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,
#7801
Markus Meuwly
#166618
Overall Influence
#7802
Douglass E. Post
#166622
Overall Influence
#7803
Ramazan Sever
#166671
Overall Influence
#7804
E. Nigel Corlett
#166682
Overall Influence
#7805
Jean M. Carlson
#91620
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jean Marie Carlson is a professor of complexity at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies robustness and feedback in highly connected complex systems, which have applications in a variety of areas including earthquakes, wildfires and neuroscience.
Go to Profile#7806
Vittorio Degiorgio
#166708
Overall Influence
#7807
N. Orisuke Sakai
#166726
Overall Influence
#7808
Kiyotaka Wasa
#166727
Overall Influence
#7809
Ichiro Sekiya
#166732
Overall Influence
#7810
Hidenori Hasimoto
#166782
Overall Influence
#7811
Anthony Brown
#100760
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Anthony Brown is a Dutch astronomer currently working at the University of Leiden most noted for leading the Gaia project's Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. He was listed in the 2018 Nature's 10 as one of the Ten people who mattered this year by the scientific journal Nature.
Go to Profile#7812
Young
#166794
Overall Influence
#7813
Patricia Lewis
#48948
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Patricia Lewis is a British and Irish nuclear physicist and arms control expert, who is currently the Research Director for International Security at Chatham House. She is also currently Co-Director of the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She was previously the Senior Scientist-in-Residence and Deputy Director at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies . She was previously the Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and the Director of VERTIC.
Go to Profile#7814
H. Juergen Stein
#166796
Overall Influence
#7815
Jack Bernard Swift
#166846
Overall Influence
#7816
H. Q. Lu
#166870
Overall Influence
#7817
Mark Jackson Stevens
#166873
Overall Influence
#7818
Richard M. Aspden
#166893
Overall Influence
#7819
Fredrik Laurell
#166903
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#7820
Levy
#166910
Overall Influence
#7821
Emily Winterburn
#129465
Overall Influence
Emily Winterburn is a British science writer, physicist and historian of science based in Yorkshire. She is a visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds. Among other books, she wrote The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel, published by The History Press in 2017.
Go to Profile#7822
Eva Schinnerer
#166946
Overall Influence
#7823
Tian-jun Li
#166954
Overall Influence
#7824
Ruth Margaret Williams
#89462
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ruth Margaret Williams is a British mathematician at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on discrete gravity. Early life and education Williams was born in Birmingham and attended primary schools in Lozells and Banners Gate. Her secondary education was at Sutton Coldfield High School for Girls. The first member of her family to go to university, she read mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge, then moved to Imperial College, London, for her PhD, which was in theoretical physics and focused on current algebras. She obtained a postdoctoral research position at the Center for Theoretical Studies at the University of Miami .
Go to Profile#7825
David Smith
#167036
Overall Influence
#7826
Christopher G. A. Harrison
#167041
Overall Influence
#7827
Zhong-zhou Ren
#167044
Overall Influence
#7828
Catherine Johnson
#99089
Overall Influence
Catherine L. Johnson is a planetary scientist known for her research on the magnetic fields of planets including Mercury, Venus, Earth and its moon, and Mars. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#7829
Jian-ping Chen
#167066
Overall Influence
#7830
Markus Roth
#167107
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#7831
Dieter Suter
#167110
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#7832
Matthew Headrick
#62827
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Matthew Peter Headrick is an American physicist who is an Associate Professor of Physics at Brandeis University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2002 under Shiraz Minwalla and his A.B from Princeton University in 1994. Headrick is known for his contributions to the quantum information perspective on holography.
Go to Profile#7833
Michel Versluis
#167145
Overall Influence
#7834
Patria Hume
#142802
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Patria Anne Hume is a New Zealand sports biomechanics academic. She is currently a full-time Professor of Human Performance at the Auckland University of Technology Sport Performance Research Institute New Zealand at AUT Millennium.
Go to Profile#7835
Sabre Kais
#167165
Overall Influence
#7836
Roberto Fanelli
#167166
Overall Influence
#7837
Ewen Whitaker
#47192
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Ewen Adair Whitaker was a British-born astronomer who specialized in lunar studies. During World War II he was engaged in quality control for the lead sheathing of hollow cables strung under the English Channel as part of the "Pipe Line Under The Ocean" Project to supply gasoline to Allied military vehicles in France. After the war, he obtained a position at the Royal Greenwich Observatory working on the UV spectra of stars, but became interested in lunar studies. As a sideline, Whitaker drew and published the first accurate chart of the South Polar area of the Moon in 1954, and served as di...
Go to Profile#7838
Harald Grosse
#167183
Overall Influence
#7839
Timothy Francis Bell
#167246
Overall Influence
#7840
Fabrizio Fiore
#167260
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#7841
Doron Gepner
#106668
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Doron Gepner is an Israeli theoretical physicist. He made important contributions to the study of string theory, two-dimensional conformal field theory, and integrable models. Birth and education Gepner was born in Philadelphia to Israeli parents. He studied mathematics at Technion, Haifa and theoretical physics at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot , where his graduate advisor was Yitzhak Frishman. His early work focused on non-perturbative quantum field theory in two space-time dimensions.
Go to Profile#7842
Stefano Covino
#167277
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
#7843
Bahram Mobasher
#167289
Overall Influence
#7844
Roger Bacon
#81836
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Roger Bacon was an American physicist and inventor at the Parma Technical Center of National Carbon Company in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where he invented graphite fiberss in 1958. Bacon was trying to measure the triple point of carbon—the temperature and pressure where solid, liquid and gas are in thermodynamic equilibrium—in a direct-current carbon arc furnace when he noticed stalagmite-like filaments growing from the vapor phase at lower pressures on the negative electrode. The condensate was embedded with flexible graphite whiskers as much as 5 µm in diameter and 3 cm long. Bacon estimate...
Go to Profile#7845
Vladimir K. Dobrev
#167362
Overall Influence
#7846
Kiyoteru Tokuyasu
#167364
Overall Influence
#7847
Chetan Nayak
#167369
Overall Influence
#7848
Ulrich Dahmen
#167397
Overall Influence
#7849
Claus F. Klingshirn
#167400
Overall Influence
#7850
Volker Philipps
#167408
Overall Influence
