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,
#7701
Abhai Mansingh
#165106
Overall Influence
#7702
Fabio Finelli
#165136
Overall Influence
#7703
Haim Harari
#165142
Overall Influence
#7704
John A. Rowlands
#165202
Overall Influence
#7705
Karl Gebhardt
#165223
Overall Influence
#7706
Aaron Lewis
#165242
Overall Influence
#7707
Walter J. Tomlinson
#165251
Overall Influence
#7708
D. Brabers Fruchart
#165263
Overall Influence
#7709
Werner Heiland
#165278
Overall Influence
#7710
Hermann Gerhard Hertz
#165311
Overall Influence
#7711
Geoff Brumfiel
#165323
Overall Influence
#7712
Elke Arenholz
#143806
Overall Influence
Elke Arenholz is a German American physicist working in the field magnetic materials and X-ray spectroscopy, where she pioneered the use of superconducting vector magnets to study X-ray magnetic circular dichroism . She is the associate director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source .
Go to Profile#7713
Alberto Vecchio
#165377
Overall Influence
#7714
Albert J. Libchaber
#165399
Overall Influence
#7715
Dana Dattelbaum
#129504
Overall Influence
Dana Dattelbaum is an American physicist and scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She leads NNSA’s Dynamic Materials Properties portfolio at LANL, which provides experimental data, platforms and diagnostics for materials behaviors relevant to nuclear weapons performance, ranging from plutonium to high explosives.
Go to Profile#7716
Donna L. Whitney
#165451
Overall Influence
#7717
Brigitte Schmieder
#165456
Overall Influence
#7718
Irina Ya. Aref’eva
#165470
Overall Influence
#7719
Lino Reggiani
#165475
Overall Influence
#7720
Grant Jay Jensen
#165484
Overall Influence
#7721
Charles Taylor
#103629
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Charles Alfred Taylor was a British physicist well known for his work in crystallography and his efforts to promote science to young audiences. Early life Charles Taylor was born in Hull in 1922. Education He began his degree at Queen Mary College , but the college was subsequently evacuated to Cambridge during World War II. He graduated in 1943 and after working for the Admiralty during the war, then worked as a lecturer and then a reader after completing his PhD.
Go to Profile#7722
David Israel Schuster
#106664
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
David Israel Schuster is a chemist who is currently a professor emeritus at New York University. His research program focused on organic photochemistry and later on fullerenes. Early life and education Schuster was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935 and raised in Far Rockaway. He attended Columbia University as an undergraduate and received his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1956. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1961 under the mentorship of John D. Roberts. During Schuster's time in the Roberts laboratory, the group began experimenting with some of the first applications of NMR spectroscopy to organic chemistry.
Go to Profile#7723
Stefano Baroni
#165499
Overall Influence
#7724
Sabrina Stierwalt
#107095
Overall Influence
Sabrina Stierwalt is an American extragalactic astrophysicist who studies gas dynamics and the formation and evolution of galaxies through surveys utilizing x-ray, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, submillimeter, and radio wavelengths. She is experienced in science communication and advocating for equality and equity for underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.
Go to Profile#7725
Giles Harrison
#102358
Overall Influence
Giles Harrison is a Professor of Atmospheric Physics in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, where he has served as Head of Department several times. He is a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bath and Oxford. His research work continues over 250 years of UK studies in atmospheric electricity, in its modern form an interdisciplinary topic at the intersection of aerosol and cloud physics, solar-climate and internal-climate interactions, scientific sensor development and the retrieval of quantitative data from historical sources.
Go to Profile#7726
Hiroshi Satō
#165526
Overall Influence
#7727
Lindsay P. Keller
#165539
Overall Influence
#7728
Robert Woodrow Wilson
#165567
Overall Influence
#7729
Marcus Bleicher
#165568
Overall Influence
#7730
Lucas Lombriser
#160099
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Lucas Lombriser is a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Geneva. His research is in Theoretical Cosmology, Dark Energy, and Alternative Theories of Gravity. In 2020 and 2021 Lombriser proposed that the Hubble tension and other discrepancies between cosmological measurements imply significant evidence that we are living in a Hubble Bubble of 250 million light years in diameter which is 20% less dense than the cosmic average and lowers the locally measured cosmic microwave background temperature over its cosmic average. Previously,...
Go to Profile#7731
Nancy U. Crooker
#165596
Overall Influence
#7732
Ian Douglass Hutcheon
#165610
Overall Influence
#7733
Marina Galand
#139042
Overall Influence
Marina Galand is an atmospheric physicist and lecturer at Imperial College London. She is the 2018 recipient of the Holweck Prize for her "outstanding contribution to space physics by studying in a comprehensive and original manner the effects of energy sources on planetary atmospheres throughout the Solar System and beyond".
Go to Profile#7734
Hiroshi Sakamoto
#165629
Overall Influence
#7735
Michael Strickland
#165639
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Strickland is an American theoretical physicist who received his PhD from Duke University in 1997. His specialty is the physics of the Quark-Gluon Plasma which is an extreme state of matter which filled the entire Universe until about 10−5 seconds after the Big Bang. He has contributed to calculation of the quark-gluon plasma equation of state, QGP plasma instabilities/thermalization, reformulation of relativistic hydrodynamics for far-from-equilibrium systems, and quarkonium suppression in the QGP, etc.
Go to Profile#7736
Ewa Paluch
#73887
Overall Influence
Ewa Paluch is a French-Polish biophysicist and cell biologist. She is the 17th Professor of Anatomy in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#7737
Anatoly V. Kotikov
#165659
Overall Influence
#7738
Georg Bergmann
#165699
Overall Influence
#7739
Paul Charbonneau
#165779
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
#7740
Desmond John Hillier
#165783
Overall Influence
#7741
Yan-wu Zhu
#165808
Overall Influence
#7742
Kristjan Haule
#165818
Overall Influence
#7743
Maya Paczuski
#110817
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Maya Paczuski is the head and founder of the Complexity Science Group at the University of Calgary. She is a well-cited physicist whose work spans self-organized criticality, avalanche dynamics, earthquake, and complex networks. She was born in Israel in 1963, but grew up in the United States. Maya Paczuski received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T. in 1986 and then went on to study with Mehran Kardar, earning her Ph.D in Condensed matter physics from the same institute.
Go to Profile#7744
Franz Mandl
#144332
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Franz Mandl was a British theoretical physicist, known for his graduate-level textbooks. Early life and education Mandl was born in Vienna in 1923 into a Jewish family. They moved to Berlin in the 1920s, and after the rise of Nazi Germany, the family emigrated to England as refugees in 1936. Mandl received a scholarship to study at Lincoln College, Oxford where he received his undergraduate and doctorate degrees in physics.
Go to Profile#7745
Philip D. Ross
#165865
Overall Influence
#7746
Bengt Gunnar Svensson
#165869
Overall Influence
#7747
Andrew Melatos
#165890
Overall Influence
#7748
R. C. Johnson
#165891
Overall Influence
#7749
Rainer Hillenbrand
#165903
Overall Influence
#7750
Vahid Sandoghdar
#165912
Overall Influence
