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).
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List of the most influential female people in Physics,
#1501
Eva von Bahr
1874 - 1962 (88 years)
Eva Wilhelmina Julia von Bahr-Bergius, was a Swedish physicist and teacher at a folk high school. She was the first woman in Sweden to become a docent in physics. She is known for her contact with and support of the poet Dan Andersson, for her friendship and support of the physicist Lise Meitner, and as a Catholic writer.
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Toshiko Yuasa
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Toshiko Yuasa was a Japanese nuclear physicist who worked in France. She was the first Japanese female physicist. Early life and education Yuasa was born in Taitō Ward, Tokyo, in 1909. Her father was an engineer who worked for the Japanese patent office. Her mother was from a traditional literary family – her mother's grandfather was Tachibana Moribe. Toshiko was the second-youngest of seven children. She attended the Division of Science at Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School from 1927 until her graduation in 1931. She then enrolled in the Department of Physics at Tokyo Bunrika University , making her the first woman in Japan to study physics.
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Berta Karlik
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Berta Karlik was an Austrian physicist. She worked for the University of Vienna, eventually becoming the first female professor at the institution. While working with Ernst Foyn she published a paper on the radioactivity of seawater. She discovered that the chemical element 85 astatine is a product of the natural decay processes. The element was first synthesized in 1940 by Dale R. Corson, K. R. MacKenzie, and Emilio Segrè, after several scientists in vain searched for it in radioactive minerals.
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Ștefania Mărăcineanu
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Ștefania Mărăcineanu was a Romanian physicist. She worked with Marie Curie studying the element named for Curie's homeland Polonium. She made proposals that would lead to Irène Joliot-Curie's Nobel Prize. Mărăcineanu believed that Joliot-Curie had taken her work on Induced radioactivity to gain the prize.
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Sameera Moussa
1917 - 1952 (35 years)
Sameera Moussa or Samira Musa Aly was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner "Atoms for Peace." She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.
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Ellen Hayes
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Ellen Amanda Hayes was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was a controversial figure, not only because of being a female college professor, but also for embracing many radical causes. Early life Hayes was born in Granville, Ohio, the first of six children to Ruth Rebecca Hayes and Charles Coleman Hayes. At the age of seven she studied at the Centerville school, a one-room ungraded public school and, in 1867, at sixteen, was employed to teach at a country school. In 1872, she entered the preparatory department at Oberlin College and was admitted as a freshman in 1875, where her mai...
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Charlotte Riefenstahl
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Charlotte Houtermans was a German physicist. Education Riefenstahl began her studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen in 1922, where her teachers included, among others, Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Emmy Noether, Robert Pohl, and Carl Runge. She received her doctorate under Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann in 1927, the same year as Robert Oppenheimer, under Born, and Fritz Houtermans, under Franck. She was courted by both Oppenheimer and Houtermans.
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Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat was a French theoretical physicist. Her physics research focused on relativistic quantum mechanics under the influence of gravity. Along with the help of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, she attempted to propose one of the first unified field theories. She is also known for her work on the history of special and general relativity.
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Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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Klavdiâ Barkhatova
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Klavdiya Aleksandrovna Barkhatova was a Soviet astronomer. She became notable for he studies into stellar astronomy and eventually became a highly respected specialist in the field, producing a large body of scientific works. Kourovka Astronomical Observatory in Kourovka, Sverdlovsk Oblast is named in her honor.
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Agnes Mary Clerke
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Agnes Mary Clerke was an Irish astronomer and writer, mainly in the field of astronomy. She was born in Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland, and died in London. Family Agnes Clerke was the daughter of John William Clerke who was, at the time, a bank manager in Skibbereen, and his wife Catherine Mary Deasy whose father was a judge's registrar. She had two siblings; her older sister, Ellen Mary and her younger brother, Aubrey St. John . Her elder sister Ellen also wrote about astronomy. All of the Clerke children were entirely home schooled.
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