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,
#801
Adam Falk
#11314
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Adam Frederick Falk is the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Earlier in his career, Falk was the president of Williams College, a university administrator at Johns Hopkins University, and a theoretical physicist.
Go to Profile#802
Gabriela González
#24142
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Gabriela Ines González, is a professor of physics and astronomy at the Louisiana State University and was the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration from March 2011 until March 2017. Biography Gabriela González was born on February 24, 1965, in Córdoba, Argentina. She is the daughter of Dora Trembinsky, a professor of mathematics, and Pedro González, a doctor in Economic Sciences. González completed her primary school studies at the Colegio Luterano Concordia in the city of Córdoba, and her secondary school studies at the Instituto Manuel Lucero. An avid student, González received...
Go to Profile#803
Felix Villars
#13511
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Felix Villars was a Swiss-born American emeritus professor of physics at MIT. He is best known for the Pauli–Villars regularization, an important principle in quantum field theory. Early life Villars was born in Biel, Switzerland and served in the Swiss Army during the Second World War, working as a meteorologist. In 1945, he graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology with degrees in physics and mathematics. His undergraduate thesis earned him the Institute's Kern Medal for Excellence. The following year, Villars earned his doctorate in physics from the same institution.
Go to Profile#804
Lee Alvin DuBridge
#8475
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Lee Alvin DuBridge was an American educator and physicist, best known as president of the California Institute of Technology from 1946–1969. Background Lee Alvin DuBridge was born on , in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father was Fred DuBridge, a football coach at Indiana State Normal School. He graduated from Cornell College in 1922, and then began a teaching assignment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which he received an M.A. degree in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1926. DuBridge continued his academic work at the California Institute of Technology, as assistant, then associate professor at Washington University in St.
Go to Profile#805
Priyamvada Natarajan
#23179
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly with her work in gravitational lensing, and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Go to Profile#806
Lawrence H. Johnston
#23629
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Lawrence Harding Johnston was an American physicist, a young contributor to the Manhattan Project. He was the only man to witness all three atomic explosions in 1945: the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
Go to Profile#807
Evgenii Feinberg
#23740
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Evgenii L'vovich Feinberg was a Soviet physicist, recognized for his contributions to theoretical physics. He was the son of a physician, born in Baku, moving to Moscow in 1918 where he graduated from Moscow State University as a theoretical physicist in 1935. He did research at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Troitsk, Moscow Oblast from 1938, where he published over a hundred works in his field. Feinberg studied radio physics , statistical acoustics, the neutron, cosmic rays and particle physics. In his early years, he studied the beta-decay of ionized atoms , inelastic coherent processes ...
Go to Profile#808
Marc Davis
#26548
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Marc Davis is an American professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973 and has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He taught for a year at Princeton, 1973–74, then was on the astronomy faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1981. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#809
Charles Alfred Coulson
#35003
Overall Influence
#810
Sun Kwok
#18458
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sun Kwok is a Hong Kong astronomer best known for his work on physics and chemistry of the late stages of stellar evolution. In 1978, he proposed a new theory on the origin of planetary nebulae. which has transformed our understanding of the death of Sun-like stars. He is a pioneer on the study of stellar synthesis of organic compounds, which may have implications on the origin of life on Earth.
Go to Profile#811
Alladi Ramakrishnan
#10829
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Alladi Ramakrishnan was an Indian physicist and the founder of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai. He made contributions to stochastic process, particle physics, algebra of matrices, special theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Go to Profile#812
Charles Tanford
#21805
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Charles Tanford was a German-born protein biochemist. He died in York, England, on October 1, 2009. Early life and education Charles Tanford was born in Halle, Germany in 1921 to Majer and Charlotte Tannenbaum. His parents, who were Jewish, fled to England in 1929 anticipating the coming rule of the Nazi Party, and changed their name to Tanford. At the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Tanford was sent to New York to live with relatives. Despite Tanford's attempts to persuade them to leave, many of his relatives stayed behind in Germany and subsequently were murdered in the Holocaust. While in the United States, Tanford earned a B.A.
Go to Profile#813
Emmanuel Rashba
#9323
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Emmanuel I. Rashba is a Soviet-American theoretical physicist of Jewish origin who worked in Ukraine, Russia and in the United States. Rashba is known for his contributions to different areas of condensed matter physics and spintronics, especially the Rashba effect in spin physics, and also for the prediction of electric dipole spin resonance , that was widely investigated and became a regular tool for operating electron spins in nanostructures, phase transitions in spin-orbit coupled systems driven by change of the Fermi surface topology, Giant oscillator strength of impurity excitons, and coexistence of free and self-trapped excitons.
Go to Profile#814
Carl M. Bender
#9935
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Carl M. Bender is an American applied mathematician and mathematical physicist. He currently holds the Wilfred R. and Ann Lee Konneker Distinguished Professorship of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He also has joint positions as professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg and as visiting professor of applied mathematics and mathematical physics at Imperial College, London.
Go to Profile#815
John David Jackson
#17737
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
John David Jackson was a Canadian–American physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a faculty senior scientist emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A theoretical physicist, he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, well known for his work in nuclear and particle physics, as well as his widely used graduate text on classical electrodynamics.
Go to Profile#816
Claud Lovelace
#20509
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Claud Lovelace was a theoretical physicist noted for his contributions to string theory, specifically, the idea that strings did not have to be restricted to the four dimensions of spacetime. A study in 2009 ranked him as the 14th most influential physicist in the world for the period 1967–1973.
Go to Profile#817
Iosif Khriplovich
#29669
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Iosif Benzionovich Khriplovich is a Russian theoretical physicist who has made deep contributions in quantum field theory, atomic physics, and general relativity. He is a Chief Researcher at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, and holds a Chair of Theoretical Physics at Novosibirsk State University. Dr. Khriplovich was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2000, and remains a Corresponding Member. He was awarded the 2004 Silver Dirac Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics by University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and shared the 2005 Pomeranchuk ...
Go to Profile#818
Roberto Salmeron
#20211
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Roberto Aureliano Salmeron was a Brazilian electrical engineer and experimental nuclear physicist and an emeritus Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research . Salmeron was born in São Paulo. He did his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering at the Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo, in São Paulo, and in physics in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro , in Rio de Janeiro. From 1947 to 1950, he worked as researcher and physics instructor at the Escola Politécnica and in the Department of Physics of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Le...
Go to Profile#819
Oreste Piccioni
#31791
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Oreste Piccioni was an Italian-American physicist who made important contributions to elementary particle physics. He is the co-discoverer of the antineutron. Biography He was a graduate student of Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome, receiving his doctorate in 1938. Remaining in Italy during World War II, he did fundamental research under difficult conditions in the basement of a high school, which first clarified the nature of the muon.
Go to Profile#820
Jorge E. Hirsch
#7076
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jorge Eduardo Hirsch is an Argentine American professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. Hirsch received a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1980 and completed his postdoctoral research at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1983. He is known for inventing the h-index in 2005, an index for quantifying a scientist's publication productivity and the basis of several scholar indices.
Go to Profile#821
Ad Bax
#20506
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Adriaan "Ad" Bax is a Dutch-American molecular biophysicist. He was born in the Netherlands and is the Chief of the Section on Biophysical NMR Spectroscopy at the National Institutes of Health. He is known for his work on the methodology of biomolecular NMR spectroscopy.
Go to Profile#822
Yuen-Ron Shen
#21509
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Yuen-Ron Shen is a Chinese physicist. He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on non-linear optics. He was born in Shanghai and graduated from National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard under physicist and Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen in 1963, and joined the department of physics at Berkeley in 1964. In the early years, Shen was probably best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials. These fundamental studies enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources.
Go to Profile#823
Horst Stöcker
#12815
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Horst Stöcker is a German theoretical physicist and Judah M. Eisenberg Professor Laureatus at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Biography After Abitur 1971, Stöcker studied physics, chemistry, mathematics and philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he got his Dr. phil.nat. in 1979 under Walter Greiner. Title of the dissertation was Shock waves in nuclear matter – proof by circumstantial evidence.
Go to Profile#824
Volker Heine
#14561
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Volker Heine FRS is a New Zealand / British physicist. He is married to Daphne and they have three children. Volker Heine is considered a pioneer of theoretical and computational studies of the electronic structure of solids and liquids and the determination of physical properties derived from it.
Go to Profile#825
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz
#15909
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz was an American physicist. Biography He was born in Bryan, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma. His father was an agricultural chemist and named his son after the Italian socialist Giovanni Rossi, who had founded an agricultural commune in Brazil in the 1890s. Lomanitz graduated from high school at age 14 and went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma and his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1951 from Cornell University under Richard Feynman.
Go to Profile#826
F. J. Duarte
#9150
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Francisco Javier "Frank" Duarte is a laser physicist and author/editor of several books on tunable lasers. His research on physical optics and laser development has won several awards, including an Engineering Excellence Award in 1995 for the invention of the N-slit laser interferometer.
Go to Profile#827
Atul Gurtu
#29549
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Atul Gurtu is a high energy physicist in India. He joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Mumbai, in 1971, and retired in 2011 as a senior professor, after a career spanning four decades in particle physics research.
Go to Profile#828
Neil Ashcroft
#10571
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Neil William Ashcroft was a British solid-state physicist. Early life and education Ashcroft was born in London on 27 November 1938, and migrated to New Zealand in 1947. He was educated at Hutt Valley High School, and completed his undergraduate studies at Victoria University College, earning a Bachelor of Science degree, in 1958. He received his PhD in 1964 from the University of Cambridge for research investigating the Fermi surfaces of metals.
Go to Profile#829
Jürgen Ehlers
#16793
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Jürgen Ehlers was a German physicist who contributed to the understanding of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. From graduate and postgraduate work in Pascual Jordan's relativity research group at Hamburg University, he held various posts as a lecturer and, later, as a professor before joining the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich as a director. In 1995, he became the founding director of the newly created Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany.
Go to Profile#830
David S. Saxon
#9327
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
David S. Saxon was an American physicist and educator who served as the President of University of California system as well as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation.
Go to Profile#831
Ferdinando Gliozzi
#21279
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ferdinando Gliozzi is a string theorist at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. Along with David Olive and Joël Scherk, he proposed the GSO projection to map out the tachyonic states in the Neveu–Schwarz sector.
Go to Profile#832
Sean Solomon
#20109
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sean Carl Solomon is the director of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, where he is also the William B. Ransford Professor of Earth and Planetary Science. Before moving to Columbia in 2012, he was the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. His research area is in geophysics, including the fields of planetary geology, seismology, marine geophysics, and geodynamics. Solomon is the principal investigator on the NASA MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He is also a team member on the Gravity Recovery and Interior Labo...
Go to Profile#833
Herbert Goldstein
#18763
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Herbert Goldstein was an American physicist and the author of the standard graduate textbook Classical Mechanics. Life and work Goldstein, long recognized for his scholarship in classical mechanics and reactor shielding, was the author of the graduate textbook, Classical Mechanics. The book has been a standard text since it first appeared in 1950 and has been translated into nine languages. He received a B.S. from City College of New York in 1940 and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943. From 1942 to 1946, Goldstein was a staff member of the wartime Radiation Laboratory ...
Go to Profile#834
Louis Leprince-Ringuet
#23755
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Louis Leprince-Ringuet was a French physicist, telecommunications engineer, essayist and historian of science. Leprince-Ringuet advocated strongly for the creation of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and remained its indefatigable supporter. He was vice chair and chair of CERN’s scientific policy committee. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#835
Michelle Thaller
#21079
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Michelle Lynn Thaller is an American astronomer and research scientist. Thaller is the assistant director for Science Communication at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. From 1998 to 2009 she was a staff scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, and later Manager of the Education and Public Outreach program for the Spitzer Space Telescope, at the California Institute of Technology. She is a frequent on-camera contributor to programming on The History Channel and Science Channel.
Go to Profile#836
Jerome Karle
#3451
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Jerome Karle was an American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.
Go to Profile#837
Marcos Moshinsky
#11574
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Marcos Moshinsky Borodiansky was a Mexican physicist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin whose work in the field of elementary particles won him the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Investigation in 1988 and the UNESCO Science Prize in 1997.
Go to Profile#838
Hironari Miyazawa
#26143
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
was a Japanese particle and nuclear physicist, known for his work in supersymmetry, which was first proposed by Miyazawa in 1966 as a possible symmetry between mesons and baryons. Miyazawa studied physics and received his undergraduate degree in 1950 at the University of Tokyo. He joined the faculty after he received his doctorate in 1953 from the University of Tokyo, and became a full professor of physics in 1968. In 1988 he moved to the Kanagawa University and served there until 1998. He was a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo. During these periods, he also served visiting profes...
Go to Profile#839
Andrew Fabian
#29851
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Andrew Christopher Fabian is a British astronomer and astrophysicist. He was Director of the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2018. He was a Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge from 1982 to 2013, and Vice-Master of Darwin College, Cambridge from 1997 to 2012. He served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from May 2008 through to 2010.
Go to Profile#840
David Wands
#22264
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David Wands is professor of cosmology at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, in the University of Portsmouth. He was educated at Dr Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 1994, supervised by John D. Barrow in the Astronomy Centre.
Go to Profile#841
Edmund Copeland
#22936
Overall Influence
Edmund "Ed" J. Copeland is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and professor of physics working in the Faculty of Science at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Copeland won the 2013 Rayleigh Medal and Prize awarded by the Institute of Physics for his work on particle/string cosmology. He obtained his PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1985, with a thesis entitled "Quantum aspects of Kaluza-Klein cosmologies".
Go to Profile#842
Albert Overhauser
#12364
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Albert W. Overhauser was an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his theory of dynamic nuclear polarization known as the Overhauser effect in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Go to Profile#843
Carlton M. Caves
#13348
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carlton Morris Caves is an American theoretical physicist. He is currently professor emeritus and research professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico. Caves works in the areas of physics of information; information, entropy, and complexity; quantum information theory; quantum chaos, quantum optics; the theory of non-classical light; the theory of quantum noise; and the quantum theory of measurement. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#844
Réka Albert
#6533
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.
Go to Profile#845
Michele Parrinello
#7877
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michele Parrinello is an Italian physicist particularly known for his work in molecular dynamics . Parrinello and Roberto Car were awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2009 for their continuing development of the Car–Parrinello method, first proposed in their seminal 1985 paper, "Unified Approach for Molecular Dynamics and Density-Functional Theory". They have continued to receive awards for this breakthrough, most recently the Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences and the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#846
Jagdish Mehra
#11613
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Jagdish Mehra was an Indian-American historian of science. Academic career Mehra was educated at Allahabad University, the Max Planck Institut für Physik and the University of California at Los Angeles and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Neuchatel.
Go to Profile#847
Edwin F. Taylor
#17908
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Edwin F. Taylor is an American physicist known for his contributions to the teaching of physics. Taylor was editor of the American Journal of Physics, and is author of several introductory books to physics. In 1998 he was awarded the Oersted Medal for his contributions to the teaching of physics.
Go to Profile#848
Kenneth Lane
#32140
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Kenneth Douglas Lane is an American theoretical particle physicist and professor of physics at Boston University. Lane is best known for his role in the development of extended technicolor models of physics beyond the Standard Model.
Go to Profile#849
Chad Orzel
#14373
Overall Influence
Chad Orzel is a professor of physics and science author, noted for his books How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, which has been translated into 9 languages, and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Chad as a science communicator is a regular contributor on Forbes.com, on his personal website, and, through October 2017, on ScienceBlogs.com, while continuing his work as an associate professor at Union College.
Go to Profile#850
Behram Kurşunoğlu
#8915
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
Behram Kurşunoğlu was a Turkish physicist and the founder and the director of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami. He was best known for his works on unified field theory, energy and global issues.
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