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,

#6451

Mario Giovinetto

#81847
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Mario Giovinetto is an Argentine glaciologist, climatologist and geographer. He is a Canadian citizen with permanent resident status in the US. Career Mario Giovinetto was active in polar research beginning in 1952. He participated in projects supported by the National Science Foundation and other federal research agencies in Argentina and Canada. His field work experience includes three expeditions to high-mountain glaciers in the Andes Mountains and in Africa , winter stays at two Antarctic stations , and nine summer-seasons in Antarctica and Greenland . He has logged more than 2,000 ...
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#6452

Antonio Mecozzi

#147472
Overall Influence
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#6453

Eric W. Van Stryland

#147475
Overall Influence
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#6454

Toshioz Hirai

#147487
Overall Influence
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#6455

Amanda Cooper-Sarkar

#139546
Overall Influence
Amanda Margaret Cooper-Sarkar is an English particle physicist. She is an expert on deep inelastic scattering and parton distribution functions. Education & Work Cooper-Sarkar received her DPhil in particle physics from the University of Oxford in 1975. After working as an exchange fellow at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India and then at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics in Tsukuba, Japan, she returned to England as a research associate at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, in 1979. She became a senior fellow at CERN in Geneva in 1983, and...
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#6456

Volker Bromm

#147546
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
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#6457

Ernst Bucher

#147549
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
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#6458

Dan. Haneman

#147553
Overall Influence
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#6459

Paul Fraser Harrison

#147559
Overall Influence
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#6460

Masanori Tachiya

#147587
Overall Influence
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#6461

Dr. D. R. Hadden

#147596
Overall Influence
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#6462

Gilbert Grynberg

#147616
Overall Influence
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#6463

Marvin J. Weber

#147621
Overall Influence
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#6464

Talat Rahman

#143204
Overall Influence
Talat Shahnaz Rahman is a Pakistani condensed matter physicist whose research topics include surface phenomena and excited media, including catalysis, vibrational dynamics, and magnetic excitations. She has also helped develop molecules that can "walk" across a solid surface by moving one part of the molecule while keeping another part attached to the surface. She is UCF Pegasus Professor of Physics at the University of Central Florida.
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#6465

Robert B. Aird

#45606
Overall Influence
1903 - 2000 (97 years)
Robert Burns Aird was an American educator, neurologist and epileptologist. Aird's father, Dr. John Aird, founded Provo General Hospital in Provo, Utah, with two other doctors, Dr. Fred W. Taylor and George E. Robison, in 1903. The hospital was the first general hospital in Utah County. In 1923 the partnership broke up and Dr. John Aird continued the hospital under the name of the Aird Hospital from 1923 to 1939 when Utah Valley Hospital was opened. Robert Aird's grandfather and grandmother, William Aird and Elizabeth McLean, were Scottish immigrants and the family was proud of its heritage, thus the name "Robert Burns" Aird, after the famous Scottish poet.
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#6466

John W. Moore

#147678
Overall Influence
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#6467

Byung Chan Eu

#147685
Overall Influence
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#6468

Joanna Sułkowska

#117744
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Joanna Ida Sułkowska is a Polish physicist and chemist who specializes in biophysics and protein molecular biophysics and theory. She is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Chemistry and the Center of New Technologies at the University of Warsaw.
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#6469

Armin Bunde

#147688
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
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#6470

Richard D. Hazeltine

#147789
Overall Influence
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#6471

Werner Rodejohann

#147793
Overall Influence
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#6472

Taylor L. Hughes

#147806
Overall Influence
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#6473

Sylvia Speller

#107161
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sylvia Speller was born on June 17, 1967, in Haren, Germany. She is a German physicist who obtained her Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Osnabruck and has been a professor in the faculty of mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Rostock since 2012. She teaches and researches experimental physics, specifically, surface and interface physics, nanophysics, and scanning probe methods. Speller is currently a member of the German Physical Society.
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#6474

Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop

#136834
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop is a professor of physics at the University of Queensland and an Officer of the Order of Australia. She has led pioneering research in atom optics, laser micro-manipulation using optical tweezers, laser enhanced ionisation spectroscopy, biophysics and quantum physics.
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#6475

Carsten Bresch

#45546
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Carsten Bresch was a German geneticist and physicist. He was a professor at the University of Freiburg at the Faculty of Biology. Working in Göttingen, Cologne, Dallas, and Freiburg, he was a pioneer of genetics of bacteriophages, writing the standard Classical and Molecular Genetics.
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#6476

Matthias Brack

#147866
Overall Influence
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#6477

Erwin Di Cyan

#147871
Overall Influence
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#6478

Hiroshi Yaśuoka

#147876
Overall Influence
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#6479

Jacquesq Flouquet

#147904
Overall Influence
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#6480

William Douglas Allen

#100625
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
William Douglas Allen was a physicist and electrical engineer. Allen was born on 27 July 1914 in Mussooree, British India. He was educated in South Australia at Prince Alfred College and the University of Adelaide, where he received a BSc in 1935. In 1937, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he completed a D.Phil. in 1940.
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#6481

Fabio Pacucci

#140723
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Fabio Pacucci is an Italian theoretical astrophysicist and science educator, currently at Harvard University and at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He is widely known for his contributions to the study of black holes, in particular the first population of black holes formed in the Universe and high redshift quasars. He discovered the only two candidate direct collapse black holes known so far, and he was in the team that discovered the farthest lensed quasar known. Pacucci is also a science educator, engaged in public talks on astronomy and science in general. Since 2018 he is a collaborator of TED in developing educational videos about science.
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#6482

Robert Norton Thurston

#147951
Overall Influence
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#6483

Teresa Anderson

#110720
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Teresa Mary Anderson is a British physicist and the director of the University of Manchester's Discovery Centre at Jodrell Bank Observatory. She is a professor at the University of Manchester and the curator of science at the Bluedot Festival.
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#6484

Baohua Jia

#147967
Overall Influence
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#6485

Gustaaf Borghs

#147991
Overall Influence
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#6486

Fumihiro Matsukura

#147999
Overall Influence
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#6487

Haley Gomez

#126202
Overall Influence
Haley Gomez MBE, FRAS, FLSW is a Welsh Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University. She studies the formation and evolution of cosmic dust using the Herschel Space Observatory. She is Deputy Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy. She was awarded an Order of the British Empire in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honour’s.
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#6488

Harald Weinfurter

#148028
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
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#6489

Isaac F. Silvera

#148048
Overall Influence
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#6490

Allan N. Kaufman

#148050
Overall Influence
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#6491

David L. Atherton

#148058
Overall Influence
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#6492

Rudolf A. Treumann

#148065
Overall Influence
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#6493

Wilbur Davenport

#47455
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Wilbur B. Davenport Jr. was a professor emeritus of communication science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Early life and education Davenport earned his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Alabama Polytechnic Institute, Auburn University in 1941 where he was a member of Sigma Pi fraternity. He received his master's degree in 1943 from MIT and then served from 1943 to 1946 in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a lieutenant . He returned to MIT and earned his Ph.D. in 1950, just after being named an assistant professor at the...
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#6494

Petr Hořava

#129785
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Petr Hořava is a Czech string theorist. He is a professor of physics in the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on quantum field theory and string theory. Hořava is a member of the theory group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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#6495

Tisato Kajiyama

#148099
Overall Influence
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#6496

Jennifer Dionne

#89981
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Jennifer Dionne is an American scientist and pioneer of nanophotonics. She is currently senior associate vice provost of research platforms at Stanford University, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and an associate professor of materials science and engineering and by courtesy, of radiology. She serves as director of the Department of Energy's "Photonics at Thermodynamic Limits" Energy Frontier Research Center , which strives to create thermodynamic engines driven by light, and she leads the "Extreme Scale Characterization" efforts of the DOE's Q-NEXT Quantum Science Center. She is also an associate editor of the ACS journal Nano Letters.
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#6497

Zenghu Chang

#148088
Overall Influence
Zenghu Chang is a laser researcher in the Physics department at the University of Central Florida who is an author and coauthor of over 350 articles which carry the h-index of 39. His team developed the world's shortest laser pulse in 2013 and was given $6.9 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. to strengthen the pulses for ultrafast sensors. He is partnering with researchers from other Universities on the project. Since 2018 he is fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
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#6498

Rolf-peter Kudritzki

#148126
Overall Influence
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#6499

Ludovic Berthier

#148127
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
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#6500

Dante Minniti

#148178
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
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