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.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#9601
Samson Kutateladze
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Samson Semyonovich Kutateladze was a Soviet heat physicist and hydrodynamist. Biography Early life Kutateladze's parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, an obstetric nurse. His father, Semyon Samsonovich, had been a nobleman; he was before the October Revolution a student at Petrograd University and then an army officer. He was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp near Novosibirsk. Following the divorce, Kutateladze and his mother lived for a few years in Georgia, returning in 1922 to Petrograd.
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George Adolphus Schott
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
George Adolphus Schott FRS was a British mathematician. He is best known for developing the full theory of radiation from electrons travelling at close to the speed of light. Born in Bradford to German parents, he was educated at Bradford Grammar School and later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1890. After obtaining his Doctor of Science he became assistant lecturer to D.M. Lewis in the Department of Physics. After a years leave, in which he travelled to Germany, he became lecturer of Applied Mathematics at Aberystwyth University, where he would spend the rest of his career.
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Yrjö Väisälä
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Yrjö Väisälä was a Finnish astronomer and physicist. His main contributions were in the field of optics. He was also active in geodetics, astronomy and optical metrology. He had an affectionate nickname of Wizard of Tuorla , and a book with the same title in Finnish describes his works. His discoveries include 128 minor planets and 3 comets.
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Jean Bosler
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
Jean Bosler was a French astronomer and author of several books. Recruited by Deslandres as an astronomer at l’observatoire de Paris, Bosler discovered in 1908 in the spectrum of Comet Morehouse the spectral lines of ionized nitrogen, which was the first evidence of that element in comets. Much of his research was on the physical properties and orbits of comets. He made a report on progress in astrophysics in the United States for the 1910 annual report of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1912, he showed in his doctoral dissertation that the Sun’s magnetic field, by means of the intermediary ...
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John Augustine Zahm
1851 - 1921 (70 years)
The Rev. John Augustine Zahm , CSC was a Holy Cross priest, author, scientist, and explorer of South America. He was born at New Lexington, Ohio, and died in Munich, Germany. Early life Zahm was born on June 14, 1851 in a log home in Jackson Township, Perry County, Ohio to John and Mary Zahm. His mother was born in Pennsylvania and was of English descent, having Edward Braddock as an ancestor. His father was an immigrant to the United States from Olsberg, Germany.
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Knut Lundmark
1889 - 1958 (69 years)
Knut Emil Lundmark , was a Swedish astronomer, professor of astronomy and head of the observatory at Lund University from 1929 to 1955. Lundmark received his astronomical education at the observatory of Uppsala University. His dissertation was titled: The relations of the globular clusters and spiral nebulae to the stellar system. During the 1920s he worked at several observatories in the USA, mainly the Lick Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory.
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Friedrich Hayn
1863 - 1928 (65 years)
Friedrich Karl Traugott Hayn was a German astronomer. Biography Hayn was born in Auerbach, Saxony, in 1863, the son of a pastor. He attended high school in Dresden. From 1883 to 1888, he studied astronomy at Leipzig University and the University of Göttingen. In 1888, he received his doctorate from Göttingen after determining the orbit of Comet Swift–Tuttle, which had been discovered in 1862. In 1891, he became an assistant at Leipzig Observatory. In 1920, he turned down an offer from the Koenigsberg Observatory, and became an associate professor at Leipzig. Throughout his career, he surveyed, among other things, the Pleiades cluster and certain rotational elements of the moon.
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Theodor Kaluza
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza was a German mathematician and physicist known for the Kaluza–Klein theory, involving field equations in five-dimensional space-time. His idea that fundamental forces can be unified by introducing additional dimensions were reused much later for string theory.
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Prosper-René Blondlot
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Prosper-René Blondlot was a French physicist, who in 1891 made the first measurement of the speed of radio waves, but is now mostly remembered for his "discovery" of N rays, a phenomenon that subsequently proved to be illusory.
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Friedrich Karl Ginzel
1850 - 1926 (76 years)
Friedrich Karl Ginzel was an Austrian astronomer. From 1877 Ginzel worked at the observatory in Vienna. In 1886, he became a member of the Königlichen Astronomischen Recheninstituts in Berlin, where he was offered a professorship in 1899.
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Richard Börnstein
1852 - 1913 (61 years)
Richard Börnstein was a German physicist and meteorologist. Born into a Jewish family in Königsberg, he studied natural sciences at the University of Göttingen, and later on, worked as an assistant to Georg Hermann Quincke at the University of Heidelberg. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg, and afterwards taught classes in experimental physics and meteorology at the Agricultural Academy in Proskau. From 1881 onward, he served as a professor at the Agricultural University of Berlin.
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Paul Drude
1863 - 1906 (43 years)
Paul Karl Ludwig Drude was a German physicist specializing in optics. He wrote a fundamental textbook integrating optics with James Clerk Maxwell's theories of electromagnetism. Education Born into an ethnic German family, the son of a physician in Braunschweig, Drude began his studies in mathematics at the University of Göttingen, but later changed his major to physics. His dissertation covering the reflection and diffraction of light in crystals was completed in 1887, under Woldemar Voigt.
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Gyula Farkas
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak or Julius Farkas de Kisbarnak was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist. Biography Farkas was born on March 28, 1847, in Sárosd, Hungary. He was the eldest of seven children in a Roman Catholic Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak, which can trace back their origins to the first half of the 17th century. His father was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys; his mother was Cecília Hoffmann . His paternal grandparents were János Farkas de Kisbarnak , state administrator of Súr and Anna Fiber. His maternal grandparents were István Hoffmann, states cashier and Rozália Vitmáier.
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Eugène Cosserat
1866 - 1931 (65 years)
Eugène-Maurice-Pierre Cosserat was a French mathematician and astronomer. Born in Amiens, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1883 to 1888. He was on Science faculty of Toulouse University from 1889 and director of its observatory from 1908, a position he held for the rest of his life. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1919.
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Isaac Newton
1642 - 1727 (85 years)
Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book , first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though notably he developed calculus well before Leibniz.
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Ptolemy
100 - 170 (70 years)
Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treat...
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Ernest Rutherford
1871 - 1937 (66 years)
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. Rutherford has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday". In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." He was the first Oceanian Nobel laureate, and the first to perform the awarded work in Canada.
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Richard Feynman
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.
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Apollonius of Perga
262 BC - 190 BC (72 years)
Apollonius of Perga was an ancient Greek geometer and astronomer known for his work on conic sections. Beginning from the earlier contributions of Euclid and Archimedes on the topic, he brought them to the state prior to the invention of analytic geometry. His definitions of the terms ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are the ones in use today. With his predecessors Euclid and Archimedes, Apollonius is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity.
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Hans Christian Ørsted
1777 - 1851 (74 years)
Hans Christian Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, which was the first connection found between electricity and magnetism. Oersted's law and the oersted unit are named after him.
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Christian Doppler
1803 - 1853 (50 years)
Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He formulated the principle – now known as the Doppler effect – that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.
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Yakov Frenkel
1894 - 1952 (58 years)
Yakov Il'ich Frenkel was a Soviet physicist renowned for his works in the field of condensed-matter physics. He is also known as Jacov Frenkel, frequently using the name J. Frenkel in publications in English.
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Caroline Herschel
1750 - 1848 (98 years)
Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German-born British astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel, with whom she worked throughout her career.
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Charles Messier
1730 - 1817 (87 years)
Charles Messier was a French astronomer. He published an astronomical catalogue consisting of 110 nebulae and star clusters, which came to be known as the Messier objects, referred to with the letter M and their number between 1 and 110. Messier's purpose for the catalogue was to help astronomical observers distinguish between permanent and transient visually diffuse objects in the sky.
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Ilya Frank
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Ilya Mikhailovich Frank was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Igor Y. Tamm, also of the Soviet Union. He received the award for his work in explaining the phenomenon of Cherenkov radiation. He received the Stalin prize in 1946 and 1953 and the USSR state prize in 1971.
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Gustav Mie
1868 - 1957 (89 years)
Gustav Adolf Feodor Wilhelm Ludwig Mie was a German physicist. Life Mie was born in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany in 1868. From 1886 he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Rostock. In addition to his major subjects, he also attended lectures in chemistry, zoology, geology, mineralogy and astronomy, as well as logic and metaphysics. In 1889 he continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg and received a doctoral degree in mathematics at the age of 22.
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George Placzek
1905 - 1955 (50 years)
George Placzek was a Moravian physicist. Biography Placzek was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Brünn, Moravia , the grandson of Chief Rabbi Baruch Placzek. He studied physics in Prague and Vienna.
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John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh
1842 - 1919 (77 years)
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, was a British mathematician and physicist who made extensive contributions to science. He spent all of his academic career at the University of Cambridge. Among many honours, he received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his investigations of the densities of the most important gases and for his discovery of argon in connection with these studies." He served as president of the Royal Society from 1905 to 1908 and as chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1908 to 1919.
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Siméon Denis Poisson
1781 - 1840 (59 years)
Baron Siméon Denis Poisson FRS FRSE was a French mathematician and physicist who worked on statistics, complex analysis, partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, elasticity, and fluid mechanics. Moreover, he predicted the Poisson spot in his attempt to disprove the wave theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, which was later confirmed.
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Karl Ferdinand Braun
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German electrical engineer, inventor, physicist and Nobel laureate in physics. Braun contributed significantly to the development of radio and television technology: he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi "for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy", was a founder of Telefunken, one of the pioneering communications and television companies, and has been both called the "father of television" and the co-father of the radio telegraphy, together with Marconi.
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Georg Joos
1894 - 1959 (65 years)
Georg Jakob Christof Joos was a German experimental physicist. He wrote Lehrbuch der theoretischen Physik, first published in 1932 and one of the most influential theoretical physics textbooks of the 20th Century.
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Angelo Secchi
1818 - 1878 (60 years)
Angelo Secchi was an Italian Catholic priest, astronomer from the Italian region of Emilia. He was director of the observatory at the Pontifical Gregorian University for 28 years. He was a pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy, and was one of the first scientists to state authoritatively that the Sun is a star.
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Max Abraham
1875 - 1922 (47 years)
Max Abraham was a German physicist known for his work on electromagnetism and his opposition to the theory of relativity. Biography Abraham was born in Danzig, Imperial Germany to a family of Jewish merchants. His father was Moritz Abraham and his mother was Selma Moritzsohn. Attending the University of Berlin, he studied under Max Planck. He graduated in 1897. For the next three years, Abraham worked as Planck's assistant.
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Mikhail Lomonosov
1711 - 1765 (54 years)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries were the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. The founder of modern geology, Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.
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Frank Oppenheimer
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Frank Friedman Oppenheimer was an American particle physicist, cattle rancher, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. A younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment. After the war, Oppenheimer's earlier involvement with the American Communist Party placed him under scrutiny, and he resigned from his physics position at the University of Minnesota. Oppenheimer...
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Abraham Esau
1884 - 1955 (71 years)
Robert Abraham Esau was a German physicist. After receipt of his doctorate from the University of Berlin, Esau worked at Telefunken, where he pioneered very high frequency waves used in radar, radio, and television, and he was president of the Deutscher Telefunken Verband. During World War I, he was a prisoner of war of the French; he was repatriated to Germany in 1919. In 1925, he was appointed professor at the University of Jena, where he also served as rector. From 1933, Esau was the State Councilor in Thuringia.
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Fritz London
1900 - 1954 (54 years)
Fritz Wolfgang London was a German born physicist and professor at Duke University. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces are today considered classic and are discussed in standard textbooks of physical chemistry. With his brother Heinz London, he made a significant contribution to understanding electromagnetic properties of superconductors with the London equations and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on five separate occasions.
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Johann Josef Loschmidt
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Johann Josef Loschmidt , who mostly called himself Josef Loschmidt , was a notable Austrian scientist who performed ground-breaking work in chemistry, physics , and crystal forms. Born in Karlsbad, a town in the Austrian Empire , Loschmidt became professor of physical chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1868.
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Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi
903 - 986 (83 years)
ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sūfī was an Iranian astronomer. His work , written in 964, included both textual descriptions and illustrations. The Persian polymath Al-Biruni wrote that al-Sūfī's work on the ecliptic was carried out in Shiraz. Al-Sūfī lived at the Buyid court in Isfahan.
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Ludwig Biermann
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Ludwig Franz Benedikt Biermann was a German astronomer, obtaining his Ph.D. from Göttingen University in 1932. He made important contributions to astrophysics and plasma physics, discovering the Biermann battery. He predicted the existence of the solar wind which in 1947 he dubbed "solar corpuscular radiation".
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Auguste Bravais
1811 - 1863 (52 years)
Auguste Bravais was a French physicist known for his work in crystallography, the conception of Bravais lattices, and the formulation of Bravais law. Bravais also studied magnetism, the northern lights, meteorology, geobotany, phyllotaxis, astronomy, statistics and hydrography.
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Léon Brillouin
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Léon Nicolas Brillouin was a French physicist. He made contributions to quantum mechanics, radio wave propagation in the atmosphere, solid-state physics, and information theory. Early life Brillouin was born in Sèvres, near Paris, France. His father, Marcel Brillouin, grandfather, Éleuthère Mascart, and great-grandfather, Charles Briot, were physicists as well.
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Erich Fischer
1910 - 1969 (59 years)
Erich Horst Fischer was a German experimental physicist. He worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. After World War II, he helped rebuild the KWIP branch at Hechingen, was a professor at the University of Tübingen and Ankara University, and then a research scientist for the German firm GKSS.
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Pierre Victor Auger
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Pierre Victor Auger was a French physicist, born in Paris. He worked in the fields of atomic physics, nuclear physics, and cosmic ray physics. He is famous for being one of the discoverers of the Auger effect, named after him.
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André-Marie Ampère
1775 - 1836 (61 years)
André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". He is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid and the electrical telegraph. As an autodidact, Ampère was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France.
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Dirk Coster
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
Dirk Coster was a Dutch physicist. He was a professor of Physics and Meteorology at the University of Groningen. Coster was born in Amsterdam. On 26 February 1919 he married Lina Maria "Miep" Wijsman, who held a degree in Oriental languagess. Eventually, she was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate degree in this field from the University of Leiden. Dirk and Miep had two sons and two daughters . Coster is known as the co-discoverer of hafnium in 1923, along with George de Hevesy, by means of X-ray spectroscopic analysis of zirconium ore. The discovery took place in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Ejnar Hertzsprung
1873 - 1967 (94 years)
Ejnar Hertzsprung was a Danish chemist and astronomer. Career Hertzsprung was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, the son of Severin and Henriette. He studied chemical engineering at Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1898. After spending two years working as a chemist in St. Petersburg, in 1901 he studied photochemistry at Leipzig University for a year. His father was an amateur astronomer, which led to Ejnar's interest in the subject. He began making astronomical observations in Fredericksberg in 1902, and within a few years had noticed that stars with similar spectral type could have widely different absolute magnitudes.
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Giuseppe Piazzi
1746 - 1826 (80 years)
Giuseppe Piazzi was an Italian Catholic priest of the Theatine order, mathematician, and astronomer. He established an observatory at Palermo, now the Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo – Giuseppe S. Vaiana. He is perhaps most famous for his discovery of the first dwarf planet, Ceres.
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Robert W. Wood
1868 - 1955 (87 years)
Robert Williams Wood was an American physicist and inventor who made pivotal contributions to the field of optics. He pioneered infrared and ultraviolet photography. Wood's patents and theoretical work inform modern understanding of the physics of ultraviolet light, and made possible myriad uses of UV fluorescence which became popular after World War I. He published many articles on spectroscopy, phosphorescence, diffraction, and ultraviolet light.
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E. T. Whittaker
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th-century who contributed widely to applied mathematics and was renowned for his research in mathematical physics and numerical analysis, including the theory of special functions, along with his contributions to astronomy, celestial mechanics, the history of physics, and digital signal processing.
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