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,
#9801
Lew Kowarski
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Lew Kowarski was a Russian born and naturalized French physicist. He was a lesser-known but important contributor to nuclear science. Early life Lew Kowarski was born in Saint Petersburg to Nicholas Kowarski, a businessman and the Ukrainian singer Olga Vlassenko. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, when Lew was 12 years old, his family fled west under adventurous circumstances and settled in Vilnius . During his youth, Lew was a talented musician and considered a music career; however, his fingers grew too large for the keyboard.
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Erich Schumann
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Erich Schumann was a German physicist who specialized in acoustics and explosives, and had a penchant for music. He was a general officer in the army and a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin. When Adolf Hitler came to power he joined the Nazi Party. During World War II, his positions in the Army Ordnance Office and the Army High Command made him one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. He ran the German nuclear energy program from 1939 to 1942, when the army relinquished control to the Reich Research Council. His role in the pr...
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James Bradley
1693 - 1762 (69 years)
James Bradley was an English astronomer and priest who served as the third Astronomer Royal from 1742. He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light , and the nutation of the Earth's axis .
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Ernst Ruska
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope. Life and career Ernst Ruska was born in Heidelberg, Germany. He was educated at the Technical University of Munich from 1925 to 1927 and then entered the Technical University of Berlin, where he posited that microscopes using electrons, with wavelengths 1000 times shorter than those of light, could provide a more detailed picture of an object than a microscope utilizing light, in which magnification is limited by the size of the wavelengths.
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Adolphe Quetelet
1796 - 1874 (78 years)
Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet FRSF or FRSE was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist who founded and directed the Brussels Observatory and was influential in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences. His name is sometimes spelled with an accent as Quételet.
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Roger Joseph Boscovich
1711 - 1787 (76 years)
Roger Joseph Boscovich was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the Republic of Ragusa. He studied and lived in Italy and France where he also published many of his works.
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Heinrich Christian Schumacher
1780 - 1850 (70 years)
Prof Heinrich Christian Schumacher FRS FRSE was a German-Danish astronomer and mathematician. Biography Schumacher was born at Bramstedt, in Holstein, near the German/Danish border. He was educated at Altona Gymnasium on the outskirts of Hamburg. He studied in Germany at Kiel, Jena, and Göttingen Universities as well as Copenhagen. He received a doctorate from Dorpat University in Russian Empire in 1807.
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Walther Meissner
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Fritz Walther Meißner was a German technical physicist. Meißner was born in Berlin to Waldemar Meißner and Johanna Greger. He studied mechanical engineering and physics at the Technical University of Berlin, his doctoral supervisor being Max Planck. He then entered the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin. From 1922 to 1925, he established the world's third largest helium-liquifier, and discovered in 1933 the Meissner effect, damping of the magnetic field in superconductors. One year later, he was called as chair in technical physics at the Technical University of Munich.
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Guillermo Haro
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Guillermo Haro Barraza was a Mexican astronomer. Through his own astronomical research and the formation of new institutions, Haro was influential in the development of modern observational astronomy in Mexico. Internationally, he is best known for his contribution to the discovery of Herbig–Haro objects.
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Edward Arthur Milne
1896 - 1950 (54 years)
Edward Arthur Milne FRS was a British astrophysicist and mathematician. Biography Milne was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. He attended Hymers College and from there he won an open scholarship in mathematics and natural science to study at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914, gaining the largest number of marks which had ever been awarded in the examination. In 1916 he joined a group of mathematicians led by A. V. Hill for the Ministry of munitions working on the ballistics of anti-aircraft gunnery, they became known as ′Hill's Brigands′. Later Milne became an expert on sound localisation. In 1917 he became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
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Friedrich Bessel
1784 - 1846 (62 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. Certain important mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli before being generalised by Bessel.
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C. F. Powell
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Cecil Frank Powell, FRS was a British physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for heading the team that developed the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion , a subatomic particle.
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Simon Newcomb
1835 - 1909 (74 years)
Simon Newcomb was a Canadian–American astronomer, applied mathematician, and autodidactic polymath. He served as Professor of Mathematics in the United States Navy and at Johns Hopkins University. Born in Nova Scotia, at the age of 19 Newcomb left an apprenticeship to join his father in Massachusetts, where the latter was teaching.
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Johann Elert Bode
1747 - 1826 (79 years)
Johann Elert Bode was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularisation of the Titius–Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name. Life and career Bode was born in Hamburg. As a youth, he suffered from a serious eye disease that particularly damaged his right eye; he continued to have trouble with his eyes throughout his life.
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Karl Heinz Beckurts
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Karl Heinz Beckurts was a German physicist and research manager. With Karl Wirtz, he wrote a textbook on neutron physics. He was co-editor of the journal Nukleonik. Along with his driver, Eckhard Groppler, Beckurts was murdered by a roadside bomb at 7:32 AM on 9 July 1986 in Straßlach, a village near Munich. The bomb used an electronic triggering device. The Red Army Faction claimed responsibility under the name "Kommando Mara Cagol" but the identity of the perpetrators is still unknown. The Bundeskriminalamt named Horst Ludwig Meyer as the only suspect for the bombing; Meyer was fatally shot...
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Heinz Pose
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Rudolf Heinz Pose was a German nuclear physicist who worked in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. He did pioneering work in nuclear physics which contributed to the understanding atom's energy levels. Pose was an early member of the Germany's Uranium Club but eventually participated in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons when he was appointed director of Laboratory B in Obninsk in Russia in 1945.
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George Francis FitzGerald
1851 - 1901 (50 years)
Prof George Francis FitzGerald FTCD was an Irish academic and physicist who served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin from 1881 to 1901. FitzGerald is known for his work in electromagnetic theory and for the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction, which became an integral part of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after him, as is a building at TCD.
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Edward Charles Pickering
1846 - 1919 (73 years)
Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote Elements of Physical Manipulations .
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Charles Galton Darwin
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
Sir Charles Galton Darwin was an English physicist who served as director of the National Physical Laboratory during the Second World War. He was a son of the mathematician George Howard Darwin and a grandson of Charles Darwin.
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Marietta Blau
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist credited with developing photographic nuclear emulsions that were usefully able to image and accurately measure high-energy nuclear particles and events, significantly advancing the field of particle physics in her time. For this, she was awarded the Lieben Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As a Jew, she was forced to flee Austria when Nazi Germany annexed it in 1938, eventually making her way to the United States. She was nominated for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry for her work, but did not win. After her return to Austria, she wo...
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Al-Biruni
973 - 1048 (75 years)
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni , known as al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He has been called variously the "founder of Indology", "Father of Comparative Religion", "Father of modern geodesy", and the first anthropologist.
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Heinrich Rubens
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Heinrich Rubens was a German physicist. He is known for his measurements of the energy of black-body radiation which led Max Planck to the discovery of his radiation law. This was the genesis of quantum theory.
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Pascual Jordan
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Ernst Pascual Jordan was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix mechanics, and developed canonical anticommutation relations for fermions. He introduced Jordan algebras in an effort to formalize quantum field theory; the algebras have since found numerous applications within mathematics.
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John Tyndall
1820 - 1893 (73 years)
John Tyndall FRS was a prominent 19th-century Irish physicist. His scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he made discoveries in the realms of infrared radiation and the physical properties of air, proving the connection between atmospheric CO and what is now known as the greenhouse effect in 1859.
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Hans von Halban
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Hans Heinrich von Halban was a French physicist, of Austrian-Jewish descent. Family He was descended on his father's side from Polish Jews, who left Kraków for Vienna in the 1850s. His grandfather, Heinrich Blumenstock, was a senior official in the Habsburg Empire and was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph I in the 1880s, taking the name of Ritter Heinrich Blumenstock von Halban. The surname Blumenstock was subsequently dropped by the family, as was the use of 'von' after the Second World War. His mother's family was from Bohemia and his great-grandfather, Moritz von Fialka, was a colonel in ...
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Charles Édouard Guillaume
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Charles Édouard Guillaume was a Swiss physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920 in recognition of the service he had rendered to precision measurements in physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys. In 1919, he gave the fifth Guthrie Lecture at the Institute of Physics in London with the title "The Anomaly of the Nickel-Steels".
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Henry Augustus Rowland
1848 - 1901 (53 years)
Henry Augustus Rowland was an American physicist and Johns Hopkins educator. Between 1899 and 1901 he served as the first president of the American Physical Society. He is remembered for the high quality of the diffraction gratings he made and for the work he did with them on the solar spectrum.
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Hans Kopfermann
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Hans Kopfermann was a German atomic and nuclear physicist. He devoted his entire career to spectroscopic investigations, and he did pioneering work in measuring nuclear spin. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club.
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Edwin Hall
1855 - 1938 (83 years)
Edwin Herbert Hall was an American physicist, who discovered the eponymous Hall effect. Hall conducted thermoelectric research and also wrote numerous physics textbooks and laboratory manuals. Biography Hall was born in Gorham, Maine, U.S. Hall did his undergraduate work at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, graduating in 1875. He was the principal of Gould Academy in 1875–1876 and the principal of Brunswick High School in 1876–1877. He did his graduate schooling and research, and earned his Ph.D. degree , at the Johns Hopkins University where his seminal experiments were performed.
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Ányos Jedlik
1800 - 1895 (95 years)
Ányos István Jedlik was a Hungarian inventor, engineer, physicist, and Benedictine priest. He was also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and author of several books. He is considered by Hungarians and Slovaks to be the unsung father of the dynamo and electric motor.
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Nikolay Umov
1846 - 1915 (69 years)
Nikolay Alekseevich Umov was a Russian physicist and mathematician known for discovering the concept of Umov-Poynting vector and Umov effect. Biography Umov was born in 1846 in Simbirsk in the family of a military doctor. He graduated from the Physics and Mathematics department of Moscow State University in 1867 and became a Professor of Physics in 1875. He studied theoretical physics by reading works of Gabriel Lamé, Clebsch and Clausius, that made a significant impact on the originality of his later ideas in physics.
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Guido Beck
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Guido Beck was an Argentinian physicist of German Bohemian origin. Biography Beck studied physics in Vienna and received his doctorate in 1925, under Hans Thirring. He worked in Leipzig in 1928 as an assistant to Werner Heisenberg. A combination of the troubled political climate of Europe in the 1930s, his own restlessness, and the Nazi persecutions in Germany, made the Jewish-born Beck a traveler in those years. Until 1935 he worked in Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford, Copenhagen, Prague, United States and Japan.
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Anders Celsius
1701 - 1744 (43 years)
Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 proposed the Centigrade temperature scale which was later renamed Celsius in his honour.
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Jean Baptiste Perrin
1870 - 1942 (72 years)
Jean Baptiste Perrin was a French physicist who, in his studies of the Brownian motion of minute particles suspended in liquids , verified Albert Einstein's explanation of this phenomenon and thereby confirmed the atomic nature of matter. For this achievement he was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926.
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Shoichi Sakata
1911 - 1970 (59 years)
Shoichi Sakata was a Japanese physicist and Marxist who was internationally known for theoretical work on the subatomic particles. He proposed the two meson theory, the Sakata model , and the Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata neutrino mixing matrix.
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Orso Mario Corbino
1876 - 1937 (61 years)
Orso Mario Corbino was an Italian physicist and politician. He is noted for his studies of the influence of external magnetic fields on the motion of electrons in metals and he discovered the Corbino effect. He served as the minister for education in 1921 and as the Minister for National Economy in 1921. He also served as professor of the University of Messina and of the University of Rome .
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Amedeo Avogadro
1776 - 1856 (80 years)
Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quaregna and Cerreto was an Italian scientist, most noted for his contribution to molecular theory now known as Avogadro's law, which states that equal volumes of gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure will contain equal numbers of molecules. In tribute to him, the ratio of the number of elementary entities in a substance to its amount of substance , , is known as the Avogadro constant. This constant is denoted NA, and is one of the seven defining constants of the SI.
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Georg Stetter
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
Georg Carl Stetter was an Austrian-German nuclear physicist. Stetter was Director of the Second Physics Institute of the University of Vienna. He was a principal member of the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. In the latter years of World War II, he was also the Director of the Institute for Neutron Research. After the war, he was dismissed from his university positions, and he then became involved in dust protection research. After his dismissal was overturned, he became Director of the First Physics Institute of the University of Vienna, and he began research on aerosols.
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Max Steenbeck
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Max Christian Theodor Steenbeck was a German physicist who worked at the Siemens-Schuckertwerke in his early career, during which time he invented the betatron in 1934. He was taken to the Soviet Union after World War II, and he contributed to the Soviet atomic bomb project. In 1955, he returned to East Germany to continue a career in nuclear physics.
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John Sealy Townsend
1868 - 1957 (89 years)
Sir John Sealy Edward Townsend, FRS was an Irish-British mathematical physicist who conducted various studies concerning the electrical conduction of gases and directly measured the electrical charge. He was a Wykeham Professor of physics at Oxford University.
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Edward W. Morley
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Edward Williams Morley was an American scientist known for his precise and accurate measurement of the atomic weight of oxygen, and for the Michelson–Morley experiment. Biography Morley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Anna Clarissa Treat and the Reverend Sardis Brewster Morley. Both parents were of early colonial ancestry and of purely British origin. He grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. During his childhood, he suffered much from ill health and was therefore educated by his father at home until the age of nineteen.
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Heraclides Ponticus
385 BC - 322 BC (63 years)
Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was born in Heraclea Pontica, now Karadeniz Ereğli, Turkey, and migrated to Athens. He is best remembered for proposing that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. He is also hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory; although this is disputed.
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Henryk Niewodniczański
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Henryk Niewodniczański was a Polish physicist, professor at the Jagiellonian University and the creator and director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków. Niewodniczański graduated from the Stefan Batory University in Wilno in 1924 and in 1926 received his PhD from the same university. In 1927, he was awarded a fellowship at University of Tübingen. At that time his main field of interest was optics of metals and molecular optics. By studying the influence of the magnetic field on the fluorescence of mercury vapour he discovered magnetic dipole radiation.
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Thābit ibn Qurra
836 - 901 (65 years)
Thābit ibn Qurra ; 826 or 836 – February 19, 901, was a polymath known for his work in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and translation. He lived in Baghdad in the second half of the ninth century during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate.
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Julius von Mayer
1814 - 1878 (64 years)
Julius Robert von Mayer was a German physician, chemist, and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed". In 1842, Mayer described the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. His achievements were overlooked and priority for the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat was attributed to James Joule in the following year.
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Arthur Schuster
1851 - 1934 (83 years)
Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster was a German-born British physicist known for his work in spectroscopy, electrochemistry, optics, X-radiography and the application of harmonic analysis to physics. Schuster's integral is named after him. He contributed to making the University of Manchester a centre for the study of physics.
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Camille Flammarion
1842 - 1925 (83 years)
Nicolas Camille Flammarion FRAS was a French astronomer and author. He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels, and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie, starting in 1882. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.
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Al-Battani
858 - 930 (72 years)
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Raqqī al-Ḥarrānī aṣ-Ṣābiʾ al-Battānī , usually called al-Battānī, a name that was in the past Latinized as Albategnius, was an astronomer, astrologer and mathematician, who lived and worked for most of his life at Raqqa, now in Syria. He is considered to be the greatest and most famous of the astronomers of the medieval Islamic world.
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Wilhelm Lenz
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Wilhelm Lenz was a German physicist, most notable for his invention of the Ising model and for his application of the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector to the old quantum mechanical treatment of hydrogen-like atoms.
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Norman Lockyer
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer was an English scientist and astronomer. Along with the French scientist Pierre Janssen, he is credited with discovering the gas helium. Lockyer also is remembered for being the founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature.
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