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.
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List of the most influential female people in Physics,
#1451
Jane Dewey
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Jane Mary Dewey was an American physicist. Early life and education Jane Mary Dewey was born in Chicago, the daughter of philosopher John Dewey and educator Alice Chipman Dewey. Her parents named her in honor of Jane Addams, an activist, sociologist and reformer; and Mary Rozet Smith, a philanthropist who was Addams's longtime companion.
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Elizabeth Laird
1874 - 1969 (95 years)
Elizabeth Rebecca Laird was a Canadian physicist who chaired the physics department at Mount Holyoke College for nearly four decades. She was the first woman accepted by Sir J. J. Thomson to conduct research at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. In her later life she studied electromagnetic radiation for military and medical applications.
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Beryl May Dent
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Beryl May Dent was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from the University of Bristol with First Class Honours in applied mathematics. She was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student a...
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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...
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Margaretta Palmer
1862 - 1924 (62 years)
Margaretta Palmer was an American astronomer, one of the first women to earn a doctorate in astronomy. She worked at the Yale University Observatory at a time when woman were frequently hired as assistant astronomers, but when most of these women had only a high school education, so Palmer's advanced degree made her unusual for her time.
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Julie Vinter Hansen
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Julie Marie Vinter Hansen was a Danish astronomer. Life Early life Vinter Hansen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Education While studying at the University of Copenhagen, she was appointed a computer at the University's observatory in 1915. In the pre-electronic era, computers were humans that worked doing hand calculations at the direction of astronomers. She was the first woman to hold an appointment at the University. She was later appointed observatory assistant and, in 1922, observer.
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Sarah Frances Whiting
1847 - 1927 (80 years)
Sarah Frances Whiting was an American physicist and astronomer. She was one of the founders and the first director of the Whitin Observatory at Wellesley College. She instructed several notable astronomers and physicists, including Annie Jump Cannon.
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Louise Sherwood McDowell
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Louise Sherwood McDowell was an American physicist and educator. She spent most of her career as a professor of physics at Wellesley College and is best known for being one of the first female scientists to work at the United States Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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Ida Barney
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Ida Barney was an American astronomer, best known for her 22 volumes of astrometric measurements on 150,000 stars. She was educated at Smith College and Yale University and spent most of her career at the Yale University Observatory. She was the 1952 recipient of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy.
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Marie Curie
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie , known simply as Marie Curie , was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University o...
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Hertha Wambacher
1903 - 1950 (47 years)
Hertha Wambacher was an Austrian physicist. Education After having obtained the general certificate of education from the girls' high school run by the Association for the Extended Education of Women in 1922, she studied first chemistry, then physics at the University of Vienna.
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Maria Pogonowska
1897 - 2009 (112 years)
Maria Pogonowska was a Polish-Israeli scientist of Jewish origin. She was a doctor of physics. Biography Maria Asterblum was born in Warsaw. Her father was Maurycy, a lawyer and her mother Salomea. In 1915, she entered the Warsaw University, newly opened after the Russians left Warsaw, studying physics. She was one of only four women admitted in the first year of studies. In 1924, she became the first doctor promoted by the Department of Physics; her doctoral advisor was Stefan Pieńkowski. She worked as a senior assistant at the Department of Experimental Physics at Warsaw University and has ...
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Elisabeth Rotten
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Elisabeth Friederike Rotten was a Quaker peace activist and educational progressive. Life As daughter to the Swiss couple Moritz and Luise Rotten, she attended the "höhere Mädchenschule Luisenschule" during 1888-1898, later studying at the Victoria-Lyzeum Berlin from 1904. In September 1906 she took the Reifeprüfung at the Kaiserin Augusta-Gymnasium Charlottenburg. She graduated in her studies in philosophy and German language and literature in Heidelberg, Berlin, Marburg and Montpellier. In Marburg she met with Hermann Lietz and Gustav Wyneken, which was vital to the future development of her thinking.
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Gladys Mackenzie
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Gladys Isabel Harper was a Scottish physicist who studied X-rays. She taught physics at Newnham College, Cambridge and was a research fellow of the University of Bristol. She conducted research in X-ray physics, focusing on topics such as alpha particles, X-ray monochromatization, and spectroscopy. Her research of alpha particles proved that the theory of Gaunt can also be applied to molecular hydrogen. She also developed through her research of crystal and slit systems a quantitative general theory for analysis of composite radiation and production of monochromatic beams. She attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with an MA and BSc in mathematics and natural philosophy.
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Isabelle Stone
1868 - 1966 (98 years)
Isabelle Stone was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society. She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Early life and education Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago. She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890, and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University. Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.
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Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Geertruida Luberta de Haas-Lorentz was a Dutch physicist and the first to perform fluctuational analysis of electrons as Brownian particles. Consequently she is considered to be the first woman to work in electrical noise theory.
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Édmée Chandon
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Édmée Marie Juliette Chandon was an astronomer known for being the first professional female astronomer in France. She worked at the Paris Observatory from 1908 until her retirement in 1941. Biography The eldest of five children, Chandon was born to Marie Duhan and merchant François Chandon on 21 November 1885 in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. In July 1906, she completed her degree in Mathematical Sciences at the Faculté des sciences de Paris. She began working at the Paris Observatory in November 1908 as a trainee, where she met Jacques Jean Trousset after he joined her team in January 1909.
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Ruth Stokes
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.
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Fanny Gates
1872 - 1931 (59 years)
Fanny Cook Gates was an American physicist, an American Physical Society fellow and American Mathematical Society member. She made contributions to the research of radioactive materials, determining that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively. More specifically, Gates showed that the emission of blue light from quinine was temperature dependent, providing evidence that the emitted light is produced from phosphorescence rather than radioactive decay.
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Laura Bassi
1711 - 1778 (67 years)
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti was an Italian physicist and academic. Recognized and depicted as "Minerva" , she was the first woman to have a doctorate in science, and the second woman in the world to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Working at the University of Bologna, she was also the first salaried female teacher in a university. At one time the highest paid employee of the university, by the end of her life Bassi held two other professorships. She was also the first female member of any scientific establishment, when she was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute o...
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Klara Döpel
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Klara Renate Döpel was a feminist and a German lawyer until 1933. Then she married the German nuclear physicist Robert Döpel, and they worked together as a team at Leipzig University studying nuclear reactor configurations for the German nuclear energy project. Klara was killed in an air raid near the end of World War II.
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Phoebe Waterman Haas
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Phoebe Waterman Haas was one of the earliest American women to be awarded a doctorate in astronomy . While her formal professional career ended upon her marriage, she contributed as a citizen scientist, volunteering for the American Association of Variable Star Observers . The Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory was supported by donations from her family and is named in her honor.
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Gladys Anslow
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Gladys Amelia Anslow was an American physicist who spent her career at Smith College. She was the first woman to work with the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education Anslow was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to John Anslow and Ella Iola Leonard. Anslow attended Springfield Central High School and entered Smith College in 1909. While studying at Smith College, Anslow was a member of the Mathematical Society and served as vice president of the Physics Club. In her second year, Anslow elected a focus on physics under Frank Allan Waterman. Following her graduation with an A.B.
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Mary Taylor Slow
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Mary Taylor Slow was a British physicist who worked on the theory of radio waves and the application of differential equations to physics. She was the first woman to take up the study of radio as a profession.
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Caroline Furness
1869 - 1936 (67 years)
Caroline Ellen Furness was an American astronomer who taught at Vassar College in the early twentieth century. She studied under Mary Watson Whitney at Vassar and was the first woman to earn a PhD in astronomy from Columbia.
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Franziska Seidl
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Franziska Seidl was an Austrian physicist. She was professor for experimental physics at the University of Vienna. One of her main research areas was ultrasound. Biography Franziska was born in Vienna to Franz and Maria Vicari, née Anton, who were proprietors of a small business. She attended primary and secondary school and received musical education. In 1911, she married Wenzel Seidl , a physics and mathematics teacher at a gymnasium in Hranice, Moravia. They lived in Hranice until Wenzel was conscripted in World War I, and died in 1916 at the Isonzo Front.
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Pearl I. Young
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Pearl I. Young became the first female technical employee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , which evolved to become today's NASA. She became Chief Technical Editor at NACA's Langley Instrument Research Laboratory, and an engineering professor.
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Alexandra Glagoleva-Arkadieva
1884 - 1945 (61 years)
Alexandra Andreevna Glagoleva-Arkadieva was a Russian and Soviet physicist known for her research on medical imaging using X-rays, mechanisms for generating microwaves, and spectrometry in the far infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. She was the first Russian woman to become internationally known for her physics research.
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Betty Louise Turtle
1941 - 1990 (49 years)
Betty Louise Turtle was an Australian astronomer and physicist. In 1971, with her colleague Paul Murdin, she identified the powerful X-ray source Cygnus X-1 as the first clear candidate for a black hole.
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Angelina Cabras
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Angelina Cabras was an Italian mathematician and physicist. She earned degrees in mathematics from the University of Turin in 1924 and in physics from the University of Cagliari in 1927. She obtained a position in mathematical physics at Cagliari, later moving to the institute of theoretical mechanics there. Her research concerned higher dimensional rigid body dynamics, the theory of relativity, and inductance.
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Anna McPherson
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Anna Isobel McPherson was a Canadian physicist and the first female professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University. Early life and education McPherson received a B.A. degree in Mathematics and Physics with First Class Honors from McGill University in 1921. There she received the Anne Molson Gold Medal for excellence, awarded to the best student in physics, mathematics, and physical science at McGill.
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Zinaida Aksentyeva
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Zinaïda Mikolaïevna Aksentieva was a Ukrainian/Soviet astronomer and geophysicist. Life Aksentieva or Aksentyeva was born in Odessa in 1900. She graduated from Odessa Institute of Public Education in 1924. She worked on mapping gravity and her observatory was one of the first to be able to accurately find the centre of the earth. She worked in Poltava Observatory. She became the observatory director in 1951. Her areas of study were tidal deformation of the earth and gravimeter Earth profiles.
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Florence Lewis
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Florence Parthenia Lewis was an American mathematician and astronomer. Early life and education Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Lewis attended the University of Texas for her undergraduate degree, which she received in 1897, and Radcliffe College for a master's degree, which she received in 1906. She earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in astronomy and mathematics.
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Bice Sechi-Zorn
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Bice Sechi-Zorn was an Italian/American nuclear physicist, and professor at the University of Maryland. Life She graduated from University of Cagliari. She met her husband, Gus T. Zorn, at the University of Padua. They both worked at the University of Maryland. She was a professor of physics beginning from 1976 to 1984.
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Mary Acworth Evershed
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
Mary Acworth Evershed was a British astronomer and scholar. Her work on Dante Alighieri was written under the pen name M.A. Orr. Early life Mary Acworth Orr was born to Lucy Acworth and Andrew Orr on 1 January 1867 at Plymouth Hoe. Her father was an officer in the Royal Artillery. Mary grew up in Wimborne and South Stoke in Somerset. Mary’s youngest brother was the colonial administrator Charles William James Orr.
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Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider was a German-Australian physicist and philosopher. She is best known for her collaboration and correspondence with physicists Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and Max Planck. Rosenthal-Schneider earned a PhD in philosophy in 1920 at the University of Berlin, where she first met Albert Einstein. After leaving Nazi Germany and emigrating to Australia in 1938, she became a tutor in the German department at the University of Sydney in 1945 and taught history and philosophy of science. In the 1940s and 1950s, she exchanged a series of letters with Albert Einstein about philo...
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Alysia D. Marino
Alysia Diane Marino is an American experimental particle physicist. She is the Jesse L. Mitchell Endowed Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2022, Marino was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "major contributions to understanding the physics of neutrino production and interactions, and for leadership in data analysis in the T2K and NA61/SHINE collaborations."
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Nadiashda Galli-Shohat
1879 - 1948 (69 years)
Nadiashda or Nadejda Galli-Shohat was a Russian physicist. Born Nadiashda Kokaoulina in Siberia, she graduated from the Women's University of Petrograd in 1903, joined the Bolshevik Party after the 1905 Russian Revolution, and took the name Galli upon marrying her first husband. She received her doctorate from Göttingen in 1914, worked at the Yekaterinburg Meteorological Observatory from 1915 to 1917, and from 1917 to 1922 was professor and chair of the physics department at Ural Federal University, after which she worked at the University of Petrograd's State Optical Institute. Together with...
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Maria Goeppert Mayer
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.
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Lise Meitner
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".
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Frances Woodworth Wright
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Woodworth Wright was an American astronomer based at Harvard University. During World War II, she taught celestial navigation to military officers and engineers. Early life Frances Woodworth Wright was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of George William Wright and Nellie Woodworth Wright. As a child in 1907, Wright wrote a short essay titled "My Favorite Poem", for the popular national children's magazine St. Nicholas. She earned a bachelor's degree at Brown University in 1920. She was granted a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1958, as a student of Fred Whipp...
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Frances Lowater
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Frances Lowater was a British-American physicist and astronomer. Life and career Lowater studied in England for her undergraduate degrees, at University College, Nottingham, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She then moved to the United States, where she attended Bryn Mawr College and earned her Ph.D. in 1906. While studying for her Ph.D., she took a position as a physics demonstrator, and remained in that position until 1910. She spent a year at Westfield College and four years at Rockford College, then moved to Wellesley College, where she spent the rest of her career; with the exception of a...
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Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
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Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
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Vibert Douglas
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Allie Vibert Douglas, , who usually went by her middle name, was a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. Life Douglas was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 15 December 1894. Because both of Douglas' parents died the year she was born, she first lived in London, England with her brother George Vibert Douglas, and her grandmother. Douglas' grandfather was Rev. George Douglas, a prominent Methodist minister and educator. In 1904 both Douglas and her brother returned to Montreal where they attended Westmount High School. Growing up, Douglas was interested in science but felt that her gender was a handicap.
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Alice Hall Farnsworth
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Alice Hall Farnsworth was an American astronomer. She was director of John Payson Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College from 1936 until her retirement in 1957. Early life Alice Hall Farnsworth was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children of Frederick Tudor Farnsworth and Anna Caroline Tufts Farnsworth. As a child, she was an active reader of St. Nicholas magazine, submitting contest entries and winning prizes.
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Henrietta Hill Swope
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.
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Mildred Allen
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Mildred Allen was an American physicist. Biography Early life and education Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson.
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Martha Betz Shapley
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Martha Betz Shapley was an American astronomer known for her research on eclipsing binary stars. Early life Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz and his wife. Her family were descendants of German immigrants, and her grandfather once told her that he had seen astronomer Caroline Herschel in the streets of Hanover in Germany. Her mother and two sisters became schoolteachers, and Shapley herself became a schoolteacher at age 15. Three years later, she began her studies at the University of Missouri, where she earn...
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Carlotta Maury
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.
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