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,
#7851
Robert Foster Stein
#167411
Overall Influence
#7852
J. Èurgen Ehlers
#167461
Overall Influence
#7853
Paolo Salucci
#167478
Overall Influence
#7854
Norbert Kaiser
#167507
Overall Influence
#7855
Darryl D. D’lima
#167520
Overall Influence
#7856
John Demetrius Vergados
#167523
Overall Influence
#7857
Lian-tao Wang
#167542
Overall Influence
#7858
Robert S. Markiewicz
#167545
Overall Influence
#7859
Barbara Ryden
#158051
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Barbara Sue Ryden is an American astrophysicist who is a Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University. Her research considers the formation, shape and structure of galaxies. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016.
Go to Profile#7860
Donald J. Plazek
#167610
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
#7861
Marcello Ciafaloni
#167611
Overall Influence
#7862
Coryn A. L. Bailer‐jones
#167612
Overall Influence
#7863
Ketevi Assamagan
#92682
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kétévi Adiklè Assamagan is an African American engineer and physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021. Assamagan founded the African School of Physics.
Go to Profile#7864
Wesley A. Traub
#167623
Overall Influence
#7865
Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan
#167628
Overall Influence
#7866
M. R. S. Rao
#21990
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Manchanahalli Rangaswamy Satyanarayana Rao was an Indian scientist. He was awarded the fourth-highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, for Science and Engineering in 2010. From 2003 to 2013 he was president of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India.
Go to Profile#7867
Lyndsay Fletcher
#150150
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Lyndsay Fletcher is a Scottish astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow who specialises in solar flares. Early life and education Fletcher attended Bellahouston Academy in Glasgow, and credits her high school physics teacher there with her enjoyment of physics. She studied physics and astronomy at the University of Glasgow and graduated in 1989. She remained there for her graduate studies, earning a PhD in 1993.
Go to Profile#7868
Vittorio Calabrese
#167713
Overall Influence
#7869
Martin Egelhaaf
#167723
Overall Influence
#7870
Palle Holmstrup
#167732
Overall Influence
#7871
Gary Shiu
#167742
Overall Influence
#7872
Moshe Ron
#45052
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Moshe Ron is an Israeli materials scientist, specializing in metal hydrides. Biography Moshe Ron was born in Poland. His family escaped to USSR before World War II. He started his academic education in soviet Central Asia during the war. After the war he tried to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine, but spent two years at Cyprus. He got his degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He did research on the Mössbauer effect in metals. Moshe Ron was the organizer and scientific supervisor of the Laboratory of Hydrogen Energy at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He contributed to the development of heat pumps based on use of metal hydrides.
Go to Profile#7873
Sylvestre Maurice
#167774
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
#7874
Wang Huanyu
#80415
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Wang Huanyu was a Chinese physicist who served as Communist Party Secretary and deputy director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences between March 2003 and October 2014. Wang made a significant contribution to China's lunar exploration project.
Go to Profile#7875
Holger Stark
#167794
Overall Influence
#7876
Carl A. Rouse
#94750
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Carl A. Rouse was an American physicist, working in the fields of atomic, plasma, and computational physics. Rouse was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech . Early life and education Rouse was born in Hazelton, Ohio. Interested in physics and boxing from an early age, Rouse was described as "gifted high school student" and won a Golden Glove in high school. He entered the Army Special Training Reserves in 1944 , where his academic performance sent him to New York University to participate in the ASTR Civil Engineering Course. Rouse would later realize that the p...
Go to Profile#7877
Anthony Lowe
#81528
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Anthony Peter Lowe AP is a British-Australian mathematical physicist and actuary. He previously served as chief executive officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and is a frequent media commentator on prostate cancer and prostate specific antigen testing.
Go to Profile#7878
Suh Jin-suck
#49946
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jin-Suck Suh is a South Korean medical professor. He graduated with MD from Yonsei University in 1979. He received PhD in 1999 from Ajou University. He is the Avison Distinguished Professor, 2011 at Yonsei University. Suh is a director as well as a principal investigator in imaging development projects of medical convergence research institute at Yonsei University.
Go to Profile#7879
Attila Grandpierre
#114666
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Attila Grandpierre is a Hungarian musician, astrophysicist, physicist, self-taught historian, writer and poet. He is best known as leader/vocalist of the Galloping Coroners rock band. Personal ideology From his childhood on he was very interested in dealing with the Sun and the cosmos. As an adult he is looking for the answer whether the Universe does have a physical, biological or psychological nature.
Go to Profile#7880
Patricia Rankin
#104572
Overall Influence
Patricia Rankin is a British high energy physicist, equity researcher and Chair of the Department at the Arizona State University. Her research considers high energy particle physics and gender balance in scientific disciplines. She was previously responsible for the high energy physics section of the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#7881
Roderick Lim
#101423
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Roderick Y. H. Lim is a Singaporean nano- and biophysicist at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland. Life Lim studied physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2003 he obtained his PhD from the National University of Singapore for research carried out at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the M.E. Mueller Institute for Structural Biology at the Biozentrum until 2008. In 2009, he was appointed Argovia Professor for nanobiology at the Biozentrum and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute, where he received...
Go to Profile#7882
Manfred Wagner
#75932
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Manfred Hermann Wagner is the author of Wagner model and the molecular stress function theory for polymer rheology. He is a Professor for Polymer engineering and Polymer physics at the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#7883
Mukul Kundu
#163072
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Mukul Ranjan Kundu , was an Indian solar physicist, known best as a pioneer of radio observations of the Sun. Early in his career, he showed that the Sun's 10.7 centimetre radio flux is correlated with the level of ionisation in the Earth's ionosphere. The 10.7 cm flux is now used as a standard proxy for the level of magnetic activity on the Sun. He served on the editorial board of the journal Solar Physics and was awarded the George Ellery Hale Prize in 2007.
Go to Profile#7884
Julyan Cartwright
#99828
Overall Influence
Julyan Cartwright is an interdisciplinary physicist working in Granada, Spain at the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute of the CSIC and affiliated with the Carlos I Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics at the University of Granada.
Go to Profile#7885
Dimitri Kusnezov
#90423
Overall Influence
Dimitri Kusnezov is an American physicist and academic who is the under secretary of homeland security for science and technology. He has published over 160 research papers and articles and has over 3600 citations according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#7886
Jenny Hoffman
#143031
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Jenny Hoffman is an American quantum physicist and professor at Harvard University. She is interested in nanoscale engineering and imaging of materials, using molecular beam epitaxy and scanning probe microscopy. Hoffman has received several awards for her research and teaching, including the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and 2010 Sloan Research Fellowship.
Go to Profile#7887
Tim de Zeeuw
#133325
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Pieter Timotheus "Tim" de Zeeuw is a Dutch astronomer specializing in the formation, structure and dynamics of galaxies. From 2007 to 2017 he was the director general of European Southern Observatory. He is married to astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck. In May 2022, Leiden University suspended him after an internal review concluded that over several years he repeatedly belittled and insulted women in public and abused his position of power as a professor by threatening to damage their scientific careers; and that in addition to intimidation and inappropriate behavior there was "a component of sexual harassment".
Go to Profile#7888
Jennifer L. Ross
#149253
Overall Influence
Jennifer L. Ross is an American physicist who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics at Syracuse University. Her research considers active biological condensed matter physics. She was elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018 and American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.
Go to Profile#7889
Essam E. Khalil
#45497
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Essam Eldin Khalil Hassan Khalil is an Egyptian Mechanical Engineer. Khalil is a professor in the mechanical power department at Cairo University. He is the author and co-author of several international researches in HVAC field. He has many years of experience in delivering courses in air-conditioning to University, college students, to building managers and maintenance staff in both the industrial and commercial sectors in Egypt, the Arabian countries and worldwide. He has been selected by various universities and international organisations to lecture to graduate and post graduate level engi...
Go to Profile#7890
Aleksandra Walczak
#135417
Overall Influence
Aleksandra M. Walczak is a theoretical biophysicist. She works on stochastic gene expression at Ecole Normale Supérieure where she is a research director. Education Walczak completed her master's degree at Warsaw University, Poland in 2002, her PhD at University of California, San Diego in 2007, and was a post-doc until 2010 at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#7891
Luca Gammaitoni
#168029
Overall Influence
#7892
Paul Grant
#142699
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Paul Michael Grant is an American/Irish physicist and science writer who was involved in discovering and elucidating the structure of Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide which was important as the first high temperature superconductor to exhibit superconductivity above the boiling point of Nitrogen. He was a co-author of IBM's US patent application covering their preparation.
Go to Profile#7893
Françoise Genova
#168044
Overall Influence
#7894
Leonid Peshkin
#77439
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Leonid Leon Peshkin is a scientist working at the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School. Peshkin's research interests include embryology, evolution and aging. Early life and education Born in Moscow, Peshkin graduated from the Moscow's "Lyceum Vtoraya Shkola" with advanced program in math and physics. He earned his B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Moscow Technological University . He went on to receive an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1995 under Shimon Ullman.
Go to Profile#7895
Christian Pike
#67649
Overall Influence
Christian Pike is a professor at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and a member of the USC Neuroscience Program. His ongoing work focuses on Alzheimer's disease and other age-related neurodegenerative disorders. His laboratory studies the role of neuronal apoptosis in neural diseases. Recently, his research found new use for synthetic estrogens in lessening the effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy for Alzheimer's patients.
Go to Profile#7896
Ulrich Höfer
#147421
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ulrich Höfer is a German professor of physics at the University of Marburg. He received his Ph.D. in 1989. According to Google Scholar, Höfer has an h-index of 44/50 . His main research area is Surface Dynamics.
Go to Profile#7897
Peter Laut
#168120
Overall Influence
Peter Laut is a professor Emeritus of Physics, from the Technical University of Denmark, DTU. He retired in 2003. He has a background in theoretical physics and is educated at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He gradually developed an interest in climatology, and in the 1990s he was asked to become an advisor to The Danish Energy Agency regarding the scientific developments in climatology with special attention to the possible causes of global warming. The Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Energy Agency established an agreement under which the Technical U...
Go to Profile#7898
Marcelle Soares-Santos
#165861
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Marcelle Soares-Santos is a Brazilian physicist who works as associate professor of Physics and Experimental Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Michigan. Biography Marcelle was born in Vitória, Brazil, in 1983. Two years later, her family moved to Parauapebas, in the Carajás Mountains, in the State of Pará. She graduated in Physics at the Federal University of Espírito Santo in 2004. She then pursued a Master's degree and Doctorate in Astronomy at the University of São Paulo , defending her Doctorate dissertation in 2010.
Go to Profile#7899
Julia A. Thompson
#168142
Overall Influence
1901 - 2004 (103 years)
Julia A. Thompson, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after being nominated by the Division of Particles and Fields in 1995, for her contributions to our understanding of a broad range of particle physics phenomena through experimentation and instrumentation development, and for her continued efforts to encourage participation in physics by high school students and under represented groups.
Go to Profile#7900
D. D. Bhawalkar
#74599
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dilip Devidas Bhawalkar is an Indian optical physicist and the founder director of the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology , an institute under the Department of Atomic Energy, serving as a centre for higher studies in the fields of lasers and particle accelerators. He is credited with pioneering research in optics and lasers in India and is reported to have contributed in making CAT a partner in the International Linear Collider and Large Hadron Collider experiments of the European Organization for Nuclear Research . He is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the highest Indian award in science and technology.
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