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 people in Physics,
#5451
Allan. Rosencwaig
#133017
Overall Influence
#5452
Avinash Khare
#133027
Overall Influence
#5453
Cheuk‐yin Wong
#133050
Overall Influence
#5454
Amihay Hanany
#133070
Overall Influence
#5455
Herman Z. Cummins
#123996
Overall Influence
1933 - 2010 (77 years)
Herman Z. Cummins was an experimental physicist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the City College of New York. He studied at Ohio State University, at the University of Paris, and at Columbia University. After a postdoc with Charles Townes at Columbia Radiation Laboratory, he pursued the tenure track at Johns Hopkins University. In 1971 he returned to New York, where he hold from 1974 to 2004 a Distinguished Professorship at the City College. He was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award and a Docteur Honoris Causa of the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris .
Go to Profile#5456
Laszlo Solymar
#133105
Overall Influence
#5457
Chandan Dasgupta
#120666
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Chandan Dasgupta , is an Indian theoretical physicist known for his contributions in condensed matter physics and statistical physics. He is at present a professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He was the former dean of Undergraduate Program at Indian Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#5458
Alexei P. Sokolov
#133121
Overall Influence
#5459
Victoria Meadows
#128332
Overall Influence
Victoria Suzanne Meadows is a Professor with the Astronomy Department and Director of the Astrobiology Program at the University of Washington. She is also the Principal Investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory Lead Team and the chair of the NAI Focus Group on Habitability and Astronomical Biosignatures . The research direction of the team is to create computer models that can be used to understand planet formation, stability and orbital evolution, and to simulate the environment and spectra of planets that can potentially be habitable.
Go to Profile#5460
Albert J. Sievers
#133135
Overall Influence
#5461
Keith Nugent
#86722
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Keith Alexander Nugent FAA is an Australian physicist. He is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University in Canberra. He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President at La Trobe University, Victoria, and a Laureate Professor of Physics at the University of Melbourne, specialising in X-ray optics and optical physics.
Go to Profile#5462
H Schuitemaker
#133168
Overall Influence
#5463
Boris V. Chirikov
#133173
Overall Influence
#5464
Manfred Scholer
#133177
Overall Influence
#5465
Ruben Gerardo Barrera
#64347
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ruben Gerardo Barrera is a Mexican physicist, professor emeritus at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . His main interest has been the optical properties of inhomogeneous systems. Born in Mexico City, he studied at UNAM in Mexico City, graduating in physics in 1965. In 1971 he obtained a PhD in physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After a year's post-doctoral work at the University of Frankfurt and another at the Physikalisches Institut of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen in Aachen he returned to UNAM in Mexico as an Assistant Professor i...
Go to Profile#5466
Alain Barrat
#133241
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
#5467
Massimo Locati
#133242
Overall Influence
#5468
Bela G. Fejer
#133246
Overall Influence
#5469
Eric Van Stryland
#80634
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Eric Van Stryland was president of the Optical Society of America in 2005. Eric Van Stryland received the Physics PhD degree in 1976, from the University of Arizona, Optical Sciences Center, Tucson, Arizona, where he worked on optical coherent transients and photon counting statistics. He worked in the areas of femtosecond pulse production, multiphoton absorption in solids, and laser induced damage at the Center for Laser Studies at the University of Southern California. He joined the Physics Department at the University of North Texas in 1978 helping to form the Center for Applied Quantum Electronics.
Go to Profile#5470
John-Michael Kendall
#115571
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
John-Michael Kendall is a Geophysicist and Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford. Education Kendall was educated at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1984 and a PhD in 1991 supervised by Colin J. Thomson.
Go to Profile#5471
Jack Randolph Jokipii
#133302
Overall Influence
#5472
Arthur F. Hebard
#122113
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Arthur Foster Hebard is Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He is particularly noted for leading the discovery of superconductivity in Buckminsterfullerene in 1991.
Go to Profile#5473
Michael J. S. Levine
#133375
Overall Influence
#5474
Helmut K. Schmidt
#133387
Overall Influence
#5475
David Kleinfeld
#133413
Overall Influence
#5476
Pierre Gaspard
#133433
Overall Influence
#5477
Ilya G. Usoskin
#133446
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#5478
Peter C. Eklund
#133465
Overall Influence
#5479
Eiichiro Komatsu
#133470
Overall Influence
#5480
Georges Aad
#133486
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
#5481
Belita Koiller
#65259
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Belita Koiller is a Brazilian Professor of Physics at the Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro , Brazil. She is a Condensed Matter Theorist, and has contributed to the understanding of the properties of disordered solids, particularly disordered chains and semiconductor alloys. More recently, she has been interested in quantum control of individual electron spin and charge in semiconductors, aiming at applications in quantum information and quantum computing.
Go to Profile#5482
Michael Pollak
#133536
Overall Influence
#5483
Joachim Seelig
#53582
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joachim Heinrich Seelig is a German physical chemist and specialist in NMR Spectroscopy. He is one of the founding fathers of the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. He reached emeritus status in 2012.
Go to Profile#5484
Jean P. Brodie
#88008
Overall Influence
Jean P. Brodie is a British astrophysicist. She is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an astronomer at the Lick Observatory. Education Brodie has a B.Sc. from the University of London and a Ph.D. from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#5485
Kim Venn
#52644
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Kim A. Venn is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria, Canada, and director of the university's Astronomy Research Centre. She researches the chemo-dynamical analysis of stars in the galaxy and its nearby dwarf satellites.
Go to Profile#5486
Jeanette Epps
#35266
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jeanette Jo Epps is an American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut. Epps received both her M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, where she was part of the rotor-craft research group and was a NASA GSRP Fellow. She was chosen for the 20th class of NASA astronauts in 2009, graduating in 2011. Epps currently serves as a member of the ISS Operations Branch and has completed analog astronaut missions, including NEEMO 18 and CAVES 19. She is the second woman and first African-American woman to have participated in CAVES. She has been selected to fly to...
Go to Profile#5487
Tom Tombrello
#121577
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Tom Tombrello was a Caltech H. Goddard Professor of Physics. He earned B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in physics, all at Rice University. He studied nuclear reactions in the 1960s, which helped show how chemical elements are created.
Go to Profile#5488
Phiala E. Shanahan
#111932
Overall Influence
Phiala Elisabeth Shanahan is an Australian theoretical physicist who lives and works in the United States. She is known for her work on the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei and her innovative use of machine learning techniques in lattice quantum field theory calculations.
Go to Profile#5489
Ru‐shan Wu
#133612
Overall Influence
#5490
Hao Chung Henry Kuo
#133640
Overall Influence
#5491
Robert Magnusson
#133641
Overall Influence
#5492
Eduardo R. Caianiello
#74026
Overall Influence
1921 - 1993 (72 years)
Eduardo Renato Caianiello was an Italian physicist. He contributed to scientific research, especially in quantum theory and cybernetics. He was also a pioneer in the theory of neural networks. His Caianiello's equation formalized the theory of Hebbian learning.
Go to Profile#5493
Harold Max Rosenberg
#115785
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Harold Max Rosenberg , was a distinguished experimental physicist who is notable for two successful textbooks: Low Temperature Solid State Physics and The Solid State and over one hundred papers mainly about the electrical, thermal and mechanical properties of solids, especially at low temperatures.
Go to Profile#5494
Ernst K. Zinner
#95608
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Ernst Kunibert Zinner was an Austrian astrophysicist, known for his pioneering work in the analysis of stardust in the laboratory. He long had a position in the United States at the Laboratory for Space Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he had earned his doctorate. He came to the United States in the 1960s for graduate work. In addition, Zinner regularly taught at European universities, and other American institutions.
Go to Profile#5495
Wolfram Ruf
#133682
Overall Influence
#5496
Alexander G. Kosovichev
#133685
Overall Influence
#5497
Junsuk Rho
#133686
Overall Influence
#5498
Wolfgang Schlager
#133691
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
#5499
Hiroshi Enatsu
#45453
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Hiroshi Enatsu was a Japanese theoretical physicist who contributed to a relativistic Hamiltonian formalism in quantum field theory. Academic works Enatsu has found that the commutation relation is the commutator is space-time is proper time is Hermitian adjoint is the Dirac delta function, with the aid of the relation
Go to Profile#5500
John Samuel Forrest
#88864
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
John Samuel Forrest FRS was a Scottish-born physicist, writer and Professor Emeritus, University of Strathclyde. Early life and education John Samuel Forrest was born at Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 20 August 1907, one of the three children of Samuel Norris Forrest and his wife Elizabeth. Samuel Norris Forrest was a teacher of mathematics at Hamilton Academy and author of text-books on mathematics, trigonometry and calculus. He also lectured in the Department of Mining at Glasgow Technical College
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