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,
#751
Eva Silverstein
#19346
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Eva Silverstein is an American theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and string theorist. She is a professor of physics at Stanford University and director of the Modern Inflationary Cosmology collaboration within the Simons Foundation Origins of the Universe initiative.
Go to Profile#752
Jean-Pierre Vigier
#13678
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Jean-Pierre Vigier was a French theoretical physicist, known for his work on the foundations of physics, in particular on his stochastic interpretation of quantum physics. Education A native of Paris, Vigier earned his PhD in mathematics from University of Geneva in 1946 with a study on Infinite Sequences of Hermitian Operators. In 1948 he was appointed assistant to Louis de Broglie, a position he held until the latter's retirement in 1962. Vigier was professor emeritus in the Department of Gravitational Physics at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris. He authored more than 300 scientific papers, and co-authored and edited a number of books and conference proceedings.
Go to Profile#753
Alex Zunger
#25944
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alex Zunger is a theoretical physicist, research professor, at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has authored more than 150 papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Reviews B Rapid Communication, has an h-index over 150, number of citations over 113,000 . He co-authored one of the top-five most cited papers ever to be published in the Physical Review family in its over 100 years' history.
Go to Profile#754
Andrzej Buras
#19183
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Andrzej Jerzy Buras is a Polish-born Danish theoretical physicist, professor emeritus at the Technical University Munich . Scientific career He received his master's degree in theoretical physics at the Warsaw University in 1971, and emigrated to Denmark in the same year. One year later, he received his PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute until 1975. After a fellowship in the CERN theory group from 1975–1977 he was first a visitor and then a staff member in the Fermilab theory group from 1977 till 1982. He then became staff member of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich .
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Christopher T. Hill
#24443
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Christopher T. Hill is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who did undergraduate work in physics at M.I.T. , and graduate work at Caltech . Hill's Ph.D. thesis, "Higgs Scalars and the Nonleptonic Weak Interactions" contains one of the first detailed discussions of the two-Higgs-doublet model and its impact upon weak interactions.
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Tomaso Poggio
#2665
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Tomaso Armando Poggio , is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.
Go to Profile#757
Lyman Page
#28925
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Lyman Alexander Page, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He is an expert in observational cosmology and one of the original co-investigators for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe project that made precise observations of the electromagnetic radiation from the Big Bang, known as cosmic background radiation.
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Jeremiah P. Ostriker
#24348
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jeremiah Paul "Jerry" Ostriker is an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University and is the Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he also continues as a senior research scholar. Ostriker has also served as a university administrator as Provost of Princeton University.
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Leonid Keldysh
#9289
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Leonid Veniaminovich Keldysh was a Soviet and Russian physicist. Keldysh was a professor in the I.E. Tamm Theory division of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and a faculty member at Texas A&M University. He is known for developing the Keldysh formalism, a powerful quantum field theory framework designed to describe a system in a non-equilibrium state, as well as for the theory of excitonic insulators . Keldysh's awards include the 2009 Rusnanoprize, an international nanotechnology award, for his work related to molecular-beam epitaxy, the 2011 Evgeni...
Go to Profile#760
Howard Berg
#13212
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Howard Curtis Berg was the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics and professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, where he taught biophysics and studied the motility of the bacterium Escherichia coli .
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Faheem Hussain
#12763
Overall Influence
1942 - 2009 (67 years)
Faheem Hussain , was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and a professor of physics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences . A research scientist in the field of superstring theory at the National Center for Physics, Hussain made contributions to the fields of superstring and string theory. He was the first Pakistani physicist to publish a research paper in the field of superstring theory. A social activist and democratic activist, he authored various scientific research papers in peer-reviewed journals.
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Naresh Dadhich
#31811
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#763
Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain
#15507
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain , known professionally as Ignacio Cirac, is a Spanish physicist. He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research.
Go to Profile#764
Per-Olov Löwdin
#13924
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
Per-Olov Löwdin was a Swedish physicist, professor at the University of Uppsala from 1960 to 1983, and in parallel at the University of Florida until 1993. A former graduate student under Ivar Waller, Löwdin formulated in 1950 the symmetric orthogonalization scheme for atomic and molecular orbital calculations, greatly simplifying the tight-binding method. This scheme is the basis of the zero-differential overlap approximation used in semiempirical theories. In 1956 he introduced the canonical orthogonalization scheme, which is optimal for eliminating approximate linear dependencies of a basis set.
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Rolf Landauer
#6485
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
Rolf William Landauer was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1950, and then spent most of his career at IBM.
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Karen Ter-Martirosian
#15717
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Karen Avetovich Ter-Martirosyan was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist of Armenian descent. He is known for his contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory and the author of several hundred articles in his area.
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Somak Raychaudhury
#16593
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Somak Raychaudhury is an Indian astrophysicist. He is the Vice-Chancellor at Ashoka University and was the Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics , Pune. He is on leave from Presidency University, Kolkata, India, where he is a Professor of Physics, and is also affiliated to the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is known for his work on stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes. His significant contributions include those in the fields of gravitational lensing, galaxy dynamics and large-scale motions in the Universe, including the Great A...
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Sidney van den Bergh
#21381
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Sidney Van den Bergh, OC, FRS is a retired Dutch-Canadian astronomer. He showed an interest in science from an early age, learning to read with books on astronomy. In addition to being interested in astronomy. He also liked geology and archeology. His parents got him science books, a telescope, and a microscope, although they wished him to pursue a more practical career and only follow astronomy as a hobby. He went to Leiden University in the Netherlands from 1947 to 1948. He then attended Princeton University on scholarship where he received his A.B. in 1950. In December 1950, he was living in Columbus, Ohio and evidencing an interest in Astronomy.
Go to Profile#769
Wu Ta-You
#11169
Overall Influence
1907 - 2000 (93 years)
Wu Ta-You was a Chinese physicist and writer who worked in the United States, Canada, mainland China and Taiwan. He has been called the Father of Chinese Physics. Early life and education Wu was born in Panyu, Guangzhou in the last years of the Qing dynasty. In 1929 he took his undergraduate degree at Nankai University in Tianjin . He moved to the United States for graduate schooling and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the University of Michigan in 1933.
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Maurice Karnaugh
#3097
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Maurice Karnaugh was an American physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, and inventor known for the Karnaugh map used in Boolean algebra. Career Karnaugh studied mathematics and physics at City College of New York and transferred to Yale University to complete his B.Sc. , M.Sc. and Ph.D. in physics with a thesis on The Theory of Magnetic Resonance and Lambda-Type Doubling in Nitric-Oxide .
Go to Profile#771
Yoshio Koide
#12808
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
is a Japanese theoretical physicist working in particle physics. Koide is known for his eponymous Koide formula, which some physicists think has great importance but which other physicists contend is merely a numerical coincidence.
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Keiji Kikkawa
#16442
Overall Influence
1935 - 2013 (78 years)
was a Japanese theoretical physicist. Kikkawa received his bachelor's degree from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1959, and a PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1964. After that he conducted research at the University of Tokyo, the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin. From 1970 he was associate professor at City College of New York and from 1974 at the Osaka University. From 1979 he was professor at Hiroshima University. In 1983 he returned to Osaka University where he worked until 1993. Between 2000 and 2004 he was a professor at Kanagawa University.
Go to Profile#773
Grigory E. Volovik
#14991
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Grigory Efimovich Volovik is a Russian theoretical physicist, who specializes in condensed matter physics. He is known for the Volovik effect. Education and career After graduating in 1970 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Volovik became a graduate student at Moscow's Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, where his received his Russian Candidate of Science degree in 1973. His thesis was on Dynamics of a particle strongly interacting with a Bose System. He has held since 1973 an appointment as a staff member of the Landau Institute and since 1993 a simultaneous appointment as a professor at the Low Temperature Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology .
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Boris Struminsky
#16909
Overall Influence
1939 - 2003 (64 years)
Boris Vladimirovich Struminsky was a Russian and Ukrainian physicist known for his contribution to theoretical elementary particle physics. Biography Boris Struminsky was born on 14 August 1939 in Malakhovka, a settlement in Ukhtomsky District , Moscow Oblast, RSFSR, USSR. His father was academician Vladimir Vasilyevich Struminsky .
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Luis Álvarez-Gaumé
#14295
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Luis Álvarez-Gaumé is a Spanish theoretical physicist who works on string theory and quantum gravity. Luis Álvarez-Gaumé obtained his PhD in 1981 from Stony Brook University and worked from 1981 to 1984 at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow, before he moved to Boston University to work as a professor. From 1986 until 2016, Álvarez-Gaumé was a permanent member of the CERN Theoretical Physics unit. In 2016, he became the director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook.
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Dirk Polder
#11069
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Dirk Polder was a Dutch physicist working on solid-state physics, magnetism, molecular physics and nanoscale physics. Together with Hendrik Casimir, Polder first predicted the existence of what today is known as the Casimir-Polder force, sometimes also referred to as the Casimir effect or Casimir force. Using a similar theory, he developed the formalism to treat radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale.
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Greg Moore
#10992
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Gregory W. Moore is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in mathematical physics and string theory. Moore is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of Rutgers University and a member of the University's High Energy Theory group.
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Josh A. Cassada
#25195
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Josh Aaron Cassada is an American physicist, test pilot, and NASA astronaut. Prior to his selection to join NASA in 2013, Cassada served as a test pilot in the US Navy, and has over 3,500 hours in more than 40 aircraft, and 23 combat missions. In August 2018, Cassada was selected for CTS-1, the first operational mission of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, but subsequently reassigned to SpaceX Crew-5.
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Geoffrey C. Fox
#13974
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Geoffrey Charles Fox is a British-born American theoretical physicist and computer scientist, and professor of informatics and computing, and physics at Indiana University. Fox was educated at the Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1964, he was the senior wrangler at Cambridge, the best performer in the mathematics tripos. In the same year, he also played in the annual chess match against Oxford University.
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Gregory P. Laughlin
#27444
Overall Influence
Gregory P. Laughlin is an American astrophysicist who is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Yale University. As a researcher, he is interested in hydrodynamic simulations, the characterization of extrasolar planets and planet-forming environments as well as the far future of the Universe. He has also published a paper on high-frequency trading and was involved in market prediction in 2014.
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Jacques Friedel
#11164
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Jacques Friedel ForMemRS was a French physicist and material scientist. Education Friedel attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school. He studied at the École Polytechnique from 1944 to 1946, and the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris from 1946 to 1948. He graduated from the University of Paris with a licence ès sciences degree in 1948, then studied at the Metallurgy Laboratory of the School of Mines with Charles Crussard. He graduated from the University of Bristol with a PhD in 1952, where he studied with Nevill Francis Mott, and a Doctorat d'Etat in Paris in 1954.
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Herbert Mataré
#5414
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Herbert Franz Mataré was a German physicist. The focus of his research was the field of semiconductor research. His best-known work is the first functional European transistor, which he developed and patented together with Heinrich Welker in the vicinity of Paris in 1948, independent from the Bell Labs engineers who had developed the first transistor shortly before. The final 20 years of his life Mataré split time between his homes in Hückelhoven, Germany and Malibu, California. He was born in Aachen.
Go to Profile#783
Govind P. Agrawal
#28690
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Govind P. Agrawal is an Indian American physicist and a fellow of Optica, Life Fellow of the IEEE, and Distinguished Fellow of the Optical Society of India. He is the recipient of James C. Wyant Professorship of Optics at the Institute of Optics and a professor of physics at the University of Rochester. He is also a Distinguished scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in the University of Rochester. Agrawal has authored and co-authored several highly cited books in the fields of non-linear fiber optics, optical communications, and semiconductor lasers.
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Gordon Baym
#13287
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gordon Alan Baym is an American theoretical physicist. Biography Born in New York City, he graduated from the Brooklyn Technical High School, and received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1960, studying under Julian Schwinger.
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Hans-Arwed Weidenmüller
#33735
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Hans-Arwed Weidenmüller is a German theoretical physicist, who works primarily in the field of nuclear physics. Life and work Weidenmüller studied in Bonn and from 1956 to 1957 in Heidelberg under J. Hans D. Jensen, who was his doctoral thesis advisor for his thesis on stripping reactionss , in which the nuclei used as projectiles lose nucleons to the nuclei used as targets. He was from 1963 professor for theoretical physics at the University of Heidelberg. From 1968 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics and was director there from 1972 until his 2001 retirement.
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Krzysztof Antoni Meissner
#27779
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Krzysztof Antoni Meissner is a Polish theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particles theory, and a professor of physics at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#787
Alvin M. Weinberg
#6479
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Alvin Martin Weinberg was an American nuclear physicist who was the administrator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory during and after the Manhattan Project. He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006. He was the first to use the term "Faustian bargain" to describe nuclear energy.
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Marc Kamionkowski
#29839
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Marc Kamionkowski is an American theoretical physicist and currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include particle physics, dark matter, inflation, the cosmic microwave background and gravitational wavess.
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William A. Tiller
#7892
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
William A. Tiller was a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University. He wrote Science and Human Transformation, a book about concepts such as subtle energies beyond the four fundamental forces, which he believes act in concert with human consciousness. Tiller appeared in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?.
Go to Profile#790
John Cardy
#13255
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Lawrence Cardy FRS is a British–American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work in theoretical condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics, and in particular for research on critical phenomena and two-dimensional conformal field theory.
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Herbert York
#2528
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Herbert Frank York was an American nuclear physicist of Mohawk origin. He held numerous research and administrative positions at various United States government and educational institutes. Biography Herbert York was born to a family of Mohawk ancestry, in Rochester, New York. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in 1943, from the University of Rochester, and then went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949. During World War II he was a physicist at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project.
Go to Profile#792
Manuel Cardona
#11279
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Manuel Cardona Castro was a condensed matter physicist. According to the ISI Citations web database, Cardona was one of the eight most cited physicists since 1970. He specialized in solid state physics. Cardona's main interests were in the fields of: Raman scattering as applied to semiconductor microstructures, materials with tailor-made isotopic compositions, and high Tc superconductors, particularly investigations of electronic and vibronic excitations in the normal and superconducting state.
Go to Profile#793
Steven Balbus
#20279
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Steven Andrew Balbus is an American-born astrophysicist who is the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with John F. Hawley.
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Reimar Lüst
#9983
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Reimar Lüst was a German astrophysicist. He worked in European space science from its beginning, as the scientific director of the European Space Research Organisation from 1962 and as Director General of the European Space Agency from 1984 until 1990.
Go to Profile#795
Ian Hinchliffe
#27808
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ian Hinchliffe is a British physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He obtained his BA and his PhD in physics from Oxford University. In 1983 he became a Staff Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he served as head of the theoretical physics group from 1992 to 1999.
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John Ziman
#15262
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
John Michael Ziman was a British-born New Zealand physicist and humanist who worked in the area of condensed matter physics. He was a spokesman for science, as well as a teacher and author. Ziman was born in Cambridge, England, in 1925. His parents were Solomon Netheim Ziman and, Nellie Frances, née Gaster. The family emigrated to New Zealand when Ziman was a baby. He obtained his early education at Hamilton High School and the Victoria University College. He obtained his PhD from Balliol College, Oxford and did his early research on the theory of electrons in liquid metals at the University...
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Richard Arnowitt
#21372
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Richard Lewis Arnowitt was an American physicist known for his contributions to theoretical particle physics and to general relativity. Arnowitt was a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, where he was a member of the Department of Physics.
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Stirling Colgate
#15783
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Stirling Auchincloss Colgate was an American nuclear physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a professor emeritus of physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1965 to 1974, of which he also served its president.
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David Merritt
#20965
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Roy Merritt is an American astrophysicist. Education and career He received in 1982 his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University with thesis advisor Jeremiah P. Ostriker and held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. Merritt's fields of specialization include dynamics and evolution of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and computational astrophysics.
Go to Profile#800
Igor Ternov
#28537
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Igor Mikhailovich Ternov was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for discovery of new quantum effects in microscopic particle motion such as Dynamic Character of the Electron Anomalous Magnetic Moment, the Effect of Radiative Polarization of Electrons and Positrons in a Magnetic Field, and Quantum Fluctuations of Electron Trajectories in Accelerators.
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