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,
#9901
John Martin Schaeberle
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
John Martin Schaeberle was a Kingdom of Württemberg-born American astronomer. Biography He was born Johann Martin Schäberle in Kingdom of Württemberg, but in 1854 immigrated as an infant to the United States. Most sources refer to him as John M. Schaeberle, but his family and friends called him Martin.
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Aloysius Lilius
1510 - 1576 (66 years)
Aloysius Lilius , also variously referred to as Luigi Lilio or Luigi Giglio, was an Italian doctor, astronomer, philosopher and chronologist, and also the "primary author" who provided the proposal that became the basis of the Gregorian Calendar reform of 1582.
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Johann Gottlieb Nörremberg
1787 - 1862 (75 years)
Johann Gottlieb Christian Nörremberg was a German physicist who worked on the polarization of light. From 1823 he taught classes in mathematics and physics at the military school in Darmstadt. In 1833 he became a professor of mathematics, physics and astronomy at the University of Tübingen, where he worked on surveying and the development of optical instruments. Among his better known creations was a polarization apparatus, a device used in the making of a "Nörremberg polariscope". Most of his scientific articles were published in Poggendorfs Annalen.
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Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat was a French theoretical physicist. Her physics research focused on relativistic quantum mechanics under the influence of gravity. Along with the help of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, she attempted to propose one of the first unified field theories. She is also known for her work on the history of special and general relativity.
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Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr
1677 - 1750 (73 years)
Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr was a German mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer. Professional life and publications He was born in Nuremberg, the son of the merchant Johann Siegmund Doppelmayr. He entered the Aegidien-Gymnasium in Nuremberg in 1689, then the University of Altdorf in 1696. His studies included mathematics, physics, and jurisprudence. Later he continued his studies in Halle and graduated in 1698 with a dissertation on the Sun.
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Adolf Bestelmeyer
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Adolf Bestelmeyer was a German experimental physicist. Life and work Bestelmeyer studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University of Berlin, the Technical University of Munich and the University of Munich. After his promotion, he worked in 1904 as an assistant at the University of Göttingen. In World War I he was active in torpedo research, and afterwards he was professor of physics at the University of Greifswald from 1917 to 1921. He then served until the end of World War II as a laboratory manager in various companies , especially in the area of torpedo construction.
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David Peck Todd
1855 - 1939 (84 years)
David Peck Todd was an American astronomer. He produced a complete set of photographs of the 1882 transit of Venus. Biography Todd was born in Lake Ridge, New York, the son of Sereno Edwards Todd and Rhoda Todd. He prepared at John C. Overhiser's School in Brooklyn. He studied at Columbia University from 1870 to 1872, then at Amherst College from 1873 to 1875, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in the class of 1875. He earned his M.A. from Amherst in 1878. He was awarded an honorary degree from Washington and Jefferson College in 1888.
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Marcello Pirani
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Marcello Stefano Pirani was an Italian physicist known for his invention of the Pirani vacuum gauge, a vacuum gauge based on the principle of heat loss measurement. Throughout his career, he worked on advancing lighting technology and pioneered work on the physics of gas discharge.
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Gottfried Kirch
1639 - 1710 (71 years)
Gottfried Kirch was a German astronomer and the first "Astronomer Royal" in Berlin and, as such, director of the nascent Berlin Observatory. Life and work The son of Michael Kirch, a shoemaker in Guben, initially he worked as a schoolmaster in Langgrün and Neundorf near Lobenstein. He also worked as a calendar-maker in Saxonia and Franconia. He began to learn astronomy with Erhard Weigel in Jena, and with Hevelius in Danzig. In Danzig in 1667, Kirch published calendars and built several telescopes and instruments. In 1679 he invented a screw micrometer for astronomical measurements. He became...
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Jean Becquerel
1878 - 1953 (75 years)
Jean Antoine Edmond Marie Becquerel was a French physicist, the son of Antoine-Henri Becquerel. He worked on a range of experimental physics topics including magnetic effects on the optical properties of materials, and the effects of low-temperature on magnetic susceptibility. He was among the early teachers of relativity and quantum physics in France.
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Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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Hugh Newall
1857 - 1944 (87 years)
Hugh Frank Newall, FRS FRAS was a British astrophysicist. He was Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge. He was the son of Robert Stirling Newall FRS and his wife Mary, daughter of Hugh Lee Pattinson, FRS.
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Georg von Peuerbach
1423 - 1461 (38 years)
Georg von Peuerbach was an Austrian astronomer, poet, mathematician and instrument maker, best known for his streamlined presentation of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Theoricae Novae Planetarum. Peuerbach was instrumental in making astronomy, mathematics and literature simple and accessible for Europeans during the Renaissance and beyond.
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Sergey Vavilov
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov was a Soviet physicist, the President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from July 1945 until his death. His elder brother Nikolai Vavilov was a famous Russian geneticist.
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Thomas Fincke
1561 - 1656 (95 years)
Thomas Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, and a professor at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years. Biography Thomas Jacobsen Fincke was born in Flensburg in Schleswig. Fincke was the son of Councillor Jacob Fincke and Anna Thorsmede. He completed his primary schooling at Flensburg. From 1577, he studied mathematics, rhetoric and other philosophical studies for five years at the University of Strasbourg.
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Albert Beaumont Wood
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Albert Beaumont Wood DSc , better known as A B Wood, was a British physicist, known for his pioneering work in the field of underwater acoustics and sonar. Wood is known for his work on developing sonar in the UK from the First World War until after the Second World War.
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Eugeniusz Rybka
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Eugeniusz Rybka , was a Polish astronomer, professor of the Lviv University , Wrocław University and director of the Kraków Astronomical Observatory . Also he was deputy director of the International Astronomical Union .
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Aristarkh Belopolsky
1854 - 1934 (80 years)
Aristarkh Apollonovich Belopolsky was a Russian Empire and later Soviet astronomer. He was born in Moscow but his father's ancestors are from a Serbian town called Belo Polje. Life Belopolsky got his degree at Moscow University in 1876, and in 1878, he became the assistant to Fyodor Aleksandrovich Bredikhin at Moscow Observatory. In 1888, he joined the staff of Pulkovo Observatory.
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Paul Erman
1764 - 1851 (87 years)
Paul Erman was a German physicist from Berlin, Brandenburg and a Huguenot of the fourth generation. His work was mainly concerned with electricity and magnetism, though he also made some contributions to optics and physiology.
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John Trowbridge
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
John Trowbridge was an American physicist, noted for his research into electricity and magnetism, and for his innovations in scientific education. Early life Born into a long-established New England family, John Trowbridge could trace his roots in Massachusetts and Connecticut back to the early seventeenth century. His father, John Howe Trowbridge, was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, but did not pursue a professional career, having inherited a sufficient fortune to finance a life of ease. Evidently this state of affairs did not last, however, and the younger Trowbridge would later recount that he was obliged to support himself in youth by monetising his talents as a painter.
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Karl F. Sundman
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Karl Frithiof Sundman was a Finnish mathematician who used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in two papers published in 1907 and 1909. His results gained fame when they were reproduced in Acta Mathematica in 1912. He also published a paper on regularization methods in mechanics in 1912.
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Adolfo Bartoli
1851 - 1896 (45 years)
Adolfo Bartoli was an Italian physicist, who is best known for introducing the concept of radiation pressure from thermodynamical considerations. Born in Florence, Bartoli studied physics and mathematics at the University of Pisa until 1874. He was professor of physics at the Technical Institute of Arezzo from 1876, at the University of Sassari from 1878, at the Technical Institute of Firenze from 1879, at the University of Catania from 1886 to 1893, and at the University of Pavia from 1893.
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Carlo Perrier
1887 - 1948 (61 years)
Carlo Perrier was an Italian mineralogist and chemist who did extensive research on the element technetium. With the discovery of technetium in 1937, he and Emilio Segrè accounted for the last gap in the periodic table. Technetium was the first element produced artificially .
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Armin Joseph Deutsch
1918 - 1969 (51 years)
Armin Joseph Deutsch , was an American astronomer and science fiction writer. Life and career Deutsch was born in Chicago and earned a BS from the University of Arizona in 1940 and, after wartime service as an instructor at the Army Air Force at Chanute Field in Illinois, a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1946 with a dissertation on the spectra of A-type variable stars.
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Klavdiâ Barkhatova
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Klavdiya Aleksandrovna Barkhatova was a Soviet astronomer. She became notable for he studies into stellar astronomy and eventually became a highly respected specialist in the field, producing a large body of scientific works. Kourovka Astronomical Observatory in Kourovka, Sverdlovsk Oblast is named in her honor.
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Basilis C. Xanthopoulos
1951 - 1990 (39 years)
Basilis C. Xanthopoulos was a Greek theoretical physicist, well known in the field of general relativity for his contributions to the study of colliding plane waves. Early years Basilis Xanthopoulos was born in Drama. He excelled in high school showing advanced analytic abilities in physics and mathematics. He was awarded the 1st prize in the national mathematics competition, organised by the Greek mathematical society in 1969 and at the same year he was admitted with the highest grade among all students in Greece to the Department of Mathematics of the University of Thessaloniki. Four year...
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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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