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. Humboldt's advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
Go to ProfileArthur Newell Strahler
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Arthur Newell Strahler was a geoscience professor at Columbia University who in 1952 developed the Strahler Stream Order system for classifying streams according to the power of their tributaries. Strahler was largely responsible for the shift from qualitative to quantitative geomorphology during the mid 20th century.
Go to ProfileAlfred 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.
Go to ProfileVasily Dokuchaev
1846 - 1903 (57 years)
Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchaev was a Russian geologist and geographer who is credited with laying the foundations of soil science. The Ukrainian city of Dokuchaievsk is named after him. Overview Vasily Vasil'evich Dokuchaev is commonly regarded as the father of soil science, the study of soils in its natural setting. He developed soil science in Russia, and was, perhaps the first person to make wide geographical investigations of different soil types. His great contribution to science was, figuratively, to "put soils on the map".
Go to ProfileWilliam 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.
Go to ProfileHarry Hammond Hess
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Harry Hammond Hess was an American geologist and a United States Navy officer in World War II who is considered one of the "founding fathers" of the unifying theory of plate tectonics. He is best known for his theories on sea floor spreading, specifically work on relationships between island arcs, seafloor gravity anomalies, and serpentinized peridotite, suggesting that the convection of the Earth's mantle was the driving force behind this process.
Go to ProfileWilliam 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.
Go to ProfileAlexander Fersman
1883 - 1945 (62 years)
Alexander Evgenʹevich Fersman was a prominent Soviet Russian geochemist and mineralogist, and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . Early life and education Fersman was born in St. Petersburg on 8 November 1883, to Evgeny Aleksandrovich Fersman, an architect and soldier, and Maria Eduardovna Kessler, a painter and pianist. He began exploring the countryside for minerals and collecting crystals while a young boy at his family's summer estate in Crimea. After graduating with honors from Odessa Classical Gymnasium in 1901, he attended the Mining Academy at Novorossisk, where he found the mineralogy courses so dull he attempted to switch his studies to Art History.
Go to ProfileAuguste Bravais
1811 - 1863 (52 years)
Auguste Bravais was a French physicist known for his work in crystallography, the conception of Bravais lattices, and the formulation of Bravais law. Bravais also studied magnetism, the northern lights, meteorology, geobotany, phyllotaxis, astronomy, statistics and hydrography.
Go to ProfileEdward Norton Lorenz
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
Go to ProfileAlfred Russel Wallace
1823 - 1913 (90 years)
Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.
Go to ProfileCarl 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.
Go to ProfileAndrija Mohorovičić
1857 - 1936 (79 years)
Andrija Mohorovičić was a Croatian geophysicist. He is best known for the eponymous Mohorovičić discontinuity and is considered one of the founders of modern seismology. Early years Mohorovičić was born in Volosko, Opatija, where his father , was a blacksmith, making anchors. The younger Andrija also loved the sea and married a captain's daughter, Silvija Vernić. They had four sons. Mohorovičić obtained his elementary education in his home town, then continued at the gymnasium of neighbouring Rijeka. He received his higher education in mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Prague in 1875, where one of his professors was Ernst Mach.
Go to ProfileWladimir Köppen
1846 - 1940 (94 years)
Wladimir Peter Köppen ; 25 September 1846 – 22 June 1940 Background and education Wladimir Koppen was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. He lived there until he was 20 years old. He died in Graz, Austria. Köppen's grandfather was one of several German doctors invited to Russia by Empress Catherine II to improve sanitation and was later personal physician to the tsar. His son, Wladimir's father, Peter von Köppen , was a noted geographer, historian and ethnographer of ancient Russian cultures and an important contributor to intellectual exchanges between western European slavists and Russian scientists.
Go to ProfileEugeniusz 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 .
Go to ProfileChristian 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.
Go to ProfileJean-Baptiste Lamarck
1744 - 1829 (85 years)
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck , often known simply as Lamarck , was a French naturalist. He was a soldier, biologist, and academic, and an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws.
Go to ProfileTor 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 ...
Go to ProfileRobert E. Horton
1875 - 1945 (70 years)
Robert Elmer Horton was an American civil engineer and soil scientist, considered by many to be the father of modern hydrology. Born in Parma, Michigan, he earned his B.S. from Albion College in 1897. After his graduation, he went to work for his uncle, George Rafter, a prominent civil engineer. Rafter had commissioned a weir study, the results of which Horton analyzed and summarized. In 1900, he was appointed New York District Engineer of the United States Geological Survey.
Go to ProfileCarl 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."
Go to ProfileÉdouard-Alfred Martel
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Édouard-Alfred Martel , the 'father of modern speleology', was a world pioneer of cave exploration, study, and documentation. Martel explored thousands of caves in his native France and many other countries, popularised the pursuit of cave exploration, introduced the concept of speleology as a distinct area of scientific study, maintained an extensive archive, and in 1895 founded , the first organisation devoted to cave science in the world.
Go to ProfileVilhelm Bjerknes
1862 - 1951 (89 years)
Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.
Go to ProfileMuhammad al-Idrisi
1101 - 1166 (65 years)
Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Idrisi al-Qurtubi al-Hasani as-Sabti, or simply al-Idrisi , was an Arab Muslim geographer, cartographer and Egyptologist who for some time lived in Palermo, Sicily at the court of King Roger II. Muhammed al-Idrisi was born in Ceuta then belonging to the Almoravids. He created the Tabula Rogeriana, one of the most advanced medieval world maps.
Go to ProfileFriedrich Ratzel
1844 - 1904 (60 years)
Friedrich Ratzel was a German geographer and ethnographer, notable for first using the term Lebensraum in the sense that the National Socialists later would. Life Ratzel's father was the head of the household staff of the Grand Duke of Baden. Friedrich attended high school in Karlsruhe for six years before being apprenticed at age 15 to apothecaries. In 1863, he went to Rapperswil on the Lake of Zurich, Switzerland, where he began to study the classics. After a further year as an apothecary at Moers near Krefeld in the Ruhr area , he spent a short time at the high school in Karlsruhe and became a student of zoology at the universities of Heidelberg, Jena and Berlin, finishing in 1868.
Go to ProfileFriedrich Mohs
1773 - 1839 (66 years)
Carl Friedrich Christian Mohs was a German geologist and mineralogist. He was the creator of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Mohs also introduced a classification of the crystal forms in crystal systems independently of Christian Samuel Weiss.
Go to ProfileRichard Chorley
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Richard John Chorley was an English geographer, and Professor of Geography at Cambridge University, known as leading figure in quantitative geography in the late 20th century, who played an instrumental role in bringing in the use of systems theory to geography.
Go to ProfileMikhail Lomonosov
1711 - 1765 (54 years)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries were the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. Founder of modern geology, Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.
Go to ProfileWalther Penck
1888 - 1923 (35 years)
Walther Penck was a geologist and geomorphologist known for his theories on landscape evolution. Penck is noted for criticizing key elements of the Davisian cycle of erosion, concluding that the process of uplift and denudation occur simultaneously, at gradual and continuous rates. Penck's idea of parallel slope retreat led to revisions of Davis's cycle of erosion.
Go to ProfileBeno Gutenberg
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Beno Gutenberg was a German-American seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague and mentor of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.
Go to ProfileGeorge M. Sheldrick
1942 - Present (80 years)
George Michael Sheldrick, FRS is a British chemist who specialises in molecular structure determination. He is one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011.
Go to ProfileJames 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.
Go to ProfileRené Just Haüy
1743 - 1822 (79 years)
René Just Haüy FRS MWS FRSE was a French priest and mineralogist, commonly styled the Abbé Haüy after he was made an honorary canon of Notre Dame. Due to his innovative work on crystal structure and his four-volume Traité de Minéralogie , he is often referred to as the "Father of Modern Crystallography". During the French revolution he also helped to establish the metric system.
Go to ProfileCarl-Gustaf Rossby
1898 - 1957 (59 years)
Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby was a Swedish-born American meteorologist who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. He identified and characterized both the jet stream and the long waves in the westerlies that were later named Rossby waves.
Go to ProfileAbraham Gottlob Werner
1749 - 1817 (68 years)
Abraham Gottlob Werner was a German geologist who set out an early theory about the stratification of the Earth's crust and propounded a history of the Earth that came to be known as Neptunism. While most tenets of Neptunism were eventually set aside, Werner is remembered for his demonstration of chronological succession in rockss; for the zeal with which he infused his pupils; and for the impulse he thereby gave to the study of geology. He has been called the "father of German geology".
Go to ProfileAlbrecht 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 raised the international profile of the "Vienna School of physical geography".
Go to ProfileErich von Drygalski
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Erich Dagobert von Drygalski was a German geographer, geophysicist and polar scientist, born in Königsberg, East Prussia. Between 1882 and 1887, Drygalski studied mathematics and natural science at the University of Königsberg, Bonn, Berlin and Leipzig. He graduated with a doctorate thesis about ice shields in Nordic areas. Between 1888 and 1891, he was an assistant at the Geodetic Institute and the Central Office of International Geodetics in Berlin.
Go to ProfileDavid Harvey
1935 - Present (87 years)
David W. Harvey is a British-born Marxist economic geographer, podcaster and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
Go to ProfileAbdul Jabbar Abdullah
1911 - 1969 (58 years)
Abdul Jabbar Abdullah was an Iraqi wave theory physicist, dynamical meteorologist, and President Emeritus of Baghdad University. Abdullah earned his Sc.D. degree in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946, before being appointed head of the Iraqi Teacher Association, and then chairman of the Department of Physics, College of Education, Baghdad. In 1952, he became a visiting research professor in meteorology at New York University, and in 1965 he joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research as a scientific visitor.
Go to ProfilePaul Vidal de La Blache
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Paul Vidal de La Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics. He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.
Go to ProfileJulius von Hann
1839 - 1921 (82 years)
Julius Ferdinand von Hann was an Austrian meteorologist. He is seen as a father of modern meteorology. Biography He was educated at the gymnasium of Kremsmünster and then studied mathematics, chemistry and physics at the University of Vienna, then geology and paleontology under Eduard Suess and physical geography under Friedrich Simony. From 1865 to 1868, he was master at the Oberrealschule at Linz, and in 1865 was invited by Karl Jelinek to become the first editor of the Zeitschrift für Meteorologie. In 1877, he succeeded Jelinek as the director of the Meteorologische Zentralanstalt and was appointed professor of meteorology at the University of Vienna.
Go to ProfileRosalind Franklin
1920 - 1958 (38 years)
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA , RNA , viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which she has been variously referred to as the "wronged heroine", the "dark lady of DNA", the "forgotten heroine", a "feminist icon", and the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology".
Go to ProfileEmil Racoviță
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Emil Gheorghe Racoviță was a Romanian biologist, zoologist, speleologist, and Antarctic explorer. Together with Grigore Antipa, he was one of the most noted promoters of natural sciences in Romania. Racoviță was the first Romanian to have gone on a scientific research expedition to the Antarctic. He was an influential professor, scholar and researcher, and served as President of the Romanian Academy from 1926 to 1929.
Go to ProfileC. H. D. Buys Ballot
1817 - 1890 (73 years)
Christophorus Henricus Diedericus Buys Ballot was a Dutch chemist and meteorologist after whom Buys Ballot's law and the Buys Ballot table are named. He was first chairman of the International Meteorological Organization, the organization that would become the World Meteorological Organization.
Go to ProfileIbn Battuta
1304 - 1369 (65 years)
El-Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta , commonly known as Ibn Battuta, was an Arab-Berber Maghrebi scholar and explorer who travelled extensively in the lands of Afro-Eurasia, largely in the lands of Dar al-Islam, travelling more than any other explorer in pre-modern history, totalling around , surpassing Zheng He with about and Marco Polo with . Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of southern Eurasia, including Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and the Iberian Peninsula. Near the end of his life, he dictated an account of his journeys, titled A Gift to...
Go to ProfileNorman L. Bowen
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Norman Levi Bowen FRS was a Canadian geologist. Bowen "revolutionized experimental petrology and our understanding of mineral crystallization". Beginning geology students are familiar with Bowen's reaction series depicting how different minerals crystallize under varying pressures and temperatures."
Go to ProfileGeorge Hadley
1685 - 1768 (83 years)
George Hadley was an English lawyer and amateur meteorologist who proposed the atmospheric mechanism by which the trade winds are sustained, which is now named in his honour as Hadley circulation. As a key factor in ensuring that European sailing vessels reached North American shores, understanding the trade winds was becoming a matter of great importance at the time. Hadley was intrigued by the fact that winds which should by all rights have blown straight north had a pronounced westerly flow, and it was this mystery he set out to solve.
Go to ProfileJovan Cvijić
1865 - 1927 (62 years)
Jovan Cvijić was a Serbian geographer and ethnologist, president of the Serbian Royal Academy of Sciences and rector of the University of Belgrade. Cvijić is considered the founder of geography in Serbia. He began his scientific career as a geographer and geologist, and continued his activity as a human geographer and sociologist.
Go to ProfileRalph Walter Graystone Wyckoff
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff, Sr. was an American scientist and pioneer of X-ray crystallography. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1949 and Foreign member of the Royal Society, on April 19, 1951.
Go to ProfileArnold Henry Guyot
1807 - 1884 (77 years)
Arnold Henry Guyot was a Swiss-American geologist and geographer. Early life Guyot was born on September 28, 1807, at Boudevilliers, near Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was educated at Chaux-de-Fonds, then at the college of Neuchâtel. In 1825, he went to Germany and resided in Karlsruhe where he met Louis Agassiz, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. From Karlsruhe he moved to Stuttgart, where he studied at the gymnasium. He returned to Neuchâtel in 1827. He determined to enter the ministry and started at the University of Berlin to attend lectures. While pursuing his studies, he also attended lectures on philosophy and natural science.
Go to ProfileMatthew Fontaine Maury
1807 - 1873 (66 years)
Matthew Fontaine Maury was an American astronomer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author, geologist, educator, and naval officer for the United States and then the Confederacy. He was a devout Christian and, after reading Psalm 8:8, was determined to find "the paths of the seas".
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