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,
#9501
Peter Engels
#192082
Overall Influence
Peter Engels is a professor of physics at the Washington State University, who conducts research in the field of ultracold atomic gases. His group at WSU performs a variety of experiments involving quantum hydrodynamics, spin–orbit coupling , soliton formation, condensed matter physics, and more using Rb-87 and K-40 . Recently, in collaboration with the theorists Prof. Michael Forbes, Yongping Zhang, and Thomas Busch, his team published research demonstrating negative mass hydrodynamics in a spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensate.
Go to Profile#9502
Feng Wang
#176168
Overall Influence
Feng Wang is an American physicist, currently at University of California, Berkeley and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Education Wang received a B.A. from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1999 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004.
Go to Profile#9503
Ali ibn Isa al-Asturlabi
#73692
Overall Influence
ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā al-Asṭurlābī was a 9th century Arab geographer and astronomer. He wrote a treatise on the astrolabe and was an opponent of astrology. During the reign of al-Ma'mun, and together with Khālid ibn ʿAbd al‐Malik al‐Marwarrūdhī, he participated in an expedition to the Plain of Sinjar to measure the length of a degree. Differing reports state that they obtained a result of , 56 and two-thirds, or 56 and one-quarter miles per degree.
Go to Profile#9504
Erik Magnus Boe
#136872
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Erik Magnus Boe is a Norwegian legal scholar. He was born in Oslo. He took his cand.jur. degree in 1970 and the dr.juris. degree in 1980. He worked in the Ministry of Justice from 1970 to 1973, and was also an associate professor at the University of Tromsø from 1972 to 1976. In 1986 he was appointed as a law professor at the University of Oslo. He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#9505
Atsunobu Tomomatsu
#107338
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
is a Japanese scholar in international relations. His specializations are studies of international cooperation, technical cooperation and international exchange. He is professor emeritus at Utsunomiya University, Japan.
Go to Profile#9506
Rustem Zhantiev
#160633
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Emeritus Professor Rustem Devletovich Zhantiev Dn is a Russian scientist, specialising in the fields of the systematics, ecology and physiology of insect acoustic communication, orientation, and neurophysiology.
Go to Profile#9507
Andrzej Busza
#105037
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Andrzej Busza , Polish Canadian poet, translator, essayist. Associated Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After the outbreak of the World War II, his family fled through Romania to Palestine where they stayed until 1947, when they settled in England. Andrzej Busza studied there in London . Soon he became active in Polish émigré literary circles. In 1965 he moved to Canada where for many years he taught English literature on University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#9508
Manfred Angerer
#119425
Overall Influence
1953 - 2010 (57 years)
Manfred Angerer was an Austrian musicologist. Life Born in Pöchlarn , Angerer studied piano as a concert subject at the Vienna Academy of Music from 1970 and musicology as well as art history and philosophy at the University of Vienna from 1972. He completed his doctorate in 1979 with a dissertation on Alexander Scriabin's late works. Two years later he became assistant to Walter Pass at the Institute for Musicology of the University of Vienna, becoming a lecturer in 1984. In 1990 he habilitated with a thesis on Joseph Haydn. Angerer was married to the musicologist Eike Rathgeber .
Go to Profile#9509
Shahriar Afshar
#186707
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
#9510
Suresh Chandra Rai
#192142
Overall Influence
#9511
Thomas P. Glynn
#65184
Overall Influence
Thomas P. Glynn III is a senior official at Harvard University overseeing the Harvard Allston Land Company, a new entity to develop commercial real estate in the Allston land owned by Harvard. He is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, former general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and United States Deputy Secretary of Labor. Since May, 2023, he has served as chair of the MBTA's board of directors.
Go to Profile#9512
Bjørn Gjevik
#191422
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Bjørn Gjevik is a Norwegian physicist. He hails from Hitra. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1972 and became a professor of hydrodynamics at the University of Oslo in 1977. He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#9513
Ralf Mackenbach
#188247
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Ralf J. J. Mackenbach is a Dutch plasma physicist, artist and former child singer, best known for winning the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2009 with the song "Click Clack". He is the first and to date only Dutch winner of the contest.
Go to Profile#9514
Hans van Leeuwen
#191330
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Johannes "Hans" van Leeuwen is educator, engineer, inventor, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is an emeritus professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at Iowa State University and an entrepreneur in ethanol co-product development. His research and innovations have worked to solve various problems including, new water purification methods, a way of creating food and animal feed from waste, and a process in making the purest alcohol ever made.
Go to Profile#9515
Daniela Jacob
#168834
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Daniela Jacob is a German climate scientist. She heads the Climate Service Center Germany and is a visiting professor at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Biography Jacob studied meteorology from 1980 to 1986 at the Technical University of Darmstadt and received her doctorate in 1991 from the University of Hamburg.
Go to Profile#9516
Gennady Drach
#167676
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gennady Vladimirovich Drach is a Russian scientist in the fields of culturology and history of ancient Greek philosophy. He is a professor at the Southern Federal University, vice president of the Russian Philosophical Society , and a 2007 Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation. He is a member of the Editorial Boards for Humanitarians of the South of Russia and Scientific Thought of Caucasus.
Go to Profile#9517
Alenka Luzar
#184759
Overall Influence
Alenka Luzar was a Slovenian-American physical chemist known for her research on the dynamics of hydrogen bonds in water. Education and career Luzar is originally from Ljubljana, and as a teenager was a member of the Slovenian junior national ski team at the Junior Olympic games associated with the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. She was educated at the University of Ljubljana, completing her Ph.D. there in 1983.
Go to Profile#9518
Dieter Zeppenfeld
#192117
Overall Influence
Dieter Zeppenfeld from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Division of Particles and Fields in 1999, for pioneering contributions to the theoretical formulation of effective electroweak gauge boson interactions in a model-independent way and in the linear-sigma model, which initiated phenomenological and experimental studies of gauge boson anomalous coup.
Go to Profile#9519
James DeYoreo
#170497
Overall Influence
James DeYoreo is the Battelle Fellow and Initiative Lead for the Materials Synthesis and Simulation Across Scales Initiative at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. Concurrent with his position at PNNL, he is a member of the graduate faculty, materials science and engineering, University of Washington.
Go to Profile#9520
Anders Thor
#93886
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
Anders Johan Thor was a Swedish scientist and teacher most notable for his leadership in international standardization of quantities and units. He is one of the creators of binary prefixes and the IUPAC Green Book.
Go to Profile#9521
Stephen Thorndike
#192203
Overall Influence
Stephen Thorndike is a high school teacher. He is known for discovering, along with astrophysicist Alice C. Quillen, Epsilon Eridani c, a hypothetical planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani. After working at the University of Rochester, he now works as a science instructional specialist at Monroe 2 Boces in Spencerport, New York.
Go to Profile#9522
Richard C. Lamb
#182971
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Richard C. Lamb was an American astrophysicist. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Lamb earned his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began graduate work at the University of Kentucky after a stint in the military, earning a doctorate in 1963. Lamb worked for Argonne National Laboratory, then began teaching at Iowa State University until his retirement in 1996. Lamb later became a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. A member of the American Astronomical Society and the International Astronomical Union, Lamb was also granted fellowship ...
Go to Profile#9523
Michael L. W. Thewalt
#172028
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael L. W. Thewalt is a Canadian physicist. He received his BSc from McMaster University in 1972. His MSc and PhD were from the University of British Columbia in the mid-1970s. He teaches at Simon Fraser University and is known for researching semiconductors, especially isotopically enriched silicon.
Go to Profile#9524
Ursula Wertheim
#132280
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Ursula Wertheim was a German literary scholar and university teacher at Jena in East Germany. The primary focus of her writing and teaching was on Germany's eighteenth and nineteenth century classical literature.
Go to Profile#9525
B. B. Chakrabarti
#34850
Overall Influence
Binay Bhushan Chakrabarti, commonly known as B. B. Chakrabarti, is an Indian academic and professor of management and finance. He was the Director of Indian Institute of Management Ranchi . Now the director is Prof Shailendra Singh, another professor of IIM Lucknow.
Go to Profile#9526
Gennady Andreev
#192218
Overall Influence
1950 - 2002 (52 years)
#9527
Georgi Efremov
#58446
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Georgi D. Efremov was a Macedonian academic and scientist at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Skopje, Macedonia, and a professor in the Faculty of Agricultural Science and Food in Skopje. He was specialized in genetic engineering in human medicine, veterinary medicine, and animal biotechnology. He was a former Ambassador and Minister of Science in the Republic of Macedonia.
Go to Profile#9528
Rio Febrian
#192233
Overall Influence
#9529
Faiza Darkhani
#86422
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Faiza Darkhani is an Afghan environmentalist, women's rights activist, and educator. In 2021, she was part of the 100 Women BBC list, which includes the most inspiring and influential women in the world. Darkhani is one of the few scholars of climate change within Afghanistan. She formally was the director of the National Environmental Protection Agency in Badakhshan province.
Go to Profile#9530
Harihar Rao
#49615
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Harihar Rao was an Indian-born American musician, noted for playing tabla and sitar. He was born into a prominent musical family in Mangalore, India. He moved to the United States in 1964, residing in Pasadena, California. Rao was a Fulbright Scholar at UCLA., He worked in the ethnomusicology department at UCLA and privately taught and mentored students of the sitar.
Go to Profile#9531
Tadeusz Szczurek
#73464
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Tadeusz Szczurek is Polish philosophy and security sciences specialist, Doctor of Philosophy, brigadier general of Polish Armed Forces, associate professor and rector-commander of Military University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland.
Go to Profile#9532
Kathleen Collins
#161536
Overall Influence
Kathleen Collins is an American biophysicist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research considers telomerase RNA structure and telomere function. In 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#9533
Kees Neggers
#50501
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Cornelis Adrianus Maria "Kees" Neggers is a Dutch Internet pioneer. He is best known for starting and promoting many initiatives for international collaboration in research and education networking.
Go to Profile#9534
Eckhard Weymann
#155045
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Eckhard Weymann is a German music therapist. Born in Wuppertal, Weymann studied piano pedagogy at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln and completed his music-therapeutic training from 1978 to 1980 in Mentorenkurs Musiktherapie Herdecke. Together with Frank Grootaers, Tilmann Weber and Rosemarie Tüpker he founded the Institut für Musiktherapie und Morphologie . He holds a doctorate and is a professor for music improvisation and music therapy at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg as well as supervisor at the .
Go to Profile#9535
Vyacheslav Voloshyn
#135790
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Vyacheslav S. Voloshyn is a Ukrainian scientist, Doktor nauk, Professor, head of the Department of Labor Protection and Environmental of the Priazovsky State Technical University, rector of the Pryazovskyi State Technical University since 2003.
Go to Profile#9536
Siegfried Oechsle
#151969
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Siegfried Oechsle is a German musicologist. Life Oechsle studied musicology, art history and philosophy at the universities of Kiel and Copenhagen. In 1985 he became M. A. at the University of Kiel with his "Studien zum symphonischen Frühwerk Niels Gade". He then worked as a research assistant at the Musicological Institute. In 1989 he was awarded his Doctorate with a work under the title "Symphony after Beethoven. Studies on Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Gade".
Go to Profile#9537
Jiang Zejia
#141648
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Jiang Zejia was a Chinese electrical engineer and educator. Biography Jiang was born in November 1920 in Hankou, Hubei, with his ancestral home in Jingde County, Anhui. After the high school, he studied, then taught, at what is now Chongqing University. He went to study at McGill University in Canada in 1947.
Go to Profile#9538
Yair Hirschfeld
#19893
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Yair Hirschfeld is an Israeli lecturer at the University of Haifa. Hirschfeld was a key architect of the Oslo Accords in 1993. He was born in Vienna and has been a strong supporter of the two-state solution, and has urged the Palestinian National Authority and the Israeli government to accept some form of this solution.
Go to Profile#9539
Carmen Magallón
#87864
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Carmen Magallón-Portolés is a PhD, a physicist, and Master in Philosophy of Science by University of Zaragoza, Spain, committed with the advancement of women through researching their contributions to two important fields: science and peace. Her thinking is an important reference in the Spanish studies of Women in Science and Feminist Pacifism. Among her works in this field: Mujeres en pie de paz, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 2006 and Contar en el mundo. Una mirada sobre las relaciones internacionales desde las vidas de las mujeres, Madrid, Horas y horas, 2012.
Go to Profile#9540
Refat Appazov
#114524
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Refat Fazylovich Appazov was a Soviet-Crimean Tatar rocket scientist and colleague of Sergei Korolev who served as head of the ballistics department of Energia from 1961 to 1988. Unlike most Crimean Tatars, he was spared special settler status and exile to Central Asia since the authorities forgot to include him in the deportation due to being in Izhevsk at the time. As a result, he was left cut off from the rest of Crimean Tatar society in the Soviet Union for much of his life. Nevertheless, he managed to become an engineer in OKB-1 and later a teacher at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute despite repeatedly facing discrimination.
Go to Profile#9541
Mehrdad Bahar
#26085
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Mehrdād Bahār was a prominent Iranist, linguist, mythologist and Persian historian. Early life Mehrdad Bahar, was the youngest son of Persian poet Mohammad Taghi Bahar. He held a Ph.D. in Persian literature and Ancient Iranian languages from Tehran University. He received an MA degree in "Ancient and Medieval Persian history" from the University of London where he studied with Professor Mary Boyce at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He began his career as a linguist with focus on Middle Persian. Later in his career he became interested in Persian mythology. He developed theories o...
Go to Profile#9542
Milton Thiago de Mello
#53220
Overall Influence
1916 - Present (110 years)
Milton Thiago de Mello is a veterinarian and the dean of Brazilian primatology. He is a strong voice for biological conservation of Brazil's megadiverse flora and fauna. As a professional veterinarian and zoological researcher, de Mello has received awards and distinctions from many governments and organizations, such as from the Comité Français de l’Association Mondiale Vétérinaire, the World Veterinary Epidemiology Society, the Sociedad Colombiana de Primatologia and the John Guggenhiem Memorial. He is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Veterinary Sciences of London, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#9543
Andres Keevallik
#93662
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Andres Keevallik is an Estonian scientist in mechanics. In 1966, he graduated from Tallinn Polytechnical Institute in computer science . In 1974, he graduated from the university in Moscow. Since 1992, he is professor of roads' engineering.
Go to Profile#9544
Gerd Dose
#93478
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Gerd Dose was a professor of English literature and culture at the University of Hamburg from 1985 to 2007. His main research interests were medieval English literature, English comic literature, cultural studies, Australian studies, and the reception of war and the military in English comic literature. Also, research on constancy and variation in behaviour in Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus. He set up "modern English language literatures" as an area of teaching and research.
Go to Profile#9545
Utz Claassen
#13925
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Utz Claassen is a German manager, management consultant, entrepreneur, investor and author. He has held senior management positions in some of Germany’s most prominent companies such as Volkswagen and EnBW.
Go to Profile#9546
Andrzej Januszajtis
#176136
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Andrzej Januszajtis is a Polish physicist, professor and politician who served as the Chairman of the City Council of Gdańsk from 1991 to 1994.
Go to Profile#9547
J. F. Besseling
#172843
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Johannes Ferdinand "Hans" Besseling was professor emeritus of Engineering Mechanics at the Delft University of Technology, worked in the field of the application of solid mechanics to the analysis of structures; constitutive equations for the mathematical description of material behaviour. His specialities are finite element methods, continuum thermodynamics, creep and plasticity of metals.
Go to Profile#9548
Henry Reich
#192375
Overall Influence
#9549
Maurizio Bettini
#26919
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Maurizio Bettini is an Italian philologist, anthropologist and novelist. He is a professor of classical philology at the University of Siena and director of Siena's Centre for the Study of Anthropology and the Ancient World.
Go to Profile#9550
Georg Zoidl
#192409
Overall Influence
Georg Zoidl is an Austrian-Canadian Canada Research Chair for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at York University.
Go to Profile