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,
#9351
Zhang Fuchun
#189589
Overall Influence
Zhang Fuchun is a Chinese physicist. Zhang earned a bachelor's degree from Fudan University in 1968 and obtained a doctorate at Virginia Tech in 1983. Zhang then split his postdoctoral research between three institutions, the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland, and ETH Zurich between 1983 and 1988. He subsequently held a professorship at the University of Cincinnati until 2006, when he returned to China for a full-time teaching position at the University of Hong Kong, where he had begun teaching in 2003. Zhang subsequently joined the Zhejiang University faculty in 2012. In 199...
Go to Profile#9352
Heinrich Karsten Wagenfeld
#183125
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Hein Wagenfeld was a German theoretical and experimental physicist known for his work in electron and X-ray crystallography especially X-ray diffraction relating to absorption and the Borrmann effect. He was highly regarded for his commitment to international understanding and peace.
Go to Profile#9353
Christoph Junghans
#181594
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Christoph Junghans is a German born American computational physicist and academic, working in multiscale modeling and computational co-design. He is currently the group leader of the applied computer science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#9354
Arto Nurmikko
#137140
Overall Influence
Arto V. Nurmikko, a native of Finland, is a L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Engineering and Physics at Brown University. He received his degrees from University of California, Berkeley, with postdoctoral stays at MIT and Hebrew University. Professor Nurmikko conducts research in neuroengineering, brain sciences, nanophotonics and microelectronics, especially for the translation of device research to new technologies in biomedical, life science, and photonics applications.
Go to Profile#9355
Alexander Grossmann
#124573
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Professor Alexander Grossmann started out as a researcher and lecturer, working variously at the University of Tübingen, the Jülich Research Centre, and the Max Planck Institute in Munich. In 2001, Prof. Grossmann took a career shift and moved into scholarly publishing. He first took a position at Wiley-Blackwell, and then moved to Springer-Verlag GmbH in Vienna where he was Managing Director. Subsequently, Grossmann became vice president at scientific publishing house De Gruyter.
Go to Profile#9356
Ragnvald Høier
#189632
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Ragnvald Karl Olav Høier was a Norwegian physicist. He graduated from the University of Oslo with the cand.real. degree in 1965, and took the dr.philos. degree in 1973. He was appointed as professor at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1983. He was also involved at SINTEF.
Go to Profile#9357
Mikkel Andersen
#187893
Overall Influence
Mikkel F. Andersen is a physicist, Associate Professor at the University of Otago, and an investigator at the Dodd-Walls Centre in Dunedin, New Zealand. His research deals with ways to capture fast-moving atoms.
Go to Profile#9358
Carol Lynn Alpert
#97782
Overall Influence
Carol Lynn Alpert is an American science communication and public engagement expert and the Director of Strategic Projects at the Museum of Science . She is also an Associate in Applied Physics in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and Co-Director of the NSF Center for Integrated Quantum Materials.
Go to Profile#9359
Sandrine Heutz
#171248
Overall Influence
Sandrine Elizabeth Monique Heutz is a Professor of Functional Molecular Materials at Imperial College London. She works on organic and magnetically coupled molecular materials for spintronic applications. In 2008 Heutz was awarded the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Silver Medal.
Go to Profile#9360
Nicholas M. Smith Jr.
#116989
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Nicholas Monroe Smith Jr. was a nuclear physicist and research consultant. Smith was an expert on reactor physics, a developer of operations research/computer modeling, and a computer applications consultant. He had ties to the Manhattan Project at Chicago and Oak Ridge, and worked with Samuel Allison and James Van Allen. Smith was a pioneer in the field of operations research.
Go to Profile#9361
Ásgeir Helgason
#74704
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ásgeir R. Helgason is an Icelandic scientist working at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Since 2002 he has been an associate professor in psychology at the Departments of Oncology-Pathology and Public Health at the Karolinska Institutet and Reykjavik University, Iceland.
Go to Profile#9362
Thomas A. O'Halloran
#189907
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Thomas A. O'Halloran Jr. was an American particle physicist. Both of O'Halloran's parents were natives of County Cork. They moved from Ireland to Brooklyn, New York, where he was born on 13 April 1931. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics at Oregon State University, O'Halloran served in the United States Navy for four years, on the USS Ruddy, and stateside in Las Vegas, before earning a doctorate in physics at University of California, Berkeley. He completed his doctoral studies in 1963, advised by Gerson and Sulamith Goldhaber, then pursued postdoctoral research at Harvard Un...
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Hein de Baar
#135277
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Henricus "Hein" J.W. de Baar is a Dutch professor of Oceanography. He has worked in the group of Harry Elderfield at the University of Cambridge, at the University of Groningen and at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research .
Go to Profile#9364
Enrique García-Berro
#110642
Overall Influence
1959 - 2017 (58 years)
Enrique García-Berro Montilla was a Spanish and Catalan astrophysicist. He was a world-recognized expert in stellar astrophysics, in particular in the theory of white dwarf stars and type Ia supernovae.
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Greg Craven
#52660
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Gregory Joseph Craven is an Australian academic, who was the vice-chancellor and president of the Australian Catholic University from January 2008 to January 2021. On 8 April 2020, the ACU chancellor, John Fahey, announced Craven's planned retirement in an email to staff and students, which was to become effective in January 2021. His successor was named as Zlatko Skrbis, who took up his appointment as ACU's fourth Vice Chancellor on 11 January 2021.
Go to Profile#9366
Peter Stein
#107267
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Peter Gonville Stein, QC, FBA was a British legal scholar. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Aberdeen from 1956 to 1968 and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge from 1968 until his retirement in 1993.
Go to Profile#9367
Isaac Sir Newton
#190100
Overall Influence
#9368
Pedro E. Zadunaisky
#91494
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Pedro Elías Zadunaisky was an Argentine astronomer and mathematician who plotted the orbit of Saturn's most-distant moon, Phoebe, as well as several comets including Halley's Comet, and various satellites including Explorer I.
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David Chandler
#190110
Overall Influence
#9370
Michael Scholar
#25406
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir Michael Charles Scholar, KCB is a British civil servant and former President of St John's College, Oxford. Education He was educated at St Olave's Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge and held positions at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Leicester.
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Ali Aliev
#133243
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ali Enver Aliev is a Crimean Tatar American physicist, research professor at the NanoTech Institute, and adjunct professor at Physics Department, The School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Texas at Dallas. In 2011 he was recognized an “Inventor of the year” by Time magazine His fields of current research interest are nanoscience and nanotechnologies, electrochromism and acoustics. He holds a number of invention patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office .
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Elisabeth Bouchaud
#177570
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Elisabeth Bouchaud is a French physicist, playwright and actress born 1 March 1961. She is a member of Commissariat à l'énergie atomique , and works at Ecole Superieure de Chimie et Physique de la Ville de Paris. Since 2015, she is also the Director of the Théâtre de la Reine Blanche in Paris.
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Musa Hakan Asyalı
#89414
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Musa Hakan Asyalı is a Turkish scientist and professor of biomedical engineering. Formerly the dean of engineering at Zirve University, he became the rector of Abdullah Gül University in 2010, and resigned in 2012. After resigning, he worked at Yıldız Technical University until 2016, when he was accused of being the founder of a Gülen movement organization at the university.
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Amy Graves
#140326
Overall Influence
Amy Lisa Graves is a retired American physicist and physics educator, the Walter Kemp Professor Emerita in the Natural Sciences and Professor of Physics at Swarthmore College. Her publications include works on gender bias in physics, physics education, and computational simulations of phenomena in condensed matter physics, including jamming.
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Seán McLoughlin
#187023
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Seán M. McLoughlin is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of the Anthropology of Islam at the University of Leeds. His works use field research, in-depth interviews and documentary analysis to explore the dynamics of Islam and Muslim cultures in contexts of contemporary migration, diaspora and transnationalism. He works mainly with South Asian heritage Muslim communities in the UK, especially British Pakistanis and Kashmiris in the Northern England. McLoughlin is a member of the Sociology of Religion Study Group, British Sociological Association.
Go to Profile#9376
Mykhailo Lysytsa
#190173
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Mykhailo Pavlovych Lysytsa was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist. The asteroid 8064 Lisitsa was named after him.
Go to Profile#9377
Stefan Roth
#190219
Overall Influence
#9378
Bradford Wargelin
#190230
Overall Influence
#9379
Roy A. Tucker
#71739
Overall Influence
1951 - 2021 (70 years)
Roy A. Tucker was an American astronomer best known for the co-discovery of near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis along with David J. Tholen and Fabrizio Bernardi of the University of Hawaii. He was a prolific discoverer of minor planets, credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 702 numbered minor planets between 1996 and 2010. He also discovered two comets: 328P/LONEOS–Tucker and C/2004 Q1, a Jupiter-family and near-parabolic comet, respectively.
Go to Profile#9380
Tomlinson Fort Jr.
#137933
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Tomlinson Fort Jr. served as head of the Chemical Engineering departments at Carnegie Mellon and Vanderbilt University. Throughout a 40-year career in education, Fort served as Provost at Missouri–Rolla and Provost and Vice President of Cal Poly.
Go to Profile#9381
Mikhail Batura
#59407
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mikhail Batura is a Belarusian scientist and university rector accused of political repressions. He is a Doctor of Technical Sciences; Professor; Rector of the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics; member of the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences. His areas of scientific interest include system analysis, information processing and control in technical and organizational systems. Mikhail Batura has authored more than 150 scientific works and publications.
Go to Profile#9382
Alexei Kitaev
#190316
Overall Influence
#9383
Chris Tinney
#179156
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Chris Tinney is an astronomer at the University of New South Wales who is focused on extrasolar planet and brown dwarf research. He is a member of the Anglo-Australian Planet Search team which has discovered over twenty planets by doppler spectroscopy. He is also the former head of astronomy at the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
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Nicole Lloyd-Ronning
#189641
Overall Influence
Nicole Marie Lloyd-Ronning is an American computational astrophysicist specializing in gamma-ray bursts and the deaths of massive stars as a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and lecturer at University of New Mexico–Los Alamos. She is also known for her work in science popularization, as the author of the book Great Mysteries in Astrophysics, as a scientist ambassador for the Bradbury Science Museum, and in youth outreach programs, especially for young people from indigenous groups in the American
Go to Profile#9386
John Powell
#153127
Overall Influence
1923 - 1996 (73 years)
John Alfred Powell FRSE FIEE FRSA was a 20th-century British physicist and company director. His most important creation was the EMI body scanner. Life Powell was born on 4 November 1923 in Islip near Oxford, the son of Algernon Powell and his wife Constance Elsie Honour. From the tiny primary school he won a scholarship to be educated at Bicester County School in Oxfordshire.
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Anatoly Kuzovnikov
#189021
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Anatoly Aleksandrovich Kuzovnikov — was a Soviet and Russian physicist. Doctor of physical and mathematical Sciences, honored Professor of Moscow state University. Biography A. Kuzovnikov was born on November 9, 1922, in the village of Pokrovka in the Pokrovsky District of the Orenburg Oblast. In 1940, he graduated from high school and was drafted into the Red Army. Met the war at the age of 19, fought in the engineering and technical services of the Air Forces.
Go to Profile#9388
Gladys Patricia Abdel Rahim Garzón
#188497
Overall Influence
Gladys Patricia Abdel Rahim Garzón is a Colombian physicist. She is Researcher-Associate Professor of the Francisco José de Caldas District University. Her research is in materials physics. Education She studied physics at the Universidad Distrital Fracisco José de Caldas, specializing in diffraction in crystals. She completed a master's degree in Physics in 2006 and a PhD in engineering in 2017 at the National University of Colombia and graduated with meritorious mention .
Go to Profile#9389
Elizabeth B. Dussan V.
#104212
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Elizabeth B. Dussan V. is an American applied mathematician, condensed matter physicist, and chemical engineer. Her research involves fluid dynamics, and she is known for her work on wetting, porous media, and fluid-fluid interfaces.
Go to Profile#9390
Klaus Fesser
#190465
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Klaus Fesser is a professor for theoretical physics at Department of Physics at the University of Greifswald, Germany. Director Now, he is the director of the Department of Physics. Subjects of lectures Seminar of theoretical physicsLaboratory practical course IITheoretical solid-state physics IISeminar: special problems of theoretical physicsSpecial chapters of the solid theoryPhysical colloquium
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Jenifer Haselgrove
#52038
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Jenifer Leech was a British physicist and computer scientist. She is most noted for her formulation of ray tracing equations in a cold magneto-plasma, now widely known in the radio science community as Haselgrove's Equations.
Go to Profile#9392
Jennifer Bartlett
#189994
Overall Influence
Jennifer Lynn Bartlett is an American astronomer, the Kinnear Chair of Physics at the United States Naval Academy, and former Chief of the Software Products Division in the Astronomical Applications Department of the United States Naval Observatory. Her interests include the development of software for astrometry, the accurate measurements of distances to nearby stars, celestial navigation, the effects of the atmosphere on the brightness of the sky and celestial objects, the history of astronomy, and the preservation of historical astronomical data.
Go to Profile#9393
Martin Dent
#103285
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Martin Dent, OBE was an English academic who was the co-founder with retired diplomat William Peters of Jubilee 2000; an international coalition movement in over 40 countries that called for cancellation of third world debt by the year 2000.
Go to Profile#9394
Alexander V. Markov
#76151
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Alexander V. Markov is a Russian biologist, paleontologist, popularizer of science. Prize winner of the main Russian prize for popular science . Markov graduated from the Moscow State University in 1987. He has been working in the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1987. Doctor of biological sciences, Senior Research Professor of the Paleontological Institute, RAS. Professor of the RAS.
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Daniel Akerib
#190522
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Daniel S. Akerib is an American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was elected in 2008 a fellow of the American Physical Society . Biography Akerib graduated in 1984 with an A.B. from the University of Chicago and in 1990 with a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. A search for the rare decay + → + is the title of his Ph.D. thesis . As a postdoc he did research from 1990 to 1992 at California Institute of Technology and from 1993 to 1996 at UC Berkeley's Center for Particle Astrophysics . In the physics department of Case Western Reserve University, he was from 1995 to 2001 an ...
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Jeffrey T. Williams
#104997
Overall Influence
Jeffery T. Williams is an American ichthyologist. He is primarily interested in the systematics, taxonomy, and zoogeography of marine fishes. He is the retired Collections Manager in the Division of Fishes at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.
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Javier Martín-Torres
#188156
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Javier Martín-Torres is a Spanish physicist with interests in atmospheric sciences , geophysics, and astrobiology. He has published over 100 scientific papers in these areas. He is a chaired professor in Planetary Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and senior research scientist of the Spanish Research Council, assigned to the Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra, located in Armilla, Granada, Spain. He is also a visiting professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, a Specially Appointed Professor at Okayama University. Previously he has worked...
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Paula Casal
#182343
Overall Influence
Paula Casal is an ICREA Professor in the Law Department of Pompeu Fabra University. She was previously a Reader in Moral and Political Philosophy at Reading University and a Lecturer at Keele University . She was also a Fellow in Ethics at Harvard University , a Keele Junior Research Fellow, also at Harvard , a Hoover Fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain , and a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Oxford . Her work has appeared in journals such as Ethics, Economics and Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Hypatia, Political Studies, and Utilitas.
Go to Profile#9399
John Crocker
#185615
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
John C. Crocker is an American physicist and chemical engineer. He is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Crocker's research is focused in soft matter physics, nanotechnology and cell mechanics.
Go to Profile#9400
Sabina Nowak
#86627
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sabina Nowak is a Polish scientist and wolf expert. She is president of the Association for Nature Wolf and a member of the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe. Life In 1983, Nowak graduated from the University of Silesia in Katowice with a Master of Science degree in biology. In her doctoral thesis she described the "Ecology of Wolves". She has been taking care of the wolf in Poland since the mid-1990s. From 1993 to 1998 she coordinated the campaign "For the full protection of the large predators, wolf and lynx" in Poland and a campaign for the protection of the entire Polish part of the primeval forest Białowieża as a national park .
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