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,
#9651
Heinrich Louis d'Arrest
1822 - 1875 (53 years)
Heinrich Louis d'Arrest was a German astronomer, born in Berlin. His name is sometimes given as Heinrich Ludwig d'Arrest. Biography While still a student at the University of Berlin, d'Arrest was party to Johann Gottfried Galle's search for Neptune. On 23 September 1846, he suggested that a recently drawn chart of the sky, in the region of Urbain Le Verrier's predicted location, could be compared with the current sky to seek the displacement characteristic of a planet, as opposed to a stationary star. Neptune was discovered that very night.
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Rupert Wildt
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Rupert Wildt was an American astronomer. He was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in that country during World War I and its aftermath. In 1927 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin. He joined the University of Göttingen, specializing in the properties of atmospheres.
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Charles Soret
1854 - 1904 (50 years)
Charles Soret was a Swiss physicist and chemist. He is known for his work on thermodiffusion . Life Charles Soret was the son of Jacques-Louis Soret, professor of physical medicine at University of Geneva, and Clémentine Odier. In 1872, Charles graduated from an art college in Geneva and, two years later, he added a degree in mathematics. In addition, he also attended lectures in physics and other sciences. He continued studies in mathematics at the Sorbonne, where he received his MA in 1876. He believed that a good physicist is first of all a good mathematician; therefore, only afterward...
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John Robison
1739 - 1805 (66 years)
John Robison FRSE was a British physicist and mathematician. He was a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. A member of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society when it received its royal warrant, he was appointed as the first general secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh . Robison invented the siren and also worked with James Watt on an early steam car. Following the French Revolution, Robison became disenchanted with elements of the Enlightenment. He authored Proofs of a Conspiracy in 1797—a polemic accusing Freemasonry of being infiltrated by Weishaupt's Order of the Illuminati.
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Eugen von Lommel
1837 - 1899 (62 years)
Eugen Cornelius Joseph von Lommel was a German physicist. He is notable for the Lommel polynomial, the Lommel function, the Lommel–Weber function, and the Lommel differential equation. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of the Nobel Prize winner Johannes Stark.
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Berossus
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Berossus or Berosus was a Hellenistic-era Babylonian writer, a priest of Bel Marduk and astronomer who wrote in the Koine Greek language, and who was active at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Versions of two excerpts of his writings survive, at several removes from the original.
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Erhard Weigel
1625 - 1699 (74 years)
Erhard Weigel was a German mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. Biography Weigel earned his M.A. and his habilitation from the University of Leipzig. From 1653 until his death he was professor of mathematics at Jena University. He was the teacher of Leibniz in summer 1663, and other notable students. He also worked to make science more widely accessible to the public, and what would today be considered a populariser of science.
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Porfiry Bakhmetiev
1860 - 1913 (53 years)
Porfiry Ivanovich Bakhmetiev was a Russian and Bulgarian physicist and experimental biologist. The son of a peasant, after graduating from his local school in Syzran, Samara Oblast, Russia, in 1883, he graduated from the University of Zurich in Switzerland writing a thesis on wandering electrical currents. Bakhmetiev was a Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the founder of the Physical and Mathematical Society in Sofia in 1898.
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Ralph Elmer Wilson
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Ralph Elmer Wilson was an American astronomer. Wilson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Herbert Couper Wilson and Mary B. Nichols. He earned his B.A. from Carleton College and entered the University of Virginia in 1906, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1910 based on his work at the Leander Mccormick Observatory working with Ormond Stone. He then worked at the Dudley Observatory, then at the Lick southern station in Santiago, Chile in 1913, and by 1939 at the Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1929 he became the associate editor of the Astronomical Journal. He was elected to the National Academy ...
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Paul-Jacques Curie
1855 - 1941 (86 years)
Jacques Curie was a French physicist and professor of mineralogy at the University of Montpellier. Along with his younger brother, Pierre Curie, he studied pyroelectricity in the 1880s, leading to their discovery of some of the mechanisms behind piezoelectricity.
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Jean-Charles de Borda
1733 - 1799 (66 years)
Jean-Charles, chevalier de Borda was a French mathematician, physicist, and Navy officer. Biography Borda was born in the city of Dax to Jean‐Antoine de Borda and Jeanne‐Marie Thérèse de Lacroix. In 1756, Borda wrote Mémoire sur le mouvement des projectiles, a product of his work as a military engineer. For that, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1764.
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Richard Schorr
1867 - 1951 (84 years)
Richard Reinhard Emil Schorr , was a German astronomer. Biography From 1889 to 1891, Schorr worked as an assistant editor of Astronomische Nachrichten, at the observatory at Kiel. In 1892 Schorr became observer at the Hamburger Sternwarte Schorr was the director of the Hamburger Sternwarte . The former director George Rümker had started the movement of the observatory to the outer parts of Hamburg but became seriously ill and died in 1899. After Rümker's death, Schorr became director, and the building of Germany's second largest observatory in Hamburg-Bergedorf became his task. The new obser...
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Edmund Weiss
1837 - 1917 (80 years)
Edmund Weiss was an Austrian astronomer. He was born in Frývaldov, Austrian Silesia, now Jeseník, Czech Silesia. His father, Josef Weiss , was a pioneer of hydrotherapy. His twin brother, Adolf Gustav Weiss , became a botanist.
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Richard Beeching
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Richard Beeching, Baron Beeching , commonly known as Dr Beeching, was a physicist and engineer who for a short but very notable time was chairman of British Railways. He became a household name in Britain in the early 1960s for his report The Reshaping of British Railways, commonly referred to as The Beeching Report, which led to far-reaching changes in the railway network, popularly known as the Beeching Axe.
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Sosigenes the Peripatetic
Sosigenes the Peripatetic was a philosopher living at the end of the 2nd century AD. He was the tutor of Alexander of Aphrodisias and wrote a work On Revolving Spheres, from which some important extracts have been preserved in Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo.
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Zhou Dunyi
1017 - 1073 (56 years)
Zhou Dunyi was a Chinese cosmologist, philosopher, and writer during the Song dynasty. He conceptualized the Neo-Confucian cosmology of the day, explaining the relationship between human conduct and universal forces. In this way, he emphasizes that humans can master their qi in order to accord with nature. He was a major influence to Zhu Xi, who was the architect of Neo-Confucianism. Zhou Dunyi was mainly concerned with Taiji and Wuji , the yin and yang, and the wu xing .
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Georg von Neumayer
1826 - 1909 (83 years)
Georg Balthazar von Neumayer , was a German polar explorer and scientist who was a proponent of the idea of international cooperation for meteorology and scientific observation. Biography Early years Born in Kirchheimbolanden, Palatinate, Neumayer finished his education in geophysics and hydrography in Munich, Bavaria in 1849; and becoming much interested in polar exploration, continued his studies in terrestrial magnetism, oceanography, navigation, and nautical astronomy. To obtain practical experience he made a voyage to South America, and after his return gave a series of lectures at Hamburg on Maury's theories of the ocean, and recent improvements in navigation.
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Nils Christoffer Dunér
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Nils Christoffer Dunér was a Swedish astronomer. His parents were Nils Dunér and Petronella . Dunér received his doctorate from Lund University in 1862, was observer at the observatory there from 1864 and Professor of Astronomy at Uppsala University from 1888.
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William Duncan MacMillan
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
William Duncan MacMillan was an American mathematician and astronomer on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He published research on the applications of classical mechanics to astronomy, and is noted for pioneering speculations on physical cosmology. For the latter, Helge Kragh noted, "the cosmological model proposed by MacMillan was designed to lend support to a cosmic optimism, which he felt was threatened by the world view of modern physics."
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Christian Mayer
1719 - 1783 (64 years)
Christian Mayer was a Moravian-German Catholic priest, astronomer and teacher. Life He was born in Mederitz, Moravia. He became educated in Greek, Latin, mathematics, philosophy, and theology, although his place of studies is unknown. In his early twenties he decided to become a Jesuit, a path which caused him to leave his home due to the disapproval of his father. He entered the Society of Jesus in Mannheim in 1745. After completing his training he began teaching humanities.
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Hugo Tetrode
1895 - 1931 (36 years)
Hugo Martin Tetrode was a Dutch theoretical physicist who contributed to statistical physics, early quantum theory and quantum mechanics. In 1912, Tetrode developed the Sackur–Tetrode equation, a quantum mechanical expression of the entropy of an ideal gas. Otto Sackur derived this equation independently around the same time. The Sackur–Tetrode constant, S0/R, is a fundamental physical constant representing the translational contribution to the entropy of an ideal gas at a temperature of 1 K and pressure of 100 kPa, where R is the gas constant.
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Vasco Ronchi
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Vasco Ronchi was an Italian physicist known for his work in optics. He was born on 19 December 1897 in Florence, Italy. Along with Enrico Fermi, he was a student of Luigi Puccianti. He studied at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Pisa from 1915 to 1919.
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Dimitri Rozhdestvensky
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Dimitri Sergeevich Rozhdestvensky was a Russian physicist. He worked on spectroscopy, examining the dispersion of sodium lines. He drew up a proposal for the State Optical Institute which was established in 1918 in Petrograd.
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Ion I. Agârbiceanu
1907 - 1971 (64 years)
Ion I. Agârbiceanu was a Romanian physicist born in Bucium, Alba County in Transylvania. He was the son of the writer and Greek-Catholic priest Ion Agârbiceanu and his wife Maria. After completing his secondary education at the George Barițiu High School in Cluj, Agârbiceanu studied from 1925 to 1929 at the Electrotechnic Institute of Bucharest. He then pursued his studies at the University of Paris, where he obtained in 1934 his Ph.D. in Physics under the direction of Aimé Cotton; his thesis, Recherche sur le spectre de fluorescence et d'absorption des vapeurs de Iodine, was published in . F...
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Karl Lark-Horovitz
1892 - 1958 (66 years)
Karl Lark-Horovitz was an American physicist known for his pioneering work in solid-state physics that played a role in the invention of the transistor. He brought the previously neglected physics department at Purdue University to prominence during his tenure there as department head from 1929 until his death in 1958.
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Jabir ibn Aflah
1100 - 1150 (50 years)
Abū Muḥammad Jābir ibn Aflaḥ was an Arab Muslim astronomer and mathematician from Seville, who was active in 12th century al-Andalus. His work Iṣlāḥ al-Majisṭi influenced Islamic, Jewish, and Christian astronomers.
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Carey Foster
1835 - 1919 (84 years)
George Carey Foster was a chemist and physicist, known for application and modification of the Wheatstone bridge for precise electrical measurement. The Carey Foster bridge is named after him. Biography Born in Sabden, Lancashire, George Carey Foster received early education at private schools and then graduated in chemistry from University College London. He was Professor of Physics at University College London from 1865 to 1898, and served as the first Principal from 1900 to 1904.
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Christian Christiansen
1843 - 1917 (74 years)
Christian Christiansen was a Danish physicist. Christiansen first taught at the local polytechnical school. In 1886, he was appointed to a chair for physics at the University of Copenhagen. He mainly studied radiant heat and optical dispersion, discovering the Christiansen effect . Around 1917, he discovered the anomalous dispersion of numerous dyes, including aniline red , by recording absorption spectra.
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Alfred-Marie Liénard
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Alfred-Marie Liénard , was a French physicist and engineer. He is most well known for his derivation of the Liénard–Wiechert potentials. From 1887 to 1889 Liénard was a student at the École Polytechnique and from 1889 to 1892 at the École des mines de Paris. From 1892 to 1895 he was a mining engineer in Valencia, Marseille, and Angers. From 1895 to 1908 he was professor at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne and from 1908 to 1911 he was professor of electrical engineering at the École des Mines de Paris. In World War I he served in the French Army.
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Hypsicles
190 BC - 120 BC (70 years)
Hypsicles was an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer known for authoring On Ascensions and the Book XIV of Euclid's Elements. Hypsicles lived in Alexandria. Life and work Although little is known about the life of Hypsicles, it is believed that he authored the astronomical work On Ascensions. The mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria noted on a definition of polygonal numbers, due to Hypsicles:
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Heinrich Barkhausen
1881 - 1956 (75 years)
Heinrich Georg Barkhausen , born in Bremen, was a German physicist. Growing up in a patrician Bremen family, he showed interest in natural sciences from an early age. He studied at the Technical University of Munich , TU Berlin and University of Munich and Berlin before obtaining a doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1907.
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John August Anderson
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
John August Anderson was an American astronomer who made significant contributions to improving astronomical instruments in the early 20th century, especially diffraction gratings. Biography John August Anderson was born on August 7, 1876, in Rollag, Minnesota, a small unincorporated community in Clay County. He was the sixth child of Brede Andersen and Elen Martha Brevik .
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Gilles Holst
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Gilles Holst was a Dutch physicist, known worldwide for his invention in 1932 of the low-pressure sodium lamp. Early life His father was a manager of a shipyard. In 1904 he went to ETH Zurich to study mechanical engineering, changing after a year to mathematics and physics.
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Ernst Pringsheim Sr.
1859 - 1917 (58 years)
Ernst Pringsheim Sr. was a German physicist. He was born and died in Breslau. He made, together with Otto Lummer, important measurements of the blackbody radiation spectrum, leading to Max Planck's quantum hypothesis in 1900.
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Erich Kretschmann
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Erich Justus Kretschmann was a German physicist. Life Kretschmann was born in Berlin. He obtained his PhD at Berlin University in 1914 with his dissertation entitled "Eine Theorie der Schwerkraft im Rahmen der ursprünglichen Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie" . His advisors were Max Planck and Heinrich Rubens. After working as a Gymnasium teacher, he became Privatdozent for theoretical physics at the University of Königsberg in 1920, where he eventually became professor extraordinarius in 1926. From 1946 until 1952, Kretschmann was professor for theoretical physics and director of the instit...
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Otto Heckmann
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Otto Hermann Leopold Heckmann was a German astronomer. He directed the Hamburg Observatory from 1941 to 1962, after which he became the first director of the European Southern Observatory. He actively contributed to the creation of the third issue of the Astronomische Gesellschaft Katalog. He also contributed to cosmology based on the fundamentals of general relativity, and wrote the book Theorien der Kosmologie.
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Edwin Fitch Northrup
1866 - 1940 (74 years)
Edwin Fitch Northrup was a professor of physics at Princeton University from 1910 to 1920. He was affiliated with the Leeds & Northrup for about seven years. He studied at Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University, where he gained his Ph.D. in physics in 1895. He then became assistant to Prof. Henry Augustus Rowland in the development of telegraph systems and became chief engineer at the newly-founded Rowland Printing Telegraph Company. In 1903 he co-founded the Leeds & Northrup with Morris E. Leeds.
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Felix Ziegel
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Felix Yurievich Ziegel was a Soviet researcher, Doctor of Science and docent of Cosmology at the Moscow Aviation Institute, author of more than forty popular books on astronomy and space exploration, generally regarded as a founder of Russian ufology. Ziegel, the co-founder of the first officially approved Soviet UFO research group, became an overnight sensation when, on 10 November 1967, speaking on the Soviet central television, he made an extensive report on the UFO sightings registered in the USSR and encouraged viewers to send him and his colleagues first-hand accounts of their observations, which resulted in barrage of letters and reports.
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Philip Dee
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Philip Ivor Dee CBE FRS FRSE was an English nuclear physicist. He was responsible for the development of airborne radar during World War II. The University of Glasgow named the Philip Ivor Dee Memorial Lecture after him.
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Martin Wagenschein
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Martin Wagenschein was a science educator who worked in mathematical and scientific didactics. Wagenschein is best known for his promotion of open learning techniques. He emphasised the importance of teaching students to understand rather than simply learning knowledge for its own sake. As such he was one of precursors of modern teaching techniques such as constructivism, inquiry-based science, and inquiry learning.
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Eduard Riecke
1845 - 1915 (70 years)
Eduard Riecke was a German experimental physicist. Riecke studied physics at the Polytechnic in Stuttgart, at the University of Tübingen and at the University of Göttingen under Wilhelm Weber and Friedrich Kohlrausch, where he received his doctorate in 1871 and qualified as a professor shortly thereafter. In 1873 he became associate professor and in 1881 full professor, which he remained until his death.
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Tiberius Cavallo
1749 - 1809 (60 years)
Tiberius Cavallo was an Italian physicist and natural philosopher. His interests included electricity, the development of scientific instruments, the nature of "airs", and ballooning. He became both a Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1779. Between 1780 and 1792, he presented the Royal Society's Bakerian Lecture thirteen times in succession.
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William Grylls Adams
1836 - 1915 (79 years)
William Grylls Adams was professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London. He was active in research on subjects ranging from light, magnetism, and astronomy to electrical power generation and transmission. His research in optics yielded the discovery that certain materials, notably selenium, produce an electric current when exposed to light. Adams also actively participated in many academic societies and held major positions within the societies.
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Johann Karl Burckhardt
1773 - 1825 (52 years)
Johann Karl Burckhardt was a German-born astronomer and mathematician. He later became a naturalized French citizen and became known as Jean Charles Burckhardt. He is remembered in particular for his work in fundamental astronomy, and for his lunar theory, which was in widespread use for the construction of navigational ephemerides of the Moon for much of the first half of the nineteenth century.
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Eduard Schönfeld
1828 - 1891 (63 years)
Eduard Schönfeld was a German astronomer. Education Schönfeld was born at Hildburghausen, in the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, where he had a distinguished career at the gymnasium. On leaving the gymnasium, he desired to devote himself to astronomy, but abandoned the idea in deference to his father's wishes. He went first to Hanover, and afterwards to Kassel to study architecture, for which he seems to have had little inclination. 1849 found him studying chemistry under Bunsen at Marburg, where his love for astronomy was revived by Gerling's lectures.
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Ludwig A. Colding
1815 - 1888 (73 years)
Ludwig August Colding was a Danish civil engineer and physicist who articulated the principle of conservation of energy contemporaneously with, and independently of, James Prescott Joule and Julius Robert von Mayer though his contribution was largely overlooked and neglected.
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Agnes Mary Clerke
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Agnes Mary Clerke was an Irish astronomer and writer, mainly in the field of astronomy. She was born in Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland, and died in London. Family Agnes Clerke was the daughter of John William Clerke who was, at the time, a bank manager in Skibbereen, and his wife Catherine Mary Deasy whose father was a judge's registrar. She had two siblings; her older sister, Ellen Mary and her younger brother, Aubrey St. John . Her elder sister Ellen also wrote about astronomy. All of the Clerke children were entirely home schooled.
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Marian Albertovich Kowalski
1821 - 1884 (63 years)
Marian Albertovich Kowalski was a Polish-Russian astronomer. He was born in Dobrzyń nad Wisłą in Congress Poland, Russian Empire. His patronymic is alternatively given as Voytekhovich or Voytsekhovich , which suggests his father's name was Wojciech. Confusingly, a few Russian sources even give his name as Marian Albertovich Kovalsky-Voytekhovich, but this seems to be an error.
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Pieter Hendrik van Cittert
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Pieter Hendrik van Cittert was a Dutch physicist and science historian. He was born in Gouda, Netherlands, to Benjamin Pieter van Cittert and Petronella Antonia Huber, and died on October 8, 1959, in Utrecht. His achievements include proving the van Cittert–Zernike theorem about the coherence of radiation and founding the University Museum in Utrecht.
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Edward S. Holden
1846 - 1914 (68 years)
Edward Singleton Holden was an American astronomer and the fifth president of the University of California. Early years He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1846 to Edward and Sarah Frances Holden. From 1862 to 1866, he attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he obtained a B.S. degree. He later trained at West Point in the class of 1870.
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