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 people in Physics,
#51
Jacob Bekenstein
#693
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Jacob David Bekenstein was a Mexican, USA and Israeli theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.
Go to Profile#52
Nevill Francis Mott
#980
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Sir Nevill Francis Mott was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating.
Go to Profile#53
Fritjof Capra
#306
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American author, physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. In 1995, he became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College.
Go to Profile#54
George Zweig
#1776
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George Zweig is an American physicist of Jewish origin. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model . He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.
Go to Profile#55
Rainer Weiss
#746
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Rainer Weiss currently holds the title of Emeritus Professor of Physics at MIT and also works as an adjunct professor at LSU. He previously also held positions at Tufts University and Princeton University. He was also chair of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) Science Working Group. Weiss completed his bachelor of science degree in 1955 at MIT (after having dropped out briefly), and his PhD in 1962. Native to Berlin, Germany, Weiss’ family emigrated to Prague and then to the U.S. fleeing persecution from the Nazis. Weiss is known as a leading name in gravitational physics and astrophysics....
Go to Profile#56
Munir Ahmad Khan
#514
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Munir Ahmad Khan , , was a Pakistani nuclear reactor physicist who is credited, among others, with being the "father of the atomic bomb program" of Pakistan for their leading role in developing their nation's nuclear weapons during the successive years after the war with India in 1971.
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David Deutsch
#526
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#58
Nathan Rosen
#1017
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Nathan Rosen was an American-Israeli physicist noted for his study on the structure of the hydrogen atom and his work with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox. The Einstein–Rosen bridge, later named the wormhole, was a theory of Nathan Rosen.
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Cumrun Vafa
#979
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Cumrun Vafa is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. Early life and education Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran, Iran on 1 August 1960. He became interested in physics as a young child, specifically how the moon was not falling from the sky, and he later grew his interests in math by high school and was fascinated by how mathematics could predict the movement of objects.
Go to Profile#60
Saul Perlmutter
#1935
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Saul Perlmutter is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P.
Go to Profile#61
Walter Kohn
#402
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Walter Kohn was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density . This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems as well as many new insights, and ...
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Maurice Wilkins
#74
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was a New Zealand-born British biophysicist and Nobel laureate whose research spanned multiple areas of physics and biophysics, contributing to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar. He is known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA.
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Ettore Majorana
#1480
Overall Influence
1906 - Present (118 years)
Ettore Majorana was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. On 25 March 1938, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances after purchasing a ticket to travel by ship from Palermo to Naples.
Go to Profile#64
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
#1130
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Areas of Specialization: Astrophysics, Radio Pulsars Jocelyn Bell Burnell currently holds the title of Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. Previously, she has held professorial and administrative roles at the University of Bath, Princeton University, the Open University, UCL Institute of Education, and University of Southampton. She was also president of the Royal Astronomical Society, president of the Institute of Physics, worked on the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, and was project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Native to Northern Ireland, Bur...
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Sean M. Carroll
#1185
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sean Michael Carroll is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. Formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology department of physics, he is currently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist.
Go to Profile#66
Jeffrey Goldstone
#1850
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Jeffrey Goldstone is a British theoretical physicist and an emeritus physics faculty member at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He worked at the University of Cambridge until 1977. He is famous for the discovery of the Nambu–Goldstone boson. He is currently working on quantum computation.
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Willis Lamb
#1231
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." The Nobel Committee that year awarded half the prize to Lamb and the other half to Polykarp Kusch, who won "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron." Lamb was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom . Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
Go to Profile#68
Lawrence Krauss
#1110
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#69
Andre Geim
#646
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#70
Eugene Parker
#2684
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Eugene Newman Parker was an American solar and plasma physicist. In the 1950s he proposed the existence of the solar wind and that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral, predictions that were later confirmed by spacecraft measurements. In 1987, Parker proposed the existence of nanoflares, a leading candidate to explain the coronal heating problem.
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Paul Davies
#553
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Paul Charles William Davies is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, a professor in Arizona State University and director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He is affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies in Chapman University in California. He previously held academic appointments in the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology.
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Edward Mills Purcell
#1253
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic resonance has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the composition of mixtures. Friends and colleagues knew him as Ed Purcell.
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Leon M. Lederman
#1077
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
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Alexander Markovich Polyakov
#1330
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alexander Markovich Polyakov is a Russian theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1989, at Princeton University, where he is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics Emeritus.
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Vitaly Ginzburg
#782
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett for their "pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."
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Paul Steinhardt
#2580
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Paul Joseph Steinhardt is an American theoretical physicist whose principal research is in cosmology and condensed matter physics. He is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where he is on the faculty of both the Departments of Physics and of Astrophysical Sciences.
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Alexander Vilenkin
#2874
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alexander Vilenkin is the Leonard Jane Holmes Bernstein Professor of Evolutionary Science and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 260 publications.
Go to Profile#78
Kenneth G. Wilson
#820
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism. It was embodied in his fundamental work on the renormalization group.
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Joseph Polchinski
#1945
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Joseph Gerard Polchinski Jr. was an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Biography Polchinski was born in White Plains, New York, the elder of two children to Joseph Gerard Polchinski Sr. , a financial consultant and manager, and Joan , an office worker and homemaker. Polchinski was primarily of Irish descent with his paternal grandfather being Polish.
Go to Profile#80
Burton Richter
#1880
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Burton Richter was an American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory team led by Samuel Ting for which they won Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976. This discovery was part of the November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.
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Mark Oliphant
#900
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Sir Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant, was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played an important role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and in the development of nuclear weaponss.
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Ugo Fano
#2434
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Ugo Fano was an Italian American physicist, notable for contributions to theoretical physics. Biography Ugo Fano was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, Italy. His father was Gino Fano, a professor of mathematics.
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James Cronin
#2217
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
James Watson Cronin was an American particle physicist. Cronin and co-researcher Val Logsdon Fitch were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of kaons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the interactions of subatomic particles are not invariant under time reversal. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
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Toshihide Maskawa
#2155
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Toshihide Maskawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
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Geoffrey Chew
#2539
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Geoffrey Foucar Chew was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for his bootstrap theory of strong interactions. Life Chew worked as a professor of physics at the UC Berkeley since 1957 and was an emeritus since 1991. Chew held a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Chicago. Between 1950 and 1956, he was a physics faculty member at the University of Illinois. In addition, Chew was a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a founding member of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Resea...
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Robert H. Dicke
#2618
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Robert Henry Dicke was an American astronomer and physicist who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity. He was the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University .
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Franco Rasetti
#1651
Overall Influence
1901 - 2001 (100 years)
Franco Dino Rasetti was an Italian physicist, paleontologist and botanist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds.
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Patrick Moore
#1348
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore was a British amateur astronomer who attained prominence in that field as a writer, researcher, radio commentator and television presenter. Moore's early interest in astronomy led him to join the British Astronomical Association at the age of eleven. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and briefly taught before publishing his first book on lunar observation in 1953. Renowned for his expertise in Moon observation and the creation of the Caldwell catalogue, Moore authored more than seventy astronomy books. He hosted the world's longest-running...
Go to Profile#89
Neil deGrasse Tyson
#650
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#90
Ernest Walton
#1087
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was an Irish physicist and Nobel laureate who first split the atom. He is best known for his work with John Cockcroft to construct one of the earliest types of particle accelerator, the Cockcroft–Walton generator. In experiments performed at Cambridge University in the early 1930s using the generator, Walton and Cockcroft became the first team to use a particle beam to transform one element to another. According to their Nobel Prize citation: "Thus, for the first time, a nuclear transmutation was produced by means entirely under human control."
Go to Profile#91
Michio Kaku
#705
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#92
Hermann Bondi
#1851
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Sir Hermann Bondi was an Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist. He is best known for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. He contributed to the theory of general relativity, and was the first to analyze the inertial and gravitational interaction of negative mass and the first to explicate correctly the nature of gravitational waves. In his 1990 autobiography, Bondi regarded the 1962 work on gravitational waves as his "best scientific work".
Go to Profile#93
James Hartle
#2413
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
James Burkett Hartle was an American theoretical physicist. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966, and was a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Hartle is known for his work in general relativity, astrophysics, and interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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Gabriele Veneziano
#2294
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gabriele Veneziano is an Italian theoretical physicist widely considered the father of string theory. He has conducted most of his scientific activities at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and held the Chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the Collège de France in Paris from 2004 to 2013, until the age of retirement there.
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Adam Riess
#2858
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Go to Profile#96
Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov
#2333
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov is a Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist. Novikov put forward the idea of white holes in 1964. He also formulated the Novikov self-consistency principle in the mid-1980s, a contribution to the theory of time travel.
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Roy J. Glauber
#1249
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Roy Jay Glauber was an American theoretical physicist. He was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Born in New York City, he was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch. In this work, published in 1963, he created a model for photodetection and explained the fundamental characteristics of different types of light, such as laser light and light from light bulbs .
Go to Profile#98
Giorgio Parisi
#1505
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro...
Go to Profile#99
Tom Kibble
#2674
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Sir Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble was a British theoretical physicist, senior research investigator at the Blackett Laboratory and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. His research interests were in quantum field theory, especially the interface between high-energy particle physics and cosmology. He is best known as one of the first to describe the Higgs mechanism, and for his research on topological defects. From the 1950s he was concerned about the nuclear arms race and from 1970 took leading roles in promoting the social responsibility of the scientist.
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Holger Bech Nielsen
#2509
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Holger Bech Nielsen is a Danish theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, where he started studying physics in 1961. Work Nielsen has made original contributions to theoretical particle physics, specifically in the field of string theory. Independently of Nambu and Susskind, he was the first to propose that the Veneziano model was actually a theory of strings, leading him to be considered among the fathers of string theory. He was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 2001 for his research. Several physics concepts are named after him, e.g.
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