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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Physics,
#851
John Stachel
#17566
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
John Stachel is an American physicist and philosopher of science. Biography Stachel earned his PhD at Stevens Institute of Technology in Physics about a topic in General relativity in 1958. After holding different teaching positions at Lehigh University and the University of Pittsburgh, he went 1964 to Boston University where he was professor of physics until his emeritation.
Go to Profile#852
Evgeny Aramovich Abramyan
#17900
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Evgeny Aramovich Abramyan was a Soviet-Armenian physicist, Professor, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Winner of USSR State Prize, one of the founders of several research directions in the Soviet and Russian nuclear technology. Author of more than 100 inventions and several books on applied physics, Evgeny Abramyan led research teams at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, and the Institute of High Temperatures of USSR Academy of Sciences. In the 1960s he supervised the creation of a new research discipline – engineering physics – at the Novosibirsk State Technical University, chaired the university's major faculty.
Go to Profile#853
Ardeshir Hosseinpour
#12054
Overall Influence
1962 - 2007 (45 years)
Ardeshir Hosseinpour was an Iranian nuclear scientist, physics professor, and electromagnetism expert, who was involved in the Iranian nuclear program. He died mysteriously in early 2007 during his nuclear work at Isfahan.
Go to Profile#854
John R. Klauder
#19404
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John Rider Klauder is an American professor of physics and mathematics, and author of over 250 published articles on physics. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science. He received his PhD in 1959 from Princeton University where he was a student of John Archibald Wheeler.
Go to Profile#855
Thibault Damour
#18198
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Thibault Damour is a French physicist. He was a permanent professor in theoretical physics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 1989 to 2022. Since then, he is professor emeritus. An expert in general relativity, he has long taught this theory at the École Normale Supérieure . He contributed greatly to the modelling of gravitational waves from compact binary systems, and with Alessandra Buonanno, he invented the "effective one-body" approach to representing the orbital trajectories of binary black holes.
Go to Profile#856
Howard E. Haber
#25524
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Howard Eli Haber is an American physicist, specializing in theoretical elementary particle physics. Howard Haber received in 1973 his bachelor's degree and master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received in 1978 his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1978 to 1980 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1980 to 1982. He joined the faculty of the physics department and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he became an associate professor in 1989 and a full professor in 1990 .
Go to Profile#857
Nicolas Gisin
#19980
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nicolas Gisin is a Swiss physicist and professor at the University of Geneva, working on the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum information, and communication. His work includes both experimental and theoretical physics. He has contributed work in the fields of experimental quantum cryptography and long-distance quantum communication over standard telecom optical fibers. He also co-founded ID Quantique, a company that provides quantum-based technologies.
Go to Profile#858
Peter Freund
#21081
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Peter George Oliver Freund was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chicago. He made important contributions to particle physics and string theory. He was also active as a writer.
Go to Profile#859
Watt W. Webb
#14993
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Watt Wetmore Webb was an American biophysicist, known for his co-invention of multiphoton microscopy in 1990. Early life and education Watt Wetmore Webb was born on August 27, 1927, in Kansas City, Missouri. Webb hailed from a family of bankers. In 1891, his grandfather, Watt Webb, had founded the Missouri Savings Bank, an organization that would be led by Webb's uncle Wilson S. Webb, and eventually his father Watt Webb Jr. Due to a long illness, Watt W. Webb did not start formal schooling until the age of 10. As a young man, Webb worked at the family banking business; when Webb joined MIT ...
Go to Profile#860
Theodore Hall
#6548
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Theodore Alvin Hall was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on United States efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II , gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence. His brother, Edward N. Hall, was a rocket scientist who led the U.S. Air Force's program to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, personally designing the Minuteman missile and convincing the Pentagon and President Eisenhower to adopt it as a key part of t...
Go to Profile#861
Vladimir Fortov
#20413
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Vladimir Yevgenyevich Fortov was a Russian physicist and politician who served as director of the Joint Institute for High Temperatures and as president of the Russian Academy of Sciences . His research was in thermal physics, shock waves and plasma physics.
Go to Profile#862
Philip Kim
#14585
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Philip Kim is a South Korean physicist. He is a condensed matter physicist known for study of quantum transport in carbon nanotubes and graphene, including observations of quantum Hall effects in graphene.
Go to Profile#863
Keith Brueckner
#15819
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Keith Allen Brueckner was an American theoretical physicist who made important contributions in several areas of physics, including many-body theory in condensed matter physics, and laser fusion. Biography Brueckner was born in Minneapolis on March 19, 1924. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1945 and 1947 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. He died on September 19, 2014, at the age of 90.
Go to Profile#864
Elizabeth Rauscher
#21417
Overall Influence
2000 - 2019 (19 years)
Elizabeth A. Rauscher was an American physicist and parapsychologist. She was born in Berkeley, California on March 18, 1937. She died on July 3, 2019 . She was a former researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, and NASA.
Go to Profile#865
Nicholas B. Suntzeff
#25562
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nicholas B. Suntzeff is an American astronomer and cosmologist. He is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Observational Astronomy in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he is Director of the Astronomy Program. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astronomical instrumentation. With Brian Schmidt he founded the High-z Supernova Search Team, which was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 to Schmidt and Adam Riess.
Go to Profile#866
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski
#17454
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (31 years)
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is an American theoretical physicist from Chicago who studies high energy physics. She describes herself as "a proud first-generation Cuban-American and Chicago Public Schools alumna". She completed her undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at age 19, earned her PhD from Harvard University at 25 and was a PCTS Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University before joining the faculty of the Perimeter Institute at age 27. According to Google Trends, Pasterski was the #3 Trending Scientist for all of 2017. In 2015, she was named to the Forb...
Go to Profile#867
Daniel Greenberger
#18734
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Daniel M. Greenberger is an American quantum physicist. He has been professor of physics at the City College of New York since 1964. He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and—alongside Anton Zeilinger—founded the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information.
Go to Profile#868
Christopher Monroe
#11519
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Christopher Roy Monroe is an American physicist and engineer in the areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum information science, especially quantum computing. He directs one of the leading research and development efforts in ion trap quantum computing. Monroe is the Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke University and is College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and Joint Center for Quantum Computer Science. He is also co-founder and chie...
Go to Profile#869
Robert Ettinger
#5318
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was an American academic, known as "the father of cryonics" because of the impact of his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality. Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute and the related Immortalist Society and until 2003 served as the groups' president. His body has been cryopreserved, like the bodies of his first and second wives, and his mother.
Go to Profile#870
José Goldemberg
#18284
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
José Goldemberg is a Brazilian physicist, university educator, scientific leader and research scientist. He is a leading expert on energy and environment issues. Goldemberg earned his Ph.D. in physical science from the University of São Paulo where he served as rector and full professor from 1986 to 1989. From 1983 to 1986 he directed the Energy Company of the State of São Paulo. From 1990 to 1992 he served the federal government in various capacities: as the Secretary of State for Science and Technology he modernized the information systems; as interim Secretary of the Environment he admin...
Go to Profile#871
Cormac O'Raifeartaigh
#13548
Overall Influence
Cormac O'Raifeartaigh is an Irish physicist based at Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. A solid-state physicist by training, he is best known for several contributions to the study of the history and philosophy of 20th century science, including the discovery that Albert Einstein once attempted a steady-state model of the expanding universe, many years before Fred Hoyle.
Go to Profile#872
Pavle Savić
#6660
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Pavle Savić was a Serbian physicist and chemist. In his early years, he worked in Serbia as well as France, and became one of the pioneers in the research of nuclear fission. He was also a sympathiser of Yugoslav communists in the interwar period, and then rose to prominence during World War II in Yugoslavia. He made important contributions to the Partisan resistance to the Axis occupation, became a delegate to AVNOJ, and was also sent on high level missions to the Soviet Union. After the war, he founded the Vinča Nuclear Institute and was a tenured professor at the University of Belgrade as ...
Go to Profile#873
Alastair G. W. Cameron
#23195
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Alastair G. W. Cameron was an American–Canadian astrophysicist and space scientist who was an eminent staff member of the Astronomy department of Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the field of nuclear astrophysics, advanced the theory that the Moon was created by the giant impact of a Mars-sized object with the early Earth, and was an early adopter of computer technology in astrophysics.
Go to Profile#874
Ken Freeman
#23490
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Kenneth Charles Freeman is an Australian astronomer and astrophysicist who is currently Duffield Professor of Astronomy in the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Mount Stromlo Observatory of the Australian National University in Canberra. He was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1940, studied mathematics and physics at the University of Western Australia, and graduated with first class honours in applied mathematics in 1962. He then went to Cambridge University for postgraduate work in theoretical astrophysics with Leon Mestel and Donald Lynden-Bell, and completed his doctorate in 1965.
Go to Profile#875
Gerson Goldhaber
#13864
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Gerson Goldhaber was a German-born American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was one of the discoverers of the J/ψ meson which confirmed the existence of the charm quark. He worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley as well as a professor at Berkeley's graduate school in astrophysics.
Go to Profile#876
Markus Fierz
#18490
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Markus Eduard Fierz was a Swiss physicist, particularly remembered for his formulation of spin–statistics theorem, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1979 and the Albert Einstein Medal in 1989 for all his work.
Go to Profile#877
George Pake
#4089
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
George E. Pake was a physicist and research executive primarily known for helping founded Xerox PARC. Early life Pake was raised in Kent, Ohio. His father was an English instructor at Kent State University. His mother was a schoolteacher.
Go to Profile#878
Jean Brossel
#17758
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Jean Brossel was a French physicist known for his work on quantum optics. He was born and died in Périgueux. Brossel passed the entrance exam for l'École normale supérieure 1938, but then was for two years a soldier. From 1941 to 1945 he studied at the ENS under Alfred Kastler and then went to the group of Samuel Tolansky in Manchester where he spent the years 1945–1948 before moving in 1948 to Francis Bitter at MIT. In 1951 for work done at MIT, Brossel received his PhD in Paris under Kastler with a thesis on the application of double resonance methods to the study of the excited states of Hg.
Go to Profile#879
Boris Altshuler
#27557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Boris Leonidovich Altshuler is a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University. His specialty is theoretical condensed matter physics. Education and career Altshuler attended State Secondary School 489 in Saint Petersburg. He received his diploma in physics from Leningrad State University in 1976. Altshuler continued on at the Leningrad Institute for Nuclear Physics, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in physics in 1979. Altshuler stayed at the institute for the next ten years as a research fellow.
Go to Profile#880
Nathan Isgur
#29405
Overall Influence
1947 - 2001 (54 years)
Nathan Isgur was a theoretical physicist from the U.S. and Canada. Education Isgur was born in South Houston, Texas and finished high school at South Houston High School. He was a scholarship student at Caltech. where his initial interest was in biology, but he moved toward physics and graduated with a B.Sc degree in 1968. Isgur began work on his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, but received his draft notice during his first year there. Denied a draft deferment to continue his education at Berkeley he went to Toronto in order to pursue his graduate studies and to avoid serving in a war he disagreed with on moral and political grounds.
Go to Profile#881
Henrik Svensmark
#19661
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Henrik Svensmark is a physicist and professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute in Copenhagen. He is known for his work on the hypothesis that fewer cosmic rays are an indirect cause of global warming via cloud formation.
Go to Profile#882
Alfred O. C. Nier
#12614
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Alfred Otto Carl Nier was an American physicist who pioneered the development of mass spectrometry. He was the first to use mass spectrometry to isolate uranium-235 which was used to demonstrate that 235U could undergo fission and developed the sector mass spectrometer configuration now known as Nier-Johnson geometry.
Go to Profile#883
George W. Clark
#32693
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
George Whipple Clark was an American astronomer and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When he retired, M.I.T. described him as "a central figure in the development of high-energy astrophysics, particularly in the design, analysis, and interpretation of experiments for the study of high-energy cosmic ray particles and the celestial sources of gamma rays and X-rays."
Go to Profile#884
Alexei Smirnov
#33046
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alexei Yuryevich Smirnov is a neutrino physics researcher and one of the discoverers of the MSW Effect. Education Alexei Smirnov graduated from MSU Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1974. In 1977, he began to work at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where he received his Candidate of Sciences degree in 1979. In 1989, he received a degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical sciences. He also taught at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in the period from 1982 to 1990.
Go to Profile#885
Jaan Einasto
#15615
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Jaan Einasto is an Estonian astrophysicist and one of the discoverers of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Born Jaan Eisenschmidt in Tartu, the name "Einasto" is an anagram of "Estonia" . He attended the University of Tartu, where he received the Ph.D. equivalent in 1955 and a senior research doctorate in 1972. From 1952, he has worked as a scientist at the Tartu Observatory Head of the Department of Cosmology; from 1992–1995, he was Professor of Cosmology at the University of Tartu. For a long time, he was Head of the Division of Astronomy and Physics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences in Tallinn.
Go to Profile#886
Harold E. Johns
#12094
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Harold Elford Johns was a Canadian medical physicist, noted for his extensive contributions to the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancer. Early life and education Johns was born to missionary parents in Sichuan, China. He lived in China until 1926, when political unrest there prompted his parents to return to North America. After spending time in Tacoma, Washington, and in Brandon, Manitoba, his family settled in Hamilton, Ontario.
Go to Profile#887
Becky Smethurst
#33365
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
Rebecca Smethurst, also known as Dr. Becky, is a British astrophysicist, author, and YouTuber who is a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford. She was the recipient of the 2020 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as the 2020 Mary Somerville Medal and Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics. In 2022, she won the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Award "for research by a post-doctoral fellow in Astronomy whose career has shown the most promising development". As a researcher, Smethurst studies the role that supermassive black holes play in inhibiting different types of galaxies from forming stars.
Go to Profile#888
P. R. Wallace
#17874
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
P. R. Wallace was a Canadian theoretical physicist and long-time professor at McGill University. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences . He had a distinguished career as educator, researcher, and activist in science and society, but he is increasingly well known for his pioneering paper in 1947 on the band structure of graphite, and particularly graphene, the subject of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Go to Profile#889
Jean-Pierre Luminet
#16172
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jean-Pierre Luminet is a French astrophysicist, specializing in black holes and cosmology. He is an emeritus research director at the CNRS . Luminet is a member of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille and Laboratoire Univers et Théories of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, and is a visiting scientist at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseilles. He is also a writer and poet.
Go to Profile#890
Robert Gilman
#15009
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert C. Gilman, born 1945, is a thinker on sustainability who, along with his late wife Diane Gilman, has researched and written about ecovillages. The Gilmans’ work was important in giving definition to the ecovillage movement and shaping the direction of the Global Ecovillage Network. In 1991, the Gilmans co-authored Eco-Villages and Sustainable Communities, a seminal study of ecovillages for Gaia Trust.
Go to Profile#891
Frederick Charles Frank
#19444
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Sir Frederick Charles Frank, OBE, FRS was a British theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on crystal dislocations, including the idea of the Frank–Read source of dislocations. He also proposed the cyclol reaction in the mid-1930s, and made many other contributions to solid-state physics, geophysics, and the theory of liquid crystals.
Go to Profile#892
Bernard d'Espagnat
#10218
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Bernard d'Espagnat was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality. Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality is partially named after him.
Go to Profile#893
Tamiaki Yoneya
#21664
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Tamiaki Yoneya is a Japanese physicist. Independently of Joël Scherk and John H. Schwarz, he realized that string theory describes, among other things, the force of gravity. Yoneya has worked on the stringy extension of the uncertainty principle for many years.
Go to Profile#894
Johannes Juilfs
#21947
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Johannes Wilhelm Heinrich Juilfs, also known by the alias Mathias Jules, was a German theoretical and experimental physicist. He was a member of the Sturmabteilung and then, in 1933, of the Schutzstaffel . Prior to World War II, he was one of three SS staff physicists who investigated the physicist Werner Heisenberg during the Heisenberg Affair, instigated, in part, by the ideological Deutsche Physik movement. During the war, he worked as a theoretical physics assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. During the denazification process after World War II, he was banned from working as a civil servant in academia.
Go to Profile#895
James P. Crutchfield
#14514
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James P. Crutchfield is an American mathematician and physicist. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in physics there in 1983. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, where he is director of the Complexity Sciences Center—a new research and graduate program in complex systems. Prior to this, he was research professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group and SFI's Network Dynamics Program. From 1985 to 1997, he was a research physicist in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#896
Boris Chirikov
#9836
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Boris Valerianovich Chirikov was a Soviet and Russian physicist. He was the founder of the physical theory of Hamiltonian chaos and made pioneering contributions to the theory of quantum chaos. In 1959, he invented the Chirikov criterion which gives an analytical estimate for the overlap of resonances and provides the conditions for transition from integrability to global chaos in Hamiltonian dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#897
Lars Bildsten
#28486
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lars Bildsten is an American astrophysicist, best known for his work on the physics of white dwarfs and their explosions as Type Ia supernovae. He is the sixth director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a professor in the UCSB Physics Department.
Go to Profile#898
Lucie Green
#18261
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Lucinda "Lucie" May Green is a British science communicator and solar physicist. Green is a Professor of Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College London . Green runs MSSL's public engagement programme and sits on the board of the European Solar Physics Division of the European Physical Society and the advisory board of the Science Museum.
Go to Profile#899
Torbjörn Sjöstrand
#33911
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Torbjörn Sjöstrand is a Swedish theoretical physicist and a professor at Lund University in Sweden, where he also got his PhD in 1982. He is one of the main authors of PYTHIA, a program for generation of high-energy physics events.
Go to Profile#900
Hermann Nicolai
#17459
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Hermann Nicolai is a German theoretical physicist and director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam-Golm. Education and career At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hermann Nicolai, beginning in 1971, studied physics and mathematics with a Diplom in 1975 with a doctorate in 1978 under the supervision of Julius Wess. At Heidelberg University, Nicolai was from 1978 to 1979 an assistant in theoretical physics. From 1979 to 1986, he worked at CERN in Geneva as a staff member in the theory department. In 1983 he received his habilitation at Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile