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 …
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List of the most influential female people in Physics,
#51
Gabriela González
#24142
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Gabriela Ines González, is a professor of physics and astronomy at the Louisiana State University and was the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration from March 2011 until March 2017. Biography Gabriela González was born on February 24, 1965, in Córdoba, Argentina. She is the daughter of Dora Trembinsky, a professor of mathematics, and Pedro González, a doctor in Economic Sciences. González completed her primary school studies at the Colegio Luterano Concordia in the city of Córdoba, and her secondary school studies at the Instituto Manuel Lucero. An avid student, González received...
Go to Profile#52
Priyamvada Natarajan
#23179
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly with her work in gravitational lensing, and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Go to Profile#53
Michelle Thaller
#21079
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Michelle Lynn Thaller is an American astronomer and research scientist. Thaller is the assistant director for Science Communication at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. From 1998 to 2009 she was a staff scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, and later Manager of the Education and Public Outreach program for the Spitzer Space Telescope, at the California Institute of Technology. She is a frequent on-camera contributor to programming on The History Channel and Science Channel.
Go to Profile#54
Réka Albert
#6533
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.
Go to Profile#55
Elizabeth Rauscher
#21417
Overall Influence
2000 - 2019 (19 years)
Elizabeth A. Rauscher was an American physicist and parapsychologist. She was born in Berkeley, California on March 18, 1937. She died on July 3, 2019 . She was a former researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, and NASA.
Go to Profile#56
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski
#17454
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (31 years)
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is an American theoretical physicist from Chicago who studies high energy physics. She describes herself as "a proud first-generation Cuban-American and Chicago Public Schools alumna". She completed her undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at age 19, earned her PhD from Harvard University at 25 and was a PCTS Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University before joining the faculty of the Perimeter Institute at age 27. According to Google Trends, Pasterski was the #3 Trending Scientist for all of 2017. In 2015, she was named to the Forb...
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Becky Smethurst
#33365
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
Rebecca Smethurst, also known as Dr. Becky, is a British astrophysicist, author, and YouTuber who is a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford. She was the recipient of the 2020 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as the 2020 Mary Somerville Medal and Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics. In 2022, she won the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Award "for research by a post-doctoral fellow in Astronomy whose career has shown the most promising development". As a researcher, Smethurst studies the role that supermassive black holes play in inhibiting different types of galaxies from forming stars.
Go to Profile#58
Lucie Green
#18261
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Lucinda "Lucie" May Green is a British science communicator and solar physicist. Green is a Professor of Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College London . Green runs MSSL's public engagement programme and sits on the board of the European Solar Physics Division of the European Physical Society and the advisory board of the Science Museum.
Go to Profile#59
Nina Byers
#28398
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Nina Byers was a theoretical physicist, research professor and professor of physics emeritus in the department of physics and astronomy, UCLA, and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Contributions Byers received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956.
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Anna Frebel
#38293
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Anna Frebel is a German astronomer working on discovering the oldest stars in the universe. Career Anna Frebel grew up in Göttingen, Germany. After finishing high school, she began studying physics in Freiburg im Breisgau but did not finish the physics program and did not obtain a physics degree there. Instead she enrolled in an astronomy program in Australia, where she obtained a PhD in Astronomy from the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra. A W. J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship brought her to the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, where she continu...
Go to Profile#61
So-Young Pi
#30230
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
So-Young Pi is a South Korean physicist. So-Young Pi's father was the Korean writer Pi Chun-deuk. She attended Seoul National University, graduating with a degree in physics, before moving to the United States to pursue a doctorate in the subject at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Pi then completed postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During her postdoctoral research, Pi met and later married fellow physicist Roman Jackiw. The two had a son, violinist Stefan Jackiw.
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Elena Aprile
#34502
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Elena Aprile is an Italian-American experimental particle physicist. She has been a professor of physics at Columbia University since 1986. She is the founder and spokesperson of the XENON Dark Matter Experiment. Aprile is well known for her work with noble liquid detectors and for her contributions to particle astrophysics in the search for dark matter.
Go to Profile#63
Pamela L. Gay
#27140
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Pamela L. Gay is an American astronomer, educator, podcaster, and writer, best known for her work in astronomical podcasting and citizen science astronomy projects. She is a senior education and communication specialist and senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute. Her research interests include analysis of astronomy data, as well as examination of the impact of citizen science initiatives. Gay has also appeared as herself in various television documentary series.
Go to Profile#64
Dorrit Hoffleit
#18507
Overall Influence
1907 - 2007 (100 years)
Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was an American senior research astronomer at Yale University. She is best known for her work in variable stars, astrometry, spectroscopy, meteors, and the Bright Star Catalog. She is also known for her mentorship of many young women and generations of astronomers.
Go to Profile#65
Françoise Combes
#24290
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Françoise Combes is a French astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a professor at the Collège de France where she has been the chair of Galaxies and cosmology since 2014. On 15 September 2017 the 'City of Success' school at Montpellier was renamed as 'High school Françoise Combes'.
Go to Profile#66
Dilhan Eryurt
#18936
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Dilhan Eryurt was a Turkish astrophysicist who made major contributions to scientific research on the formation and evolution of the Sun and other main sequence stars. From 1961 to 1973, Eryurt worked for NASA, performing research for the Apollo program. She then established the astrophysics department at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She was the Dean of METU's science and arts faculty from 1988 to 1993.
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Fumiko Yonezawa
#9577
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Fumiko Yonezawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist. She was the first woman to be appointed as the President of the Physical Society of Japan and the first Japanese to have studied at Keele University, Staffordshire, United Kingdom. She was one of the founding members of the Department of Physics at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Japan. Her research covered semi-conductors and liquid metals. She led a group of scientists and pioneered in visualising computer simulation.
Go to Profile#68
Guinevere Kauffmann
#25066
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Guinevere Alice Mei-Ing Kauffmann was born in California. She is an astrophysicist and is known for her work studying galaxies among other subjects. Academic career Kauffmann obtained a B.Sc. in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in 1988 and an M.Sc. in astronomy in 1990. She obtained her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in 1993, working with Simon White, whom she later married.
Go to Profile#69
Jenny Nelson
#28769
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Areas of Specialization: Photovoltaic Cells, Multi-scale Modelling of Molecular Electronic Materials Jenny Nelson is Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. Irish by birth, Nelson received her undergraduate education from Churchill College, University of Cambridge. In 1988, she obtained her PhD in physics from the University of Bristol. She wrote her dissertation on the optics of fractal clusters under the supervision of Michael Berry. Since arriving at Imperial College London, Nelson has been associated with the Blackett Laboratory in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, as well as with the Grantham Institute—Climate Change and the Environment.
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Esther M. Conwell
#14808
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Esther Marley Conwell was a pioneering American chemist and physicist, best known for the Conwell-Weisskopf theory that describes how electrons travel through semiconductors, a breakthrough that helped revolutionize modern computing. During her life, she was described as one of the most important women in science.
Go to Profile#71
Katherine Freese
#29453
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Katherine Freese is a theoretical astrophysicist. She is currently a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics. She is known for her work in theoretical cosmology at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics.
Go to Profile#72
Petra Schwille
#9183
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Petra Schwille is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. In 2010, Schwille received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Go to Profile#73
Xiaowei Zhuang
#11274
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy , a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffr...
Go to Profile#74
Catherine Coleman
#8360
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Catherine Grace "Cady" Coleman is an American chemist, engineer, former United States Air Force colonel, and retired NASA astronaut. She is a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, and departed the International Space Station on May 23, 2011, as a crew member of Expedition 27 after logging 159 days in space.
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Laura Mersini-Houghton
#25015
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Laura Mersini-Houghton is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis and the author of a theory for the origin of the universe that holds that our universe is one of many selected by quantum gravitational dynamics of matter and energy. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.
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Shadia Habbal
#13220
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Shadia Rifa'i Habbal is a Syrian-American astronomer and physicist specialized in Space physics. A professor of Solar physics, her research is centered on Solar wind and Solar eclipse. Life and education She was born as Shadia Na'im Rifa'i in the city of Homs where she finished secondary education, she enrolled in the University of Damascus where she received her bachelor in physics and math. She received a master in physics from the American University of Beirut before receiving her PhD from the University of Cincinnati.
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Patrizia A. Caraveo
#25468
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Patrizia Caraveo is an Italian astrophysicist. Biography Patrizia Caraveo graduated in Physics at the physics department of the University of Milan in 1977. After a period abroad, in 2002 she began working at the Institute of Cosmic Physics in Milan as Director of Research, and is currently Director of the institute. She has worked on several international space missions dedicated to particle physics, starting with the European mission Cos-B. She is currently involved in the European INTEGRAL mission, the NASA Swift mission, the Italian AGILE mission and the NASA Fermi mission, all of which a...
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Mary Tsingou
#7228
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Mary Tsingou is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek descent. She was one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is best known for having coded the celebrated computer experiment with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became an inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing and was a turning point in soliton theory.
Go to Profile#79
Maria Spiropulu
#36516
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Maria Spiropulu is a Greek particle physicist. She is the Shang-Yi Ch'en Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Biography Maria Spiropulu received her bachelor's degree in physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1993, and obtained her PhD with the CDF experiment from Harvard University in 2000. For her doctoral thesis, she applied for the first time in hadron colliders a novel double blind analysis method to search for evidence of supersymmetry. She excluded a large part of the parameter space where SUSY particles were expected to emerge.
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Marcia Bartusiak
#32218
Overall Influence
Marcia F. Bartusiak is an author, journalist, and Professor of the Practice Emeritus of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained in both communications and physics , she writes about the fields of astronomy and physics. Bartusiak has been published in National Geographic, Discover, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, Science, Popular Science, World Book Encyclopedia, Smithsonian, and MIT Technology Review. The author of seven books, she is also a columnist for Natural History magazine.
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Teresa Paneque
#40308
Overall Influence
1997 - Present (27 years)
Teresa Paz Paneque Carreño is a Spanish-Chilean astronomer and writer. Biography Early years and education Paneque was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1997. Her father is a biochemist and her mother a pharmaceutic chemist. When she was five years old, she moved to Glasgow due to her parents' postdoctoral research. At the age of nine, she moved to Chile, and due to her education in Europe, she entered the 6th grade of primary school, two years before the corresponding age; there, she began to be interested by robotics, taking part in the Chile's FIRST Lego League Challenge.
Go to Profile#82
Hiranya Peiris
#38495
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, University College London, and Stockholm University, best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe."
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Prajval Shastri
#41335
Overall Influence
Prajval Shastri is an astrophysicist, formerly at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore and specializes in the area of phenomenology of active galaxies driven by supermassive blackholes using multi-wavelength observations ranging from radio to X-ray wavelengths.
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Augusta H. Teller
#19818
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Augusta Maria "Mici" Teller was a Hungarian-American scientist and computer programmer, involved in the development of the Metropolis algorithm. Life and career Teller was born as Auguszta Mária Harkányi in Hungary, the daughter of Ella/Gabriella and Ede Harkányi, originally Hirsch Sámuel. Her parents were Jewish, but had converted to Christianity. Known as "Mici," she and her brother, Ede, were adopted by their foster father after their biological father's death, who gave them their second last name. In 1924, Ede "Szuki" Schütz-Harkányi introduced Mici to his childhood friend, Edward Teller...
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Claudia de Rham
#28978
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Claudia de Rham is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity, and won the award in 2020.
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Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
#6106
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.
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Meg Urry
#39376
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is currently the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys, but also for her work addressing sexism and sex equality in astronomy, science, a...
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Ibtesam Badhrees
#36352
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Ibtesam Saeed Badhrees is a research scientist in experimental particle physics at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and a Distinguished Fellow of New Westminster College. Badhrees is the first Saudi woman member of CERN. In addition, she is the first Saudi female PhD holder to work in the National Center for Mathematics and Physics in King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. Her research areas are in Experimental Elementary Particle Physics, Astrophysics, Medical Physics and Nuclear Physics. In addition, Badhrees acts as an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Can...
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Bimla Buti
#44726
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Bimla Buti is an Indian physicist and specializes in the field of plasma physics. She was the first Indian woman Physicist Fellow of Indian National Science Academy. In 1994, she was awarded INSA-Vainu Bappu Award.
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Marcela Carena
#29920
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Marcela Silvia Carena Lopez is an Argentine theoretical physicist, and distinguished scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, where she is also head of the lab's Theory Division. She is also a professor at the University of Chicago, where she is a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.
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Jane Luu
#27468
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jane X. Luu is a Vietnamese-American astronomer and defense systems engineer. She was awarded the Kavli Prize for 2012 "for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system".
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Chryssa Kouveliotou
#44704
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Chryssa Kouveliotou is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at George Washington University and a retired senior technologist in high-energy astrophysics at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
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Elizabeth Roemer
#32406
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Elizabeth "Pat" Roemer was an American astronomer and educator who specialized in astronomy with a particular focus on comets and minor planets. She was well-known for the recovery of lost comets, as well as for her discovery of two asteroids, the co-discovery of Jupiter's moon Themisto, and for the asteroid 1657 Roemera that was named in her honor.
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Nancy Roman
#12681
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Nancy Grace Roman was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and motions. The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".
Go to Profile#95
Sally Dawson
#44221
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Sally Dawson is an American physicist who deals with theoretical elementary particle physics. Education and career Dawson studied mathematics and physics at Duke University with a bachelor's degree in 1977 and at Harvard University with a master's degree in 1978 and a doctorate in 1981 with thesis advisor Howard Georgi and thesis Radiative Corrections to sin2θW. She was a postdoc at Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . From 1986 she was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she became a senior scientist in 1994 and a group leader in 1998. From 2001 to the present, she is an adjunct professor at the C.
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Eva Crane
#19082
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Eva Crane born Ethel Eva Widdowson was a researcher and author on the subjects of bees and beekeeping. Trained as a quantum mathematician, she changed her field of interest to bees, and spent decades researching bees, traveling to more than 60 countries, often in challenging conditions.
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Bruria Kaufman
#11449
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Bruria Kaufman was an American theoretical physicist. She contributed to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, to statistical physics, where she used applied spinor analysis to rederive the result of Lars Onsager on the partition function of the two-dimensional Ising model, and to the study of the Mössbauer effect, on which she collaborated with John von Neumann and Harry Lipkin.
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Laura A. Lopez
#52514
Overall Influence
Laura A. Lopez is an associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State University studying the life cycle of stars. She was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2016, which is awarded by the American Astronomical Society for outstanding research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher.
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Wilhelmina Iwanowska
#43970
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Wilhemina Iwanowska was a Polish astronomer and the first astrophysics professor in Poland. Iwanowska was pioneer of astrophysics in Polish science. Childhood and family Wilhemina Iwanowska was born to a noble family on the borderlands of Poland, however, she did not come from money.
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Tara Shears
#33266
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Tara Georgina Shears is a Professor of Physics at the University of Liverpool. Early life Shears was born in Salisbury in Wiltshire. She remained in Wiltshire, living in Wootton Rivers and attending the co-educational comprehensive school Pewsey Vale School, where she was inspired by her chemistry teacher. The school had no sixth form, and her parents moved to Wedhampton , where she attended the co-educational independent school Dauntsey's School, which offered many state scholarships at the time — many of the pupils were state-funded. At A-level she studied Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Engl...
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