#469
Kenneth H. Nealson
#87840
Overall Influence
#470
Norman Sleep
#77041
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Norman H. Sleep is an American geophysicist and professor of geophysics at Stanford University. He has done internationally recognized research on plate tectonics and many other areas of geology and planetology.
Go to Profile#471
Amanda Lynch
#60231
Overall Influence
Amanda H. Lynch is an environmental and social scientist, and the Director of the Brown Institute of Environment and Society and Sloan Lindemann and George Lindemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University. She is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
Go to Profile#472
Peter Doran
#25601
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Peter T. Doran is an Americana earth scientist who is Professor of Geology and Geophysics and John Franks Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University. Prior to 2015, he was faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#473
Richard Knabb
#76735
Overall Influence
Richard 'Rick' Knabb is an American meteorologist who served as the 11th Director of the National Hurricane Center from June 4, 2012 to May 12, 2017. On March 21, 2017, Knabb announced his return to The Weather Channel as the tropical weather expert which was the position he held from 2010 to 2012. As a result, he left the position of Director of the NHC.
Go to Profile#474
Andrew D. Miall
#88218
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
#475
Fred Longstaffe
#69293
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Frederick John Longstaffe CM, Ph.D., FRSC is the former Provost and Vice-President at The University of Western Ontario. He is a Earth Science researcher. His current focus is on applying knowledge of stable isotopes to various fields of study.
Go to Profile#476
Josef Zemann
#77321
Overall Influence
1923 - 2022 (99 years)
Josef Zemann was an Austrian mineralogist and geologist. Life and work Zemann was born on 25 May 1923 in Vienna. He studied mineralogy at the University of Vienna where he received his PhD for work with Felix Machatschki in 1946. Zemann worked with Martin J. Buerger at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951 and 1952. He became director of the Institute of Mineralogy and Crystallography of the University of Göttingen. From 1967 until his retirement in 1989 he was head of the Institute of Mineralogy and Crystallography of the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#477
Allan Pred
#40202
Overall Influence
1936 - 2007 (71 years)
Allan Richard Pred was an internationally known American geographer and professor at the University of California at Berkeley He wrote more than 20 books and monographs, translated into seven languages, and over 70 articles and book chapters.
Go to Profile#478
Stephen Self
#73721
Overall Influence
Stephen Self is a British volcanologist, best known for his work on large igneous provinces and on the global impacts of volcanic eruptions. Education and career Self graduated from Leeds University in 1970, with a BSc in geology. He then went to Imperial College to study for a PhD on the recent volcanology of Terceira, Azores, supervised by George P. L. Walker. After completing his PhD thesis in 1974, Self moved to New Zealand as a post-doctoral fellow at Victoria University, Wellington, before moving to the United States as a NASA Research Fellow, first at Dartmouth College from 1977 to 1979 and then at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies .
Go to Profile#479
Stanisław Leszczycki
#68804
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Stanisław Leszczycki was a Polish geographer. He was a professor at the University of Warsaw since 1948 and the Polish Academy of Sciences since 1952 . He was President of the International Geographical Union in 1968–1972, as well as a member of many learned societies and the author of 200 scientific publications on various subdisciplines.
Go to Profile#480
Tim Flannery
#2965
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Timothy Fridtjof Flannery is an Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, explorer, author, science communicator, activist and public scientist. He was awarded Australian of the Year in 2007 for his work and advocacy on environmental issues.
Go to Profile#481
Peter Huybers
#44334
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Peter Huybers is an American climate scientist, and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Life and work Peter Huybers received a B.S. in physics in 1996 from the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a Ph.D. in climate chemistry and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. He was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change in the Geology and Geophysics Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 2004 to 2006.
Go to Profile#482
Harold Williams
#59435
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Harold Williams MSc PhD FRSC was one of the premier field geologists in the history of Newfoundland geology and the foremost expert on the Appalachian Mountains of North America. An expert on the evolution and tectonic development of mountain belts, Williams advanced the theory of colliding super-continents in the 1960s and 1970s by helping to transform the notion of continental drift into the theory of plate tectonics.
Go to Profile#483
Heinrich Holland
#56590
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Heinrich Dieter 'Dick' Holland was an emeritus professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department of Harvard University. He made major contributions to the understanding of the Earth's geochemistry, especially large-scale geochemical and biogeochemical cycles. He has also contributed to the field of planetary chemistry and planetary evolution.
Go to Profile#484
Harsh Gupta
#66305
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Harsh Kumar Gupta is an Indian earth scientist and seismologist, known for his pioneering work on estimation of reservoir-induced earthquakes. He is a former vice chancellor of the Cochin University of Science and Technology and a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the National Geophysical Research Institute , Hyderabad. A recipient of the 1983 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian award in the science and technology category, and the 2008 Waldo E. Smith Award, Gupta was awarded the fourth highest Indian civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 2006.
Go to Profile#485
John Caldwell
#30574
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
John Charles "Jack" Caldwell was an Australian demographer. He researched extensively in Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia since 1959, particularly the fields of fertility transition and health transition. Caldwell had a significant impact on demographic teaching, research and policy formulation.
Go to Profile#486
Claude Raffestin
#61072
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Claude Raffestin is a Swiss geographer. He is professor of human geography at University of Geneva. Raffestin's work primarily deals with territoriality and relies heavily on Michel Foucault’s work about power. His most influential book Pour une géographie du pouvoir has been translated into Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Go to Profile#487
Thomas F. Malone
#63391
Overall Influence
1917 - 2013 (96 years)
Thomas Francis Malone was a noted American geophysicist best known for his contributions to atmospheric science and meteorology. His career ranged from a tenured academic appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to a senior vice presidency at the Travelers Insurance Company, to dean of the graduate school at the University of Connecticut, then Director of the Holcomb Research Institute at Butler University, and finally Executive Scientist for the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.
Go to Profile#488
David Stoddart
#41151
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
David Ross Stoddart, was a British physical geographer known for the study of coral reefs and atolls. He was also known for key works on the history and philosophy of geography as an academic discipline. He was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and then professor and later emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#489
Shi Yafeng
#78486
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Shi Yafeng was Chinese geographer and glaciologist. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was an expert on geography and glaciology, and regarded as the "Father of Chinese Glaciology".
Go to Profile#490
Steven Wofsy
#58266
Overall Influence
Steven C. Wofsy is an American atmosphere and hydrospheric scientist currently Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science at Harvard University and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Awarded the Roger Revelle Medal in 2012.
Go to Profile#491
Roberta Rudnick
#51123
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Roberta L. Rudnick is an American earth scientist and professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and was awarded the Dana Medal by the Mineralogical Society of America. Rudnick is a world expert in the continental crust and lithosphere.
Go to Profile#492
Bruce Houghton
#59001
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Bruce F. Houghton is a New Zealand volcanologist. He was a student at Auckland University, and University of Otago, where he completed a PhD in 1977 on the geology of the Takatimu Mountains in western Southland.
Go to Profile#493
Kay Behrensmeyer
#59112
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Anna Katherine "Kay" Behrensmeyer is an American taphonomist and paleoecologist. She is a pioneer in the study of the fossil records of terrestrial ecosystems and engages in geological and paleontological field research into the ecological context of human evolution in East Africa. She is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History . At the museum, she is co-director of the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems program and an associate of the Human Origins Program.
Go to Profile#494
Henry Charnock
#87453
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Henry Charnock was a British meteorologist., over a water surface by: is the friction velocity is the acceleration due to gravity Charnock was President of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 1971 to 1975.
Go to Profile#495
Chris Turney
#47717
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Christian S. M. Turney is the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Technology Sydney. He was previously the Professor of Climate Change and Earth Science and Director of the Earth and Sustainability Science Research Centre and the Chronos Facility at the University of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#496
Gerard V. Middleton
#73295
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Gerard Viner Middleton FRSC , often known as Gerry Middleton, was a Canadian geologist and university teacher. Biography Middleton was born in South Africa and educated in England. He obtained his batchelors and doctorate degrees from Imperial College, London. He emigrated to Canada in 1954, and taught at McMaster University from 1955 to 1996. Over his career his main fields of research were physical sedimentology, data analysis in geology, and the history of geology. He published over 100 papers in scholarly journals, and several books, including Origin of Sedimentary Rocks , Mechanics in the Earth and Environmental Sciences , and Data Analysis in the Earth Sciences using MATLAB .
Go to Profile#497
Hurd Curtis Willett
#78082
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Hurd Curtis Willett was an American meteorologist known for his role in developing five-day weather forecasting techniques and widely known for his attempts at very long-range forecasting. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Willett grew up on a farm near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated with a B.S. degree from Princeton University in 1924, then worked at the U.S. Weather Bureau, and earned a doctorate in meteorology from George Washington University in 1929. Willett won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study then burgeoning polar front theory, what became known as the Bergen School of Meteorology, in Norway.
Go to Profile#498
Jon Blundy
#60256
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Jonathan David Blundy FRS is Royal Society Research Professor at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford and honorary professor at the University of Bristol. Education He is a graduate of University College, Oxford and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a former Kennedy Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was educated at St Paul's School, Brazil, Giggleswick School and Leeds Grammar School, where petrologists Keith Cox and Lawrence Wager also studied.
Go to Profile#499
Hsiao-Lan Kuo
#50917
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Hsiao-Lan Kuo was a Chinese-American mathematician and meteorologist. He was a recipient of the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal. Career Born in Mancheng County, Hebei Province on February 7, 1915, Kuo obtained his B.Sc. from Tsinghua University , a M.Sc. from Zhejiang University , and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago .
Go to Profile#500
Ernest Gordon Cox
#61981
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Sir Gordon Cox TD KBE FRS was a British crystallographer and structural chemist. He was the father of the British geologist Keith Gordon Cox. Early life and education Cox was born in Twerton, Somerset on 24 April 1906. He was the son of Ernest Henry Cox , a market gardener, and his wife Rosina Ring. He was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School and then read physics at the University of Bristol, graduating in 1927. He was awarded the degree of DSc by Bristol in 1936.
Go to Profile