The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#9851
Winslow Upton
1853 - 1914 (61 years)
Winslow Upton was an American astronomer. He published extensively on the subject of meteorology. Biography He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and was valedictorian when he graduated in 1875. Upton then worked as an assistant at Mitchel Observatory of the University of Cincinnati where he received his master's degree in 1877. He later received an honorary doctorate from Brown in 1906.
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Leonard Benedict Loeb
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Leonard Benedict Loeb was a Swiss-born American physicist. He was the son of Jacques Loeb a German-born American physiologist and biologist. Leonard B. Loeb wrote a number of physics books, including Atomic Structure.
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Dimitrios Stroumpos
1806 - 1890 (84 years)
Dimitrios Stroumpos was an astronomer, physicist, mathematician, author, and professor. He was a theoretical physicist. He was a pioneer in 19th-century Greek physics. He helped develop the physics department at the University of Athens. He was the dean. He did extensive research in the field of physics namely: the study of air and energy fields, electricity, magnetism, and telephones. He also studied the motion of molecules and developed a system of scientific observation. He developed the Strombo compass. His contemporaries at the time were Greek scientists Vassilios Lakon, Georgios Konstantinos Vouris, and Ioannis Papadakis.
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John Carroll
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Sir John Anthony Carroll was a British astronomer and physicist. In the 1920s he worked at the Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge, UK with F.J.M. Stratton and Richard van der Riet Woolley. He made major technological advances, inventing a high resolution spectrometer, and a coronal camera.
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Charles Elwood Mendenhall
1872 - 1935 (63 years)
Charles Elwood Mendenhall was an American physicist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early life Charles Elwood Mendenhall was born on August 1, 1872, in Columbus, Ohio. He was the son of Susan Allen and Thomas Corwin Mendenhall. At the age of six to nine, he lived in Japan while his father taught at the University of Tokyo. There he became friends with John Morse, son of Edward S. Morse.
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Olexander Smakula
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Olexander Smakula was a Ukrainian physicist known for the invention of anti-reflective lens coatings based on optical interference. Biography Smakula was born to a peasant family in Dobrovody village, Austria-Hungary . After finishing his studies at the Ternopil gymnasium he applied to the University of Göttingen from which he graduated in 1927. Afterwards he worked as an assistant of Prof. Robert Pohl. After his short stay at Odessa University, Smakula returned to Germany as head of an optics laboratory in Heidelberg. From 1934 he worked at the Carl Zeiss AG company in Jena. While at Zeiss,...
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Giovanni Camillo Glorioso
1572 - 1643 (71 years)
Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. He was a friend of Marino Ghetaldi and successor of Galileo Galilei in Pisa, then in Padua. Life Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was born in the village of Mercato or Santa Maria a Vico of Giffoni Valle Piana. He had a correspondence with Galileo Galilei in 1604 and he replaced him at the University of Padua, with an income of 350 florins per year, in 1613. He led observations on the 1618 comet, on Mars, and on some aspects of Saturn. He came closer to Antonio Santini and he had contrasts with Scipione Chiaramonti and his successor at the university of Pisa, Barthélemy Souvey, student of Fortunio Liceti.
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Valentin Stansel
1621 - 1705 (84 years)
Valentin Stansel or Stanzel was a Czech Jesuit astronomer who worked in Brazil. Biography Valentin Stanzel was born in Olomouc, Moravia. His family were of German minority ethnicity in Moravia. He entered the Society of Jesus on 1 October 1637, and taught rhetoric and mathematics at University of Olomouc and in Prague. After being ordained, he requested an appointment to the Jesuit mission in India, and went to Portugal to await an opportunity of taking ship for his destination. Meantime, he lectured on astronomy at the college of Évora. While there, in order to conform to the language of the...
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Evgeny Anichkov
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Evgeny Vasilyevich Anichkov was a Russian literary critic and historian who specialised in the Slavic folklore and mythology, as well as their relation to and use in the Russian literature. His 1905 book The Ritual Spring Song in the West and With the Slavic Peoples won him the Lomonosov Prize in 1907. His magnum opus Paganism and Ancient Rus came out in 1914.
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Karl Baedeker
1877 - 1914 (37 years)
Karl Wilhelm Sali Baedeker was a German physicist, and a professor at the University of Jena. He was the grandson of Karl Baedeker, the founder of the eponymous travel guide publishing house, and the son of Fritz Baedeker , who ran the same company from 1869 until his death in 1925.
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Edward Eisner
1929 - 1987 (58 years)
Edward Eisner FRSE FIP was a Hungarian-born physicist who was Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Strathclyde 1968-1987. He specialised in the physics of sound. The "Edward Eisner Memorial Fund Award" is named in his honour.
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Caspar Isenkrahe
1844 - 1921 (77 years)
Mathias Caspar Hubert Isenkrahe was a German mathematician, physicist and Catholic philosopher of nature. Life Isenkrahe's father died before Caspar's birth. Isenkrahe visited in 1856 the Progymnasium in Jülich, in 1857 the Marzellengymnasium in Cologne and from 1858 to 1863 the Realprogymnasium in Bonn. In 1868 he studied at the University of Bonn where he chose the subjects mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, philosophy, Latin and German. On 31 July 1866 he made his PhD with an award-winning work about the anatomy of Helicina titanica, a species of snail. He became...
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Yevgenia Bugoslavskaya
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Yevgenia Yakovlevna Bugoslavskaya was a Soviet astronomer. She had a lifelong career in astronomy and became professor of astronomy at Moscow University. Alternative spelling of her name, Evgeniia Iakovlevna Bugoslavskaia.
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Frederick A. P. Barnard
1809 - 1889 (80 years)
Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was an American academic and educator who served as the 10th President of Columbia University. Born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Yale University in 1828 and served in a succession of academic appointments, including as Chancellor of the University of Mississippi from 1856 to 1861. He assumed office as President of Columbia University in 1864, where he presided over a series of improvements to the university until his death in 1889. He was also known as an author of academic texts.
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Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon
1236 - 1304 (68 years)
Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon , of the Ibn Tibbon family, also known as Prophatius, was a Jewish astronomer; born, probably at Marseilles, about 1236; died at Montpellier about 1304. He was a grandson of Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon. His Provençal name was Don Profiat Tibbon; the Latin writers called him Profatius Judæus. Jacob occupies a considerable place in the history of astronomy in the Middle Ages. His works, translated into Latin, were quoted by Copernicus, Reinhold, and Clavius. He was also highly reputed as a physician, and, according to Jean Astruc , Ibn Tibbon was regent of the faculty...
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Maximilian Herzberger
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Maximilian Jacob Herzberger was a German-American mathematician and physicist, known for his development of the superachromat lens. Life Maximilian Herzberger was the son of Leopold Herzberger and Sonja/Sofia Behrendt/Berendt/Berends ; he had a sister Olga . The family was Jewish. He studied mathematics and physics at the Berlin University, where Albert Einstein was one of his professors, and later became a friend and advisor. In 1923, Herzberger finished his Ph.D. thesis Ueber Systeme hyperkomplexer Grössen under Ludwig Bieberbach and Issai Schur at the philosophical faculty. In 1925, he married Edith Kaufmann ; they had three children, born in Jena, viz.
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Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt
1240 - 1300 (60 years)
Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt , Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt , or Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt , was a French mathematician, physicist, and writer who conducted experiments on magnetism and wrote the first extant treatise describing the properties of magnets. His work is particularly noted for containing the earliest detailed discussion of freely pivoting compass needles, a fundamental component of the dry compass soon to appear in medieval navigation. He also wrote a treatise on the construction and use of a universal astrolabe.
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Gale Bruno van Albada
1912 - 1972 (60 years)
Gale Bruno van Albada was a Dutch astronomer, known for his orbital observations of binary stars and studies on the evolution of galaxy clusters. Biography Van Albada obtained his Ph.D. with Antonie Pannekoek at the University of Amsterdam in 1945. He shared Pannekoek's communist ideologies and back in the 1930s his brother Piet van Albada had been an associate of Marinus van der Lubbe.
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Peder Oluf Pedersen
1874 - 1941 (67 years)
Peder Oluf Pedersen was a Danish engineer and physicist. He is notable for his work on electrotechnology, his cooperation with Valdemar Poulsen on the developmental work on Wire recorders, which he called a telegraphone, the arc converter known as the Poulsen Arc Transmitter, and his work on electrical currents in the ionosphere.
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Hildegard Stücklen
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Hildegard Stücklen was a German-American physicist who dealt with spectroscopy. She worked initially as a lecturer and tutor in Switzerland in the 1930s and later moved to teach at women colleges in Massachusetts and Virginia after emigrating to the United States.
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Yahya ibn Abi Mansur
Yahya ibn Abi Mansur , also called Bizist, son of Firuzan was a senior Persian official from the Banu al-Munajjim family, who served as an astronomer and an astrologer at the court of Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun. Since his father Abu Mansur Aban was an astrologer in service of caliph al-Mansur, it can be concluded that Yahya spent his childhood in Baghdad.
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Louis Caryl Graton
1880 - 1970 (90 years)
Louis Caryl Graton , American geologist, chemist and educator, began his career in 1900 as assayer for Ledyard Gold Mines Ltd., near Rockdale, Ontario. He moved on to Canadian Goldfields Ltd. later in 1900, then entered McGill University as a graduate student, studying many of the famous mines of Ontario and Quebec. He continued his studies at Cornell University in 1902–1903.
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George Henry Bolsover
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
George Henry Bolsover CBE was the director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London from 1947 to 1976. The school, now known as UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is part of University College, London.
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Ivan Borgman
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Borgman was a physicist from the Russian Empire, who first demonstrated in 1897 that X-rays and radioactive materials induced thermoluminescence. Biography Borgman was born to a Russified Finnish-born father and a Russian mother. After graduating from the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, he entered the Physics and Mathematics department of Saint Petersburg State University, in 1866 and graduated in 1870. In 1873, Borgman went to the University of Heidelberg, where he attended lectures and studied in the laboratory under the German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. In 1875, he was appointed as a laboratory assistant at St.
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John J. Hopfield
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
John Joseph Hopfield was a Polish-American physicist. Hopfield's published research included vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy and solar ultraviolet spectroscopy. He was the discoverer of the "Hopfield bands" of oxygen and co-discoverer of the "Lyman–Birge–Hopfield bands" of nitrogen. For about a decade he was an industrial physicist working with technologies for fabricating glass windows, and was the inventor listed on several related patents.
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Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner was a British physicist. Biography Skinner was born on 7 October 1900 at 15 Woodville Road, Ealing, the only son of George Herbert, director of the shoe firm Lilley & Skinner, and Mabel Elizabeth . He was taught at home before starting school, age 9, at Durston House, from where he won a mathematical scholarship to Rugby in 1914. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1919 to read natural sciences and mathematics; he graduated in 1922.
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Temistocle Zona
1848 - 1910 (62 years)
Temistocle Zona was an Italian astronomer. Born in Porto Tolle, in 1870 Zona graduated in architecture at the University of Padua, and he was a volunteer assistant at the Observatory of that city from 1868 to 1871. In October 1880, he entered the staff of Gaetano Cacciatore at the Observatory of Palermo, and in 1891 he became the director of the Observatory, a role he held until 1898. In 1882, he became professor at the University of Palermo. He is best known as the discoverer of the comet C/1890 V1 Zona, on November 15, 1890.
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Erik Gabrielsson Emporagrius
1606 - 1674 (68 years)
Erik Gabrielsson Emporagrius was a Swedish professor and bishop. Erik Emporagrius was born in Torsåker in Gästrikland, son of Gabriel Emporagrius, the vicar there. He studied at Uppsala University, where he was awarded a master's degree in 1632, and at universities abroad. On his return to Sweden in 1637, he was appointed professor of physics at Uppsala, but after a few years he exchanged this position for a chair in the faculty of theology. In 1645 he was appointed first court chaplain to Queen Christina, in 1649 pastor primarius in Stockholm, and in 1664 Bishop of Strängnäs.
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Nicholas E. Wagman
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Nicholas E. Wagman was an American astronomer and astrometrist. Beginning in 1930, Wagman was associated with Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory. He was director of the Observatory and also chairman of the University of Pittsburgh's Astronomy Department from 1941 until 1970. Under his direction, the 0.76-m Thaw refractor was renovated and used to set the standard for parallax determinations, of which over 1200 were made. Many binary stars were also discovered and characterized.
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Antonín Strnad
1746 - 1799 (53 years)
Antonín Strnad was a Czech geographer, professor and rector of the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague and director of the observatory in Clementinum, founder of Czech scientific meteorology, agrometeorology and phenology, and also one of the founders of the Czech national revival. He began recording his meteorological observations in Clementinum and in 1775 he began the longest continuous series of observations in the world.
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James Ralston Kennedy Paterson
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
James Ralston Kennedy "RP" Paterson, CBE, MC, MD, FRCSEd, FRCR, DMRE was a radiologist and oncologist in Scotland. Along with Herbert Parker, pioneered the development of the Paterson-Parker rules for the Radium Dosage System also known as the Manchester system.
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Jørg Tofte Jebsen
1888 - 1922 (34 years)
Jørg Tofte Jebsen was a physicist from Norway, where he was the first to work on Einstein's general theory of relativity. In this connection he became known after his early death for what many now call the Jebsen-Birkhoff theorem for the metric tensor outside a general, spherical mass distribution.
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Edward Taylor Jones
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Edward Taylor Jones F.R.S.E. LL.D. was a British physicist. He was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University from 1925 to 1943. Life He was born in Denbigh in north Wales on 24 December 1872. He studied Science at the University of North Wales and did further postgraduate of the University of Berlin. From 1899 until 1925 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy at his alma mater, the University of North Wales, and then moved to the University of Glasgow for the remainder of his career. The main focus of his work was electromagnetism, atomic physics and quantum theory.
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Baha' al-din al-'Amili
1547 - 1621 (74 years)
#9885
Josef Geitler von Armingen
1870 - 1923 (53 years)
Josef Karl Franz Otto Geitler, Ritter von Armingen was an Austrian physicist born in Smíchov, today a district in Prague. He is remembered for his investigations of electromagnetic waves. He studied in Prague and Bonn, later obtaining his habilitation at Prague. In 1906 he succeeded Alois Handl as chair of experimental physics at the University of Czernowitz. In 1919, when Czernowitz became a Romanian university, Geitler relocated to Graz, where he taught classes at the Technische Universität Graz.
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Otto von Fürth
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Otto von Fürth was an Austrian physician, physiologist and biochemist. Fürth studied at the University of Prague, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. He worked at the University of Vienna, the University of Prague and the University of Straßburg where received his habilitation in medical chemistry in 1899. From that point on he worked in Vienna focusing on biochemistry. In 1898 he announced the discovery of "suprerenin." He received the Lieben Prize in 1923.
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Johannes Hevelius
1611 - 1687 (76 years)
Johannes Hevelius was a councillor and mayor of Danzig , in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. As an astronomer, he gained a reputation as "the founder of lunar topography", and described ten new constellations, seven of which are still used by astronomers.
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Emanuele Foà
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Emanuele Foà was an Italian engineer and engineering physicist, known for his contribution to mathematical fluid dynamics. In particular he proved the first known uniqueness theorem for the solutions to the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluids in bounded domains.
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Johann Baptist Cysat
1585 - 1657 (72 years)
Johann Baptist Cysat was a Swiss Jesuit mathematician and astronomer, after whom the lunar crater Cysatus is named. He was born in Lucerne, as the eighth of 14 children, to cartographer, historian and folklorist Renward Cysat .
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Ludwik Birkenmajer
1855 - 1929 (74 years)
Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer , Polish historian of science, physicist, astronomer, professor of the Jagiellonian University. Biography Descended from the German family settled in Galicia during the time of the Napoleon wars, later a part of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. He was the son of Józef Herman and Petronela de domo Stefanowski. Educated in the Franz Joseph High School in Lvov , than studied physics, chemistry and mathematics at the Kraków University till 1878. Supplementary studies in Vienna . In 1879 he defended his Ph. D. thesis in Kraków based on the study: On general methods of integration of the algebraic and transcendental functions .
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Christian Ludwig Gerling
1788 - 1864 (76 years)
Christian Ludwig Gerling studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss, obtaining his doctorate in 1812 for a thesis entitled: Methodi proiectionis orthographicae usum ad calculos parallacticos facilitandos explicavit simulque eclipsin solarem die, at the University of Göttingen. He is notable for his work on geodeticss and in 1927 some 60 letters of correspondence between Gerling and Gauss on the topic were published. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Julius Plücker.
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Gustav Eberhard
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Gustav E. Eberhard German astrophysicist. Eberhard published numerous investigations on spectroscopy and on photographic photogrametry. The photographic Eberhard effect is named after him and was published in 1926.
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Charles Thomas Whitmell
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Charles Thomas Whitmell was an English astronomer, mathematician and educationalist. Early life and education Whitmell was born into a middle-class family in Leeds, Yorkshire, where his father was a principal official of the Bank of England. As a teenage child he was pre-occupied by scientific experiments and investigations – especially in the fields of chemistry, optics, electricity and magnetism. At the age of 14 he was already corresponding with Michael Faraday and Professor John Tyndall. Whitmell was educated at Leeds Grammar School, London University and Trinity College, Cambridge . His experimental work was on the subject of highly refractive liquids.
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Heinrich Ott
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Heinrich Ott was a German physicist. Education Ott studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His thesis was on the theory of crystal structure, and he was awarded his doctorate in 1924. He stayed on as Sommerfeld’s assistant. Subsequently, he completed his Habilitation and was a Privatdozent until 1929.
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William Hammond Wright
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
William Hammond Wright was an American astronomer and the director of the Lick Observatory from 1935 until 1942. Wright was born in San Francisco. After graduating in 1893 from the University of California, he became Assistant Astronomer at Lick Observatory. From 1903 to 1906 he worked on establishing the "Southern station" of the observatory at Cerro San Cristobal near Santiago de Chile. It only took him 6 months to start with observations from this new site, and he recorded a large series of radial velocity measurements of stars in the southern sky. In 1908 he was promoted to Astronomer. Fr...
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Prana Krushna Parija
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Prana Krushna Parija OBE was an Indian botanist. His research work comprised mainly fundamental and applied aspects of plant physiology, experimental plant morphology, and ecological studies of plant environment. He studied water hyacinth and other aquatic weeds, respiration in leaves and apples, transpiration and heat resistance in plants, rice and algae and storage of apples.
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John Larry Kelly Jr.
1923 - 1965 (42 years)
John Larry Kelly Jr. , was an American scientist who worked at Bell Labs. From a "system he'd developed to analyze information transmitted over networks," from Claude Shannon's earlier work on information theory, he is best known for his 1956 work in creating the Kelly criterion formula. With notable volatility in its sequence of outcomes, the Kelly criterion can be used to estimate what proportion of wealth to risk in a sequence of positive expected value bets to maximize the rate of return. As a substantial warning, the outcome for the Kelly criterion's recommendation on bet-size "relies h...
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John Torrence Tate Sr.
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
John Torrence Tate Sr. was an American physicist noted for his editorship of Physical Review between 1926 and 1950. He is the father of mathematician John Torrence Tate Jr. Biography Tate was born on 28 July 1889 in Lenox, Iowa. He attended the University of Nebraska, studying electrical engineering, earning a BS in 1910. He continued at the University of Nebraska, shifting his focus to physics and earning an MA in 1912. Like many American students interested in pursuing advanced degrees in physics, he departed for Germany to further his studies, earning a PhD under James Franck in 1914, with...
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Renate Chasman
1932 - 1977 (45 years)
Renate Wiener Chasman was a physicist. She was born Renate Wiener to German Jewish parents in Berlin. Her father, Hans Wiener, was a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1938, the Wiener family fled Nazi Germany through the Netherlands to Sweden, where Wiener grew up and attended school in Stockholm.
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Giambattista Pianciani
1784 - 1862 (78 years)
Giambattista Pianciani was an Italian Jesuit scientist. Biography He entered the Society of Jesus on 2 June 1805; after having received the ordinary Jesuit training he was sent to various cities in the Papal States to teach mathematics and physics and finally was appointed professor in the Roman College, where he lectured and wrote on scientific subjects for twenty-four years. He was an active member of the Accademia d'Arcadia, his academical pseudonym being "Polite Megaride", of the Accademia de' Lincei, and of other scientific societies. His scientific labours were abruptly brought to an e...
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