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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#6151

Amos Maritan

#143206
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Go to Profile
#6152

Manfred H. Rees

#143217
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6153

John Antoniadis

#109642
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
John Antoniadis also known as Ioannis Antoniadis is a Greek astrophysicist. He is mostly known for his research of radio pulsars, a type of rapidly rotating neutron stars. Education Antoniadis was born in Didymoteicho, Greece. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Thessaloniki in 2009 and his Ph.D. in 2013 at the University of Bonn. under the supervision of Michael Kramer.
Go to Profile
#6154

Jesper Mecozzi Mørk

#143226
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6155

Roberto Cardarelli

#143240
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6156

Israel Felner

#143246
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Go to Profile
#6157

Stefano Moretti

#143267
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Go to Profile
#6158

Attipat Krishnaswamy Rajagopal

#143281
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6159

Stuart B. Savage

#143305
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6160

S. Jack Hu

#49883
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Shixin Jack Hu is the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia. He is also the UGA Foundation Distinguished Professor in the school of environmental, civil, agricultural, and mechanical engineering in the UGA College of Engineering.
Go to Profile
#6161

Paul R. Shapiro

#143345
Overall Influence
Paul Robert Shapiro is an American astrophysicist. Shapiro earned a bachelor's degree and doctorate from Harvard University, in 1974 and 1978, respectively, and began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981, after completing postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2006, he was appointed to the Frank N. Edmonds, Jr. Regents Professorship in Astronomy. Shapiro was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010, "[f]or outstanding contributions to astrophysics and cosmology which advanced our understanding of cosmic reionization, structure formation,...
Go to Profile
#6162

Patrick Joseph Mccarthy

#143359
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6163

Nikolai V. Krasnikov

#143367
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6164

Isaac Abella

#82579
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Isaac David Abella was a Canadian physicist who was a professor at the University of Chicago. He specialized in laser physics, quantum optics, and spectroscopy. Isaac was the cousin of Irving Abella.
Go to Profile
#6165

Ilpo Vattulainen

#143398
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Go to Profile
#6166

Eigil Friis-Christensen

#79528
Overall Influence
1944 - 2018 (74 years)
Eigil Friis-Christensen was a Danish geophysicist specializing in space physics. Career Friis-Christensen received a Magisterkonferens in Geophysics from University of Copenhagen in 1971. In 1972, he was a geophysicist at the Danish Meteorological Institute. His interest in solar activity began in August, in his tent, when he experienced an extreme solar storm: "I was in Greenland, on my first assignment in my new job as geophysicist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, setting up a chain of magnetometer stations on the west coast... watching ink pens of my recorder going so wild that t...
Go to Profile
#6167

Leopoldo Pando Zayas

#60848
Overall Influence
Leopoldo A. Pando Zayas is a physicist and string theorist.  He is professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.   Education and career Leopoldo Avelino Pando Zayas grew up in Cuba.  In 1989, when he was a high school student, he won the Silver Medal in the International Physics Olympiad, which took place that year in Warsaw, Poland.
Go to Profile
#6168

Michl Binderbauer

#92695
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michl Binderbauer is an Austrian-American physicist, entrepreneur, and CEO of TAE Technologies, a private company dedicated to commercializing non-radioactive nuclear fusion power and other sustainable technologies. He is a co-inventor of many of the company’s advances in fusion energy, power management, and particle accelerators, and holds 40 issued and pending U.S. patents and a number of international technology patents. Binderbauer has published papers on plasma physics and fusion in peer-reviewed journals including Science, Physical Review Letters and Nature Communications.
Go to Profile
#6169

Robert William Maccormack

#143438
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6170

Ken Carslaw

#136628
Overall Influence
Kenneth S. Carslaw is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds. He was educated at the University of Birmingham and the University of East Anglia . He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2001, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2011 and the American Geophysical Union Ascent Award in 2014. He is a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Scientist.
Go to Profile
#6171

C. Andrew L. Bassett

#143514
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6172

Ralph Edward Durand

#143520
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6173

Dmitrii Nikolaevich Zubarev

#143525
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6174

Sidney Fernbach

#91744
Overall Influence
1917 - 1991 (74 years)
Sidney Fernbach was an American physicist. Life Fernbach studied physics at Temple University and the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as a physicist in the USA. Starting in 1952, he worked at the University of California Radiation Laboratory using computers to research nuclear weapons. He was the originating editor of the book series Methods in Computational Physics and also of The Journal of Computational Physics. In 1992, the Sidney Fernbach Award was established after his death.
Go to Profile
#6175

Chi-yun Kung

#143553
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6176

Leonard N. Horowitz

#143562
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6177

Sara Solla

#37312
Overall Influence
Sara A. Solla is an Argentine-American physicist and neuroscientist whose research applies ideas from statistical mechanics to problems involving neural networks, machine learning, and neuroscience. She is a professor of physics and of physiology at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile
#6178

Christo Pantev

#143575
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6179

Thomas Hamacher

#99316
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Thomas Hamacher is a German physicist and professor in energy system research at the Technical University of Munich. Biography Thomas Hamacher studied physics at Bonn University, at RWTH Aachen and at Columbia University, New York. He received his Doctorate in Natural Sciences from the University of Hamburg in 1994 for his work on baryonic beta decay. He worked between 1996 and 2010 at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching bei München and was head of the Energy and System Studies Group. Since 2010, he has been a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich.
Go to Profile
#6180

Marilyn E. Jacox

Marilyn E. Jacox
#39468
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Marilyn Esther Jacox was an American physical chemist. She was a National Institute of Standards and Technology Fellow and Scientist Emeritus in the Sensor Science Division. Education Jacox was born in Utica, New York, the daughter of Grant and Mary Jacox.
Go to Profile
#6181

Yukio Tanaka

#143699
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6182

Mowafak M. Al‐jassim

#143708
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6183

Suzanne Smrekar

#88210
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Suzanne E. Smrekar is an American geophysicist and Deputy Principal Investigator for the Mars InSight lander and the principal investigator for the planned VERITAS space probe to Venus. Background Smrekar obtained her B.S. degree in geophysics and mathematics from Brown University in 1984, and her doctorate in geophysics from Southern Methodist University in 1990. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT before joining the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1992.
Go to Profile
#6184

Igor Makarikhin

#97333
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Igor Yuryevich Makarikhin is a Russian Physicist, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, who achieved the positions of a professor, a vice-rector of Academic Affairs , was a rector of Perm University. Biography Makarikhin graduated from Alexander Pushkin School No. 9 in Perm and the Faculty of Physics of Perm University .
Go to Profile
#6185

Sriram Subramaniam

#143765
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6186

Adam J. Burgasser

#143767
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6187

Karissa Sanbonmatsu

Karissa Sanbonmatsu
#98970
Overall Influence
Karissa Y. Sanbonmatsu is an American structural biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She works on the mechanism of non-coding RNA complexes including the ribosome, riboswitches, long non-coding RNAs, as well as chromatin. She was the first to perform an atomistic simulation of the ribosome, determine the secondary structure of an intact lncRNA and to publish a one billion atom simulation of a biomolecular complex.
Go to Profile
#6188

Jerzy Nikitorowicz

#44445
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jerzy Nikitorowicz is professor of pedagogics, dr. hab., rector of the University of Białystok, Poland .
Go to Profile
#6189

Joseph L. Dehmer

#143794
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6190

Tom G. Slanger

#143797
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6191

Tara Murphy

#127158
Overall Influence
Prof. Tara Murphy is an Australian Astrophysicist and CAASTRO chief investigator working in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Murphy led a group that first confirmed radio emissions from the 2017 Neutron Star Merger event which provided evidence for a global scientific announcement in the field of gravitational waves.
Go to Profile
#6192

Peter Fowler

#129975
Overall Influence
1923 - 1996 (73 years)
Peter Fowler FRS was a British physicist. Life Fowler was educated at Summer Fields School, Winchester College, and under Cecil Powell at the University of Bristol. Fowler researched primary cosmic radiation, measuring the presence of beryllium, boron, and lithium in cosmic rays. He developed improved methods for measuring cosmic rays, using high-altitude balloons and later jets, and investigated the radiation hazards of high-altitude supersonic flight.
Go to Profile
#6193

Héctor J. De Vega

#143844
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6194

Anna Hasenfratz

#122707
Overall Influence
Anna Hasenfratz is a Hungarian-American theoretical high energy physicist whose research involves non-perturbative theories, especially in lattice quantum chromodynamics. She is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile
#6195

Marco Viceconti

#143873
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Go to Profile
#6196

Paolo Brambilla

#143896
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6197

M. Ronnier Luo M. Ronnier Luo

#143910
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6198

Boon Chye Low

#143926
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6199

Roland A. Madden

#143935
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#6200

Yasushi Takahashi

#63225
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for the Ward–Takahashi identity. Biography 1924 Birth in Osaka1951 B.S. Nagoya UniversityFulbright Scholarships1953 Research associate, University of Rochester1954 D.Sc.1955 Research associate, Iowa State University1957 Scholar, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies1958 Associate Professor, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies1960 Professor, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies1968 Professor, University of Alberta2013 Death in Edmonton
Go to Profile