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,
#551
Richard Dalitz
#17338
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Richard Henry Dalitz, FRS was an Australian physicist known for his work in particle physics. Education and early life Born in the town of Dimboola, Victoria, Dalitz studied physics and mathematics at Melbourne University before moving to the United Kingdom in 1946, to study at the University of Cambridge. His PhD was awarded in 1950 for research on zero-zero transitions in the atomic nucleus supervised by Nicholas Kemmer.
Go to Profile#552
Herwig Schopper
#14699
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Herwig Franz Schopper is a German experimental physicist and was the director general of CERN from 1981 to 1988. Biography Schopper was born in Lanškroun, Bohemia, to a family of Austrian descent. He obtained his diploma and doctorate from the University of Hamburg, studying under Wilhelm Lenz and Rudolf Fleischmann. In 1950–51 he was a research assistant with Lise Meitner at Stockholm and in 1956–57 at the Cavendish Laboratory under Otto Robert Frisch.
Go to Profile#553
Ralph Asher Alpher
#9198
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Ralph Asher Alpher was an American cosmologist, who carried out pioneering work in the early 1950s on the Big Bang model, including Big Bang nucleosynthesis and predictions of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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Fay Dowker
#11381
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Helen Fay Dowker is a British physicist who is a current professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London. Education Dowker attended Manchester High School for Girls. As a student, she was interested in wormholes and quantum cosmology. Having studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, Dowker was awarded the Tyson Medal in 1987 and completed her Doctor of Philosophy for research on spacetime wormholes supervised by Stephen Hawking in 1990.
Go to Profile#555
Semyon Gershtein
#14587
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Semyon Solomonovich Gershtein was a Soviet and Russian physicist. He was an academician of Russian Academy of Sciences since 2003. He was a USSR State Prize laureate. Biography Gershtein was born in Harbin, China. After graduating from the Department of Nuclear Physics in Moscow State University, he worked at a school in Kaluga Oblast until 1954. In 1955, he entered the graduate school of the Institute for Physical Problems.
Go to Profile#556
Rudolf Fleischmann
#11624
Overall Influence
1903 - 2002 (99 years)
Rudolf Fleischmann was a German experimental nuclear physicist from Erlangen, Bavaria. He worked for Walther Bothe at the Physics Institute of the University of Heidelberg and then at the Institute for Physics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research. Through his association with Bothe, he became involved in the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; one of Fleischmann's areas of interest was isotope separation techniques. In 1941 he was appointed associate professor of experimental physics at the newly established Reichsuniversität Straßburg, in France. Late in 1944, he was arrested under the American Operation Alsos and sent to the United States.
Go to Profile#557
Lev Gor'kov
#9652
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Lev Petrovich Gor'kov was a Russian-American research physicist internationally known for his pioneering work in the field of superconductivity. He was particularly famous for developing microscopic foundations of the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity . Gor'kov was a professor of physics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, and a program director in Condensed Matter at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. He was one of the Magnet Lab's founding scientists.
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Simon Mitton
#15383
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Simon Mitton is a British astronomer and writer. He is based at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He has written numerous astronomical works. The most well known of these is his biography of fellow Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle.
Go to Profile#559
Robert F. Christy
#7623
Overall Influence
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
Robert Frederick Christy was a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who was one of the last surviving people to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He briefly served as acting president of California Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#560
Henry Margenau
#10255
Overall Influence
1901 - 1997 (96 years)
Henry Margenau was a German-American physicist and philosopher of science. Biography Early life Born in Bielefeld, Germany, Margenau obtained his bachelor's degree from Midland Lutheran College, Nebraska before his M.Sc. from the University of Nebraska in 1926, and PhD from Yale University in 1929.
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Martin Gutzwiller
#3932
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Martin Charles Gutzwiller was a Swiss-American physicist, known for his work on field theory, quantum chaos, and complex systems. He spent most of his career at IBM Research, and was also an adjunct professor of physics at Yale University.
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Charles L. Bennett
#18087
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe .
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Ivan Wilhelm
#16285
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ivan Wilhelm is a Czech nuclear physicist and former rector of the Charles University in Prague. Wilhelm graduated from the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague with a degree in nuclear physics. Until 1967, he also lectured there. In 1967, Wilhelm was sent to study in the United States. Since 1971, Wilhelm has been a part of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague.
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Ronald N. Bracewell
#8236
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Ronald Newbold Bracewell AO was the Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering of the Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience Laboratory at Stanford University. Education Bracewell was born in Sydney, in 1921, and educated at Sydney Boys High School. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1941 with the BSc degree in mathematics and physics, later receiving the degrees of B.E. , and M.E. with first class honours, and while working in the Engineering Department became the President of the Oxometrical society. During World War II he designed and developed microwave radar eq...
Go to Profile#565
Hagen Kleinert
#6644
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Hagen Kleinert is professor of theoretical physics at the Free University of Berlin, Germany , Honorary Doctor at the West University of Timișoara, and at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in Bishkek. He is also Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Creative Endeavors. For his contributions to particle and solid-state physics he was awarded the Max Born Prize 2008 with Medal. His contribution to the memorial volume celebrating the 100th birthday of Lev Davidovich Landau earned him the Majorana Prize 2008 with Medal. He is married to Dr. Annemarie Kleinert since 1974 with whom he has a ...
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George Volkoff
#12275
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
George Michael Volkoff, was a Russian-Canadian physicist and academic who helped, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, predict the existence of neutron stars before they were discovered. Early life He was born in Moscow. His father was a Russian engineer who emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1924. Unable to find work, his father moved the family to Harbin, Manchuria in 1927 to teach at a technical school. His mother died soon after moving to Harbin. In 1936, Volkoff's father returned to Russia but was exiled to the arctic camps as part of the Great Purge where he would die.
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Jayme Tiomno
#14183
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Jayme Tiomno was a Brazilian experimental and theoretical physicist with interests in particle physics and general relativity. He was member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit. He was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.
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Richard Friend
#7018
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sir Richard Henry Friend is a British physicist who was the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1995 until 2020 and is Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. Friend's research concerns the physics and engineering of carbon-based semiconductors. He also serves as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Research Foundation of Singapore.
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Alexander Skrinsky
#18837
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Skrinsky is a Russian nuclear physicist. He was born in Orenburg and was educated at the high school in the city of Gorky and then at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 1957 he joined the laboratory of Gersh Budker, which was a part of the I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy . Since 1962, Skrinsky has been connected with the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, where he was director from 1977 to 2015.
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Mikhail Lukin
#14521
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mikhail Lukin ; born 10 October 1971 Early life Mikhail "Misha" Lukin was born in Moscow, Russia. He studied physics and mathematics at MIPT, and he graduated in 1993. Following his graduation, he joined Texas A&M University where he wrote a research paper titled Quantum Coherence and Interference in Optics and Laser Spectroscopy that he used for his Ph.D. thesis. Between this and 1994 he was a visiting scientist to Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. Later on he became a postdoc at Texas A&M University and then became a fellow, and later joint director, of the Institu...
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Mario Hamuy
#19212
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mario Andrés Hamuy Wackenhut is a Chilean Astronomer and Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chile and Cerro Calan Observatory. He is well known for his observational work on all classes of supernovae, especially the use of Type Ia and Type II supernovae as measures of cosmic distance.
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John Alexander Simpson
#15018
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
John Alexander Simpson was an American physicist and science educator. He was deeply committed to educating the public and political leaders about science and its implications, most notably as a principal founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a long-time member of the organizations Board of Sponsors.
Go to Profile#573
Erik Verlinde
#8808
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Erik Peter Verlinde is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. He is the identical twin brother of physicist Herman Verlinde. The Verlinde formula, which is important in conformal field theory and topological field theory, is named after him. His research deals with string theory, gravity, black holes and cosmology. Currently, he works at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#574
Ingrid Daubechies
#1650
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#575
Gerry Neugebauer
#12863
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Gerhart "Gerry" Neugebauer was an American astronomer known for his pioneering work in infrared astronomy. Neugebauer was born in Göttingen, Germany and was the son of Otto Neugebauer, an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science, and Grete Bruck. After moving to the United States at age seven, he received his B.A. in physics from Cornell University in 1954 and his Ph.D. in physics from California Institute of Technology in 1960, with a thesis on the photoproduction of negative and positive pions from deuterium.
Go to Profile#576
John Pendry
#8534
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir John Brian Pendry, is an English theoretical physicist known for his research into refractive indices and creation of the first practical "Invisibility Cloak". He is a professor of theoretical solid state physics at Imperial College London where he was head of the department of physics and principal of the faculty of physical sciences . He is an honorary fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and an IEEE fellow. He received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience "for transformative contributions to the field of nano-optics that have broken long-held beliefs about the limitations of the resoluti...
Go to Profile#577
Fayyazuddin
#9643
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Fayyazuddin, also spelled as Fayyaz Uddin , is a Pakistani theoretical physicist, emeritus professor, specialising in theoretical physics and mathematical physics at Quaid-e-Azam University campus National Centre for Physics, Islamabad. He is a senior scientist at the National Center for Physics. Fayyaz is doing research in the fields of quantum mechanics, particle physics, and meson physics. He has published numerous physics papers accompanied by Riazuddin and has co-authored Quantum Mechanics by Fayyazuddin and Riazuddin published in 1990.
Go to Profile#578
Ramamurti Shankar
#9902
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ramamurti Shankar is the Josiah Willard Gibbs professor of Physics at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Education He received his B. Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley .
Go to Profile#579
Val Logsdon Fitch
#8450
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
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Hermann Haken
#5581
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Hermann Haken is physicist and professor emeritus in theoretical physics at the University of Stuttgart. He is known as the founder of synergetics and one of the "fathers" of quantum-mechanical laser theory. He is a cousin of the mathematician Wolfgang Haken, who proved the Four color theorem. He is a nephew of Werner Haken, a doctoral student of Max Planck.
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Zhou Guangzhao
#5566
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Zhou Guangzhao is a Chinese theoretical physicist who served as President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1987 to 1997. Early life and education Zhou Guangzhao was born on May 15, 1929, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. He was the 5th child of the civil engineer Zhou Fengjiu, and the younger brother of biochemist/geneticist Zhou Guangyu. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 1951, and then did graduate work in theoretical physics for three years at Beijing University. He stayed at Beijing Univ. on the faculty after completing his PhD. In 1957 he was sent to the USSR by t...
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Edwin E. Salpeter
#22390
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Edwin Ernest Salpeter was an Austrian–Australian–American astrophysicist. Life Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Salpeter emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens to escape the Nazis. He attended Sydney Boys High School and Sydney University, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1944 and his master's degree in 1945. In the same year he was awarded an overseas scholarship and attended the University of Birmingham, England, where he earned his doctorate in 1948 under the supervision of Sir Rudolf Peierls. He spent the remainder of his career at Cornell University, where he was the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences.
Go to Profile#583
Heinrich Leutwyler
#14652
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Heinrich Leutwyler is a Swiss theoretical physicist, with interests in elementary particle physics, the theory of strong interactions, and quantum field theory. Early life and education Leutwyler went to the Gymnasium in Bern and studied physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the University of Bern. After the diploma in 1960 he went to the US, including Princeton. In 1962 he received his PhD under the supervision of John R. Klauder , for his thesis entitled "Generally covariant Dirac equation and associated Boson Fields."
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Lev Pitaevskii
#12101
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii was a Russian theoretical physicist, who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, low-temperature physics, plasma physics, and condensed matter physics. Together with his PhD supervisor Evgeny Lifshitz and with Vladimir Berestetskii, he was also the co-author of a few volumes of the influential Landau–Lifschitz Course of Theoretical Physics series. His academic status was professor.
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Robert Jastrow
#8963
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Robert Jastrow was an American astronomer and planetary physicist. He was a NASA scientist, populist author and futurist. Education Jastrow attended Townsend Harris High School. He also attended the summer program at Camp Rising Sun. He entered Columbia University for his undergraduate and graduate college, where he earned the BA, MA , and PhD degrees in physics.
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Eric Lerner
#17421
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eric J. Lerner is an American popular science writer and independent plasma researcher. He wrote the 1991 book The Big Bang Never Happened, which advocates Hannes Alfvén's plasma cosmology instead of the Big Bang theory. He is founder, president, and chief scientist of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc. now known as LPPFusion.
Go to Profile#587
Robert Geroch
#8578
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Geroch is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked prominently on general relativity and mathematical physics and has promoted the use of category theory in mathematics and physics. He was the Ph.D. supervisor for Abhay Ashtekar, Basilis Xanthopoulos and Gary Horowitz. He also proved an important theorem in spin geometry.
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Eric Betzig
#4581
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Robert Eric Betzig is an American physicist who works as a professor of physics and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
Go to Profile#589
Irina Rakobolskaya
#21054
Overall Influence
1919 - 2016 (97 years)
Irina Vyacheslavovna Rakobolskaya was a mathematician and physicist who served as the chief of staff of the women's 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment during World War II. After the war she worked as a physicist at Moscow State University and studied cosmic rays. She received numerous high state awards in her career and was awarded the title Honored Scientist of the Russian SFSR in 1990. She co-authored a book with Natalya Meklin-Kravtsova, an aviator from the regiment, titled We Were Called Night Witches about their experiences in the war, as their nickname given by their Germa...
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Andreas Albrecht
#19168
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Andreas J. Albrecht is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is a professor and chair of the physics department at the University of California, Davis. He is one of the founders of inflationary cosmology and studies the formation of the early universe, cosmic structure, and dark energy.
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Dirk ter Haar
#15964
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Dirk ter Haar FRSE FIP DSc was an Anglo-Dutch physicist. Life Dirk ter Haar was born at Oosterwolde in the province Friesland in the north of the Netherlands on 19 April 1919. He studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Leiden. In 1946 he was a research fellow of Niels Bohr at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen , and returned to Leiden in 1948 to obtain his PhD. His supervisor was the renowned Hendrik Kramers and his PhD dissertation was on the origin of the Solar System. From 1947 to 1950 he was a visiting associate professor of physics at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#592
Emil Wolf
#10960
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Emil Wolf was a Czech-born American physicist who made advancements in physical optics, including diffraction, coherence properties of optical fields, spectroscopy of partially coherent radiation, and the theory of direct scattering and inverse scattering. He was also the author of numerous other contributions to optics.
Go to Profile#593
Karl Gordon Henize
#14998
Overall Influence
1926 - 1993 (67 years)
Karl Gordon Henize was an American astronomer, space scientist, NASA astronaut, and professor at Northwestern University. He was stationed at several observatories around the world, including McCormick Observatory, Lamont–Hussey Observatory , Mount Wilson Observatory, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Mount Stromlo Observatory . He was a member of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 15 and Skylab 2, 3, and 4. As a mission specialist on the Spacelab-2 mission , he flew on Space Shuttle Challenger in July/August 1985. He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in...
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Victor J. Stenger
#6517
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Victor John Stenger was an American particle physicist, philosopher, author, and religious skeptic. Following a career as a research scientist in the field of particle physics, Stenger was associated with New Atheism and he authored popular science books. He published twelve books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, including the 2007 best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. His final book was God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos . He was a regular...
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Carl H. Brans
#18792
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Carl Henry Brans is an American mathematical physicist best known for his research into the theoretical underpinnings of gravitation elucidated in his most widely publicized work, the Brans–Dicke theory.
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Manfred Lindner
#24354
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Manfred Lindner is a German physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. He conducts basic research in particle and astro-particle physics. Life and Scientific Work Manfred Lindner studied physics from 1978 bis 1984 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, where he received his PhD in 1987. Subsequently, he was from 1987 to 1989 postdoc at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago and from 1989 to 1991 Fellow at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. After that, Manfred Lindner spent 1991–1993 with a Heisenberg-Fellowship ...
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Robert Brandenberger
#20356
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert H. Brandenberger is a Swiss-Canadian theoretical cosmologist and a professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Biography Brandenberger completed his undergraduate degree at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and went on to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral student under Stephen Hawking at the DAMTP at Cambridge University. He also did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Brandenberger joined the faculty of Brown University in 1987 and then in 2004, he joined McGill University where he is a Canada Research Chair holder.
Go to Profile#598
Peter Bergmann
#11920
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Peter Gabriel Bergmann was a German-American physicist best known for his work with Albert Einstein on a unified field theory encompassing all physical interactions. He also introduced primary and secondary constraints into mechanics.
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Fritz-Albert Popp
#13102
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Fritz-Albert Popp was a German researcher in biophysics, particularly in the study of biophotons. Biography Popp was born in 1938 in Frankfurt. He has a diploma in Experimental Physics , a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics , and a habilitation in Biophysics and Medicine . He was awarded Professorship by the Senate of Marburg University, and lectured at Marburg University from 1973 to 1980.
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William E. Moerner
#4930
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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