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,
#201
Claire Ellen Max
#47111
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Claire Ellen Max is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is affiliated with the Lick Observatory. She was the Director of the Center for Adaptive Optics at UCSC, 2007-2014. Max received the E.O. Lawrence Award in Physics.
Go to Profile#202
Yaël Nazé
#46701
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Yaël Nazé is a Belgian astrophysicist, author and professor at the University of Liège. She specializes in massive stars and their interactions with their surroundings. In her research, she has worked with images and data collected from various space telescopes and has worked on creating new observation satellites.
Go to Profile#203
Maura McLaughlin
#62485
Overall Influence
Maura McLaughlin is currently an astrophysics professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. She holds a Bachelor's of Science degree from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is known for her work on furthering the research on gravitational waves and for her dedication to the Pulsar Search Collaboratory. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021.
Go to Profile#204
Marika Taylor
#48502
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Marika Maxine Taylor is a Professor of Theoretical Physics, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Birmingham. She started this role in September 2023 after being Head of School for Physics at the University of Southampton.
Go to Profile#205
Vasundara Varadan
#75970
Overall Influence
Vasundara Venkatraman Varadan is a professor emeritus at University of Arkansas and a Fellow of SPIE. Her research considerers microwave sensors and new materials for solar panels. She served on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University for 22 years.
Go to Profile#206
Carolin Crawford
#63708
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Carolin Susan Crawford is a British communicator of science and astrophysicist. She is an emeritus member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge and an emeritus fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#207
Sarah Tuttle
#68555
Overall Influence
Sarah Tuttle is an astrophysicist and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Washington. Tuttle builds spectrographs to detect nearby galaxies, including work on VIRUS installed on McDonald Observatory's Hobby–Eberly Telescope to study dark energy, and FIREBall , the world's first fiber fed ultraviolet spectrograph.
Go to Profile#208
Anja Cetti Andersen
#56976
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Anja Cetti Andersen is an astronomer and astrophysicist from Hørsholm, Denmark. Life She received her BSc in 1991, MSc in astronomy in 1995, and her PhD in 1999, from the University of Copenhagen. Her thesis was titled "Cosmic Dust and Late-Type Stars". Her postdoctoral research was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, firstly at the Department of Astronomy & Space Physics, Uppsala University, and then at the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Copenhagen. After this she was funded by her home institution and received a Diploma in Higher Education Teaching and Teaching Practice from the Faculty of Sciences.
Go to Profile#209
Pascale Ehrenfreund
#30231
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Pascale Ehrenfreund is an Austrian astrophysicist. Ehrenfreund holds degrees from the University of Vienna and Webster Leiden . Prior to becoming a Research Professor of Space Policy and International Affairs at George Washington University, she was a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, Leiden University, and University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She was the first woman president of the Austrian Science Fund and from 2015-2020, she was the CEO of the German Aerospace Center. Since 2019, she is the President of the International Astronautical Federation and since 2018, she is the Chancellor of the International Space University .
Go to Profile#210
Michal Lipson
#40147
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Michal Lipson is an American physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2019, Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices . Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies.
Go to Profile#211
Mary L. Boas
#27521
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Mary Layne Boas was an American mathematician and physics professor best known as the author of Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences , an undergraduate textbook that was still widely used in college classrooms as of 1999.
Go to Profile#212
Virginia Louise Trimble
#61459
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Virginia Louise Trimble is an American astronomer specializing in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies, and the history of astronomy. She has published more than 600 works in Astrophysics, and dozens of other works in the history of other sciences. She is famous for an annual review of astronomy and astrophysics research that was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and often gives summary reviews at astrophysical conferences. In 2018, she was elected a Patron of the American Astronomical Society, for her many years of intellectual, organiz...
Go to Profile#213
Annette Zippelius
#39477
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Annette Zippelius is a German physicist at the University of Göttingen. In 1998 she became a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winner. Her research focuses on complex fluids and soft matter – materials that are intermediate between conventional liquids and solids. Examples are glasses, polymeric melts or solutions, gels and foams, but also granular matter. With her research group she aims at elucidating the underlying principles of self-organization that govern their behavior.
Go to Profile#214
Sharon Glotzer
#23548
Overall Influence
Sharon C. Glotzer is an American scientist and "digital alchemist", the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she is also professor of materials science and engineering, professor of physics, professor of macromolecular science and engineering, and professor of applied physics. She is recognized for her contributions to the fields of soft matter and computational science, most notably on probl...
Go to Profile#215
Paola Caselli
#74620
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Paola Caselli is an Italian astronomer and astrochemist known for her research on molecular clouds, star formation and planet formation, and the astrochemistry behind the materials found within the Solar System. She is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics near Munich in Germany. She also holds an honorary professorship at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Go to Profile#216
Lindy Elkins-Tanton
#36425
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist and professor whose research concerns terrestrial planetary evolution. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.
Go to Profile#217
Laura Ferrarese
#55648
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
Go to Profile#218
Gillian R. Knapp
#70557
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gillian Knapp is a professor of astronomical sciences at Princeton University. She is a faculty fellow at Whitman College. She has been involved in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and she is an active member of the International Astronomical Union.
Go to Profile#219
Sonia Guimarães
#37729
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sonia Guimarães is a Brazilian Professor of Physics at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica. She was the first black Brazilian woman to earn a doctorate in physics and has dedicated her career to improving the representation of black Brazilians in academia.
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Rosaly Lopes
#37411
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Rosaly M. C. Lopes is a planetary geologist, volcanologist, an author of numerous scientific papers and several books, as well as a proponent of education. Her major research interests are in planetary and terrestrial surface processes with an emphasis on volcanology.
Go to Profile#221
Melanie Becker
#58376
Overall Influence
1966 - 2020 (54 years)
Melanie Becker was a physicist known for her research into string theory. She was a tenured professor of physics at Texas A&M University upon her death in 2020. Early life and Education Melanie Becker was originally from Germany but grew up in Malaga, Spain where She graduated from Instituto Nacional de Enseñanza Mixto de Torremolinos in 1987. She received her Diplom in physics focusing on String Theory from the University of Bonn in 1991 while working with Werner Nahm. She simultaneously worked with Luis Álvarez-Gaumé at the particle accelerator at CERN when earning her Diplom. Following her ...
Go to Profile#222
Yolanda Shea
#9865
Overall Influence
Yolanda Shea is a Research Physical Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 2019, Shea earned a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for her work in pioneering shortwave spectral measurements.
Go to Profile#223
Evelyn Hu
#18152
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Evelyn L. Hu is the Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. Hu has made major contributions to nanotechnology by designing and creating complex nanostructures. Her work has focused on nanoscale devices made from compound semiconductors and on novel devices made by integrating various materials, both organic and inorganic. She has also created nanophotonic structures that might someday facilitate quantum computing.
Go to Profile#224
Jane Rigby
#64851
Overall Influence
Jane Rebecca Rigby is an American astrophysicist who works at the Goddard Space Flight Center and is Senior Project Scientist at the James Webb Space Telescope. She was selected one of Nature's 10 Ones to Watch in 2021 and Shape 2022.
Go to Profile#225
Margaret G. Kivelson
#45792
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Margaret Galland Kivelson is an American space physicist, planetary scientist, and distinguished professor emerita of space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2010 to the present, concurrent with her appointment at UCLA, Kivelson has been a research scientist and scholar at the University of Michigan. Her primary research interests include the magnetospheres of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Go to Profile#226
Indumathi D.
#21635
Overall Influence
Indumathi D. is an Indian particle physicist and a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences , Chennai, India. She has been an active member of the Indian Neutrino Observatory project since its inception.
Go to Profile#227
Jenny Greene
#77475
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Jenny Greene is an Astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She is notable for her work on supermassive black holes and the galaxies in which they reside. Her work also involves a partnership with the Princeton Gravity Initiative and as co-founder and academic advisor to the Prison Teaching Initiative at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#228
Catherine Cesarsky
#29751
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Catherine Jeanne Cesarsky is an Argentine and French astronomer, known for her successful research activities in several central areas of modern astrophysics. She was formerly president of the International Astronomical Union and the director general of the European Southern Observatory . In 2017 she became Chairman of the Board of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project.
Go to Profile#229
Paula Szkody
#71689
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paula Szkody is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle. She served as president of the American Astronomical Society from 2020 to 2022. Early life and education Szkody was born on July 17, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan. She earned her B.A. degree in astrophysics at Michigan State University in 1970, and her Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington in 1975.
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Anne-Christine Davis
#61055
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Anne-Christine Davis is a British theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. She was the first woman to be appointed a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University. Her research mainly concerns cosmology, astrophysics and string theory.
Go to Profile#231
Nai-Chang Yeh
#33652
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Nai-Chang Yeh is a Taiwanese-American physicist specializing in experimental condensed matter physics. Early life and education She was born and grew up in Chiayi, Taiwan and received her B. Sc. from National Taiwan University in the capital Taipei City in 1983. She went to the US for graduate education and obtained her Ph.D. in physics in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#232
Marcia J. Rieke
#69468
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Marcia Jean Rieke is an American astronomer. She is a Regents' Professor of Astronomy and associate department head at the University of Arizona. Rieke is the Principal Investigator on the near-infrared camera for the James Webb Space Telescope . She has also served as the deputy-Principal Investigator on the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer for the Hubble Space Telescope , and as the co-investigator for the multiband imaging photometer on the Spitzer Space Telescope, where she also acted as an outreach coordinator and a member of the Science Working Group. Rieke was also involved with several infrared ground-based observatories, including the MMT Observatory in Arizona.
Go to Profile#233
Alenush Terian
#28740
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Ālenush Teriān was an Iranian-Armenian astronomer and physicist and is called 'Mother of Modern Iranian Astronomy'. Early life She was born on November 9, 1921, to an Armenian family in Tehran, Iran. Her father, Arto, was a stage director, poet and translator who had translated Shahnameh, from Persian to Armenian. Her mother, Varto Terian, was a stage actress and director.
Go to Profile#234
Ruth Gregory
#45284
Overall Influence
Ruth Ann Watson Gregory is a British mathematician and physicist, currently Head of Department of Physics and Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London. Her fields of specialisation are general relativity and cosmology.
Go to Profile#235
Vinod Krishan
#52339
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Vinod Krishan , is an Indian physicist, a Senior Professor and dean of sciences at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. She is involved in teaching and research in Plasma Physics. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and the 1991 recipient of the Vikram Sarabhai Award for Space Sciences.
Go to Profile#236
Rachel Rosen
#44949
Overall Influence
Rachel A. Rosen is a physicist and Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research involves quantum field theory, cosmology, astrophysics and massive gravity. In particular, she has investigated the problem of the inconsistencies known as "ghosts," and how to formulate models of massive gravity that avoid them.
Go to Profile#237
Anneila Sargent
#57759
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Professor Anneila Isabel Sargent FRSE DSc is a Scottish–American astronomer who specializes in star formation. Biography Sargent was brought up in Burntisland, Fife, and schooled at Burntisland Primary School and Kirkcaldy High School. She completed a BSc Honours degree in Physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1963, and then immigrated to the United States, first studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and then from 1967 the California Institute of Technology, where she was awarded her Ph.D in 1977. She is currently the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus at Caltech ...
Go to Profile#238
Madge Adam
#59403
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Madge Gertrude Adam was an English solar astronomer who was the first postgraduate student in solar physics at the University of Oxford observatory. Early life and education Adam was born the youngest of three children near Highbury, North London, where her father was a teacher at Drayton Park School. With the start of World War I, he enlisted and was killed in action at Ypres in 1918 causing her mother and siblings to relocate to Yorkshire to live with her mother's parents. She became ill at the age of nine and spent a year at the Liverpool Open-Air Hospital to treat her skeletal tuberculosi...
Go to Profile#239
Françoise Brochard-Wyart
#55613
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Françoise Brochard-Wyart is a French theoretical physicist. Currently, she is a professor of theoretical soft matter physics at the Curie Institute. Biography Born in Saint-Étienne, Brochard-Wyart studied at École normale supérieure de Cachan from 1964 to 1968 and obtained a degree in physics. Following her degree she studied for a PhD in liquid crystals under the supervision of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. She obtained her PhD in 1974.
Go to Profile#240
Louise Prockter
#35478
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Louise Prockter is a planetary scientist and former supervisor of the Planetary Exploration Group at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. In 2016 the Universities Space Research Association announced the appointment of Prockter as Director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, effective September 6, 2016. She was the first woman to serve as LPI Director and led the LPI from 2016 to 2020. She is currently Chief Scientist, Space Exploration Sector, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Go to Profile#241
Nathalie Deruelle
#59763
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nathalie Deruelle is a French physicist specializing in general relativity and known for her research on the two-body problem in general relativity and on cosmological perturbation theory. Education and career Deruelle began her studies at the École normale supérieure in 1971, earned an agrégation in 1975, then, after visiting positions at the European Space Agency and the University of Cambridge, completed a doctorate in 1982 at Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Go to Profile#242
JoAnne L. Hewett
#75565
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
JoAnne L. Hewett is a theoretical particle physicist on the faculty of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, where she is a professor in the Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics. Since 2017 she has been the associate lab director of the Fundamental Physics Directorate and the chief research officer at SLAC. Her research interests include physics beyond the Standard Model, dark matter, and hidden dimensions. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
Go to Profile#243
Michelle Simmons
#29833
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Michelle Yvonne Simmons is an Australian quantum physicist, recognised for her foundational contributions to the field of atomic electronics. She is founding director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology, and is Scientia Professor of Quantum Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#244
Mei-Yin Chou
#84831
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mei-Yin Chou is a Taiwanese physicist. Background Chou earned a bachelor's degree in physics from National Taiwan University, followed by a master's degree and doctorate in the same field, both from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed postdoctoral research with Exxon, and joined the Georgia Institute of Technology faculty in 1989. Chou received a two-year fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation between 1990 and 1992, as well as a five-year fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation .
Go to Profile#245
Luisa Cifarelli
#79715
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Luisa Cifarelli FInstP is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Bologna. She is the Director of the La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento. Early life and education Cifarelli was born in Rome in 1952, daughter of Michele Cifarelli, an Italian politic and magistrate. She studied physics at the University of Bologna and graduated in 1975. She worked as a researcher in at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and CERN. She edited the collection of scientific studies for the publication QCD at 200 TeV. In 1988 she was made an associate professor at L'Università degli Studi d...
Go to Profile#246
Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente
#84016
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente is an astrophysicist working as a professor at the University of Barcelona. Her work has included research on type Ia supernovae. In 2004, she led the team that searched for the companion star to the white dwarf that became supernova SN 1572, observed by Tycho Brahe, among others. Ruiz-Lapuente's research on supernovae contributed to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Go to Profile#247
Maria Strømme
#51691
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Maria Strømme, is a Norwegian physicist who lives and works in Sweden. Career She became a professor in nanotechnology at Uppsala University in 2004. She became Sweden's youngest professor in a technical subject. Strømme holds a master of science degree in engineering physics, and completed her doctoral thesis in solid state physics in 1997 at Uppsala University. She became a scientist at Naturvetenskapliga forskningsrådet. Between 2002 and 2007, she worked as an academy physicist and she was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Te...
Go to Profile#248
Amy Barger
#67484
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Amy J. Barger is an American astronomer and Henrietta Leavitt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is considered a pioneer in combining data from multiple telescopes to monitor multiple wavelengths and in discovering distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, which are outside of the visible spectrum. Barger is an active member of the International Astronomical Union.
Go to Profile#249
Jedidah Isler
#78032
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jedidah C. Isler is an American astrophysicist, educator, and an active advocate for diversity in STEM. She became the first African-American woman to complete her PhD in astrophysics at Yale in 2014. She is currently an assistant professor of astrophysics at Dartmouth College. Her research explores the physics of blazars and examines the jet streams emanating from them. In November 2020, Isler was named a member of Joe Biden's presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Go to Profile#250
Nia Imara
#44258
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nia Imara is an American astrophysicist, artist, and activist. Imara's scientific work deals with galactic mass, star formation, and exoplanet detection. Imara was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in the Future Faculty Leaders program at Harvard University. In 2020, Imara joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy.
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