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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#9951
Seishi Kikuchi
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
was a Japanese physicist, known for his explanation of the Kikuchi lines that show up in diffraction patterns of diffusely scattered electrons. Kikuchi's research was recorded in the official Nobel Prize selection meeting minutes of the 1930s.
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Emory Leon Chaffee
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Emory Leon Chaffee was an American physicist. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1911 to 1953. Chaffee was born in Somerville, Massachusetts. He studied electrical engineering and received his bachelor's degree from MIT in 1907. Afterward he made further studies at the Harvard University and took his master's degree and his Ph.D.
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Lloyd Hulbert
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Lloyd Clair Hulbert was a professor of biology at Kansas State University from 1955 until 1986. He was recognized for his work to establish Konza Prairie and served as its first director from 1971-1986. Hulbert was internationally known for his "research of bluestem prairie and prairie-forest interactions."
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Louis Ridenour
1911 - 1959 (48 years)
Louis N. Ridenour was a physicist instrumental in U.S. development of radar, Vice President of Lockheed, and an advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Biography and positions held During World War II, Ridenour worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He was co-leader with Ivan A. Getting of the group that developed the SCR-584 radar. He directed a committee in 1949 that recommended the establishment of a separate Research and Development Command and a new Air Staff Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development. In 1950, Ridenour was named the first Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Forc...
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Ukichiro Nakaya
1900 - 1962 (62 years)
Ukichiro Nakaya was a Japanese physicist and science essayist known for his work in glaciology and low-temperature sciences. He is credited with making the first artificial snowflakes. Life and research Nakaya was born near the Katayamazu hot springs in Kaga, Ishikawa Prefecture, near the area depicted in Hokuetsu Seppu, an encyclopedic work published in 1837 that contains 183 sketches of natural snowflake crystals – the subject that became Nakaya's life work. Nakaya later wrote that his father wanted him to be a potter and sent him to live with a potter while he was in primary school. His f...
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Andrei Severny
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Andrei B. Severny was a Soviet astronomer, particularly known for his work on solar flares and astronomical observations from artificial satellites. He was director of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory from 1952–1987 and vice-president of the International Astronomical Union from 1964 to 1970.
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Frank Horton
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Frank Horton FRS was professor of physics at Royal Holloway College, London University from 1914 to 1946 and later Vice-Chancellor of London University during the years of World War II from 1939 to 1945.
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Revaz Dogonadze
1931 - 1985 (54 years)
Revaz Dogonadze was a notable Georgian scientist, Corresponding Member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences , Doctor of Physical & Mathematical Sciences , Professor , one of the founders of Quantum electrochemistry,
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Charles Pollard Olivier
1884 - 1975 (91 years)
Charles Pollard Olivier was an American astronomer, notable for his contributions to the study of meteors, double stars and variable stars. Biography Charles grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he lived close to the University of Virginia. In 1901 he became an assistant at the nearby Leander McCormick Observatory, and in 1905 he was Vanderbilt fellow at the observatory. He completed his Ph.D. in astronomy by 1911, with a dissertation disproving the existence of stationary meteor radiants.
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Zdeněk Sekera
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Zdeněk Sekera was a Czech scientist who in 1966 won the American Meteorological Society's Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal for atmospheric science for his research into the dynamics of the atmosphere. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1956 and 1960 in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics. He was professor of meteorology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Thomas Thundat
Thomas George Thundat is an American scientist. He is currently the Empire Innovation Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo. Thundat is one of the pioneers in the field of nanosensors and a leading expert on microcantilevers.
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William Michael Herbert Greaves
1897 - 1955 (58 years)
William Michael Herbert Greaves FRS FREng FRSE was a British astronomer. He is most noted for his work on stellar spectrophotometry. Life He was born in Barbados in the West Indies the son of Dr E. C. Greaves, a physician trained at the University of Edinburgh. William Greaves was educated first at Lodge School and Codrington College, both in Barbados then travelled to England to study at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated MA in 1919 and became a Fellow in 1922.
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Abdul Jabbar Abdullah
1911 - 1969 (58 years)
Abdul Jabbar Abdullah Sam was an Iraqi wave theory physicist, dynamical meteorologist, and President Emeritus of the University of Baghdad. Abdullah obtained a doctorate in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946 before returning to Iraq to become an educator and researcher. After several years as the President of the University of Baghdad, Abdullah left Iraq amid a period of social unrest, and lived in the United States for the remainder of his life.
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Imre Fényes
1917 - 1977 (60 years)
Imre Fényes was a Hungarian physicist who was the first to propose a stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Selected publications External links Imre Fényes biography
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John Pasta
1918 - 1981 (63 years)
John Robert Pasta was an American computational physicist and computer scientist who is remembered today for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment, the result of which was much discussed among physicists and researchers in the fields of dynamical systems and chaos theory, and as the head of the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1964 to 1970.
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Otto Robert Frisch
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Otto Robert Frisch was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann he first measured the magnetic moment of the proton. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940.
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Maud Worcester Makemson
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Maud Worcester Makemson was an American astronomer, a specialist on archaeoastronomy, and director of Vassar Observatory. Early life and education Maud Lavon Worcester was born in 1891 in Center Harbor, New Hampshire. She attended Girls' Latin School in Boston. She briefly attended Radcliffe College, but left to teach school. In 1911, her family moved to Pasadena, California. She was working as a journalist in Bisbee, Arizona when she took an interest in astronomy. She returned to California and taught school while taking correspondence courses and summer classes to qualify for admission to the University of California.
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Dirk Reuyl
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Dirk Reuyl was a Dutch American physicist and astronomer. He was the cousin of astronomer Peter van de Kamp. Life Like his cousin, Reuijl was born in Kampen, Overijssel. He studied physics and mathematics at Utrecht University, where, in October 1931, he defended his PhD dissertation "Photographic measures of close double stars" with Albertus Antonie Nijland as advisor. He came to the United States a few years before Van de Kamp. He joined the staff at McCormick Observatory in 1929 and continued to work there until 1944. He originally worked on the parallax of stars, first publishing a list of 50 measurements in 1929 with fellow staff member Alexander N.
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Johann Nikuradse
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Johann Nikuradse was a Georgia-born German engineer and physicist. His brother, Alexander Nikuradse, was also a Germany-based physicist and geopolitician known for his ties with Alfred Rosenberg and for his role in saving many Georgians during World War II.
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Edgar W. Woolard
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Edgar William Woolard was an American meteorologist, mathematician and planetary scientist. He was born in El Paso, Texas and received his college education from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. During World War I, Woolard served in the U.S. Army. In 1919, he was employed at the U.S. Weather Bureau as an assistant meteorologist, where he would remain until 1928. He resigned to join the faculty of George Washington University as a mathematics instructor. Woolard was granted his Ph.D. from the university with a thesis titled, On the Geometrical Theory of Halos, published in 1929.
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Ernest Titterton
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Sir Ernest William Titterton was a British nuclear physicist. A graduate of the University of Birmingham, Titterton worked in a research position under Mark Oliphant, who recruited him to work on radar for the British Admiralty during the first part of the Second World War. In 1943, he joined the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he helped develop the first atomic bombs. He eventually became one of the laboratory's group leaders. He participated in the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll in 1946, where he performed the countdown for both tests. With the pass...
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Derek Jackson
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Derek Ainslie Jackson, OBE, DFC, AFC, FRS was a British physicist. Biography Derek Jackson was born in 1906, the son of Welsh businessman Sir Charles Jackson. Derek Jackson showed early promise in the field of spectroscopy under the guidance of Professor Frederick Lindemann, making the first quantitative determination of a nuclear magnetic spin using atomic spectroscopy to measure the hyperfine structure of caesium. His scientific research at Oxford did not, however, interfere with his other great passion – steeplechase riding – which led him from the foxhunting field to his first ride in the Grand National of 1935.
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Jason John Nassau
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Jason John Nassau was an American astronomer. He performed his doctoral studies at Syracuse, and gained his Ph.D. mathematics in 1920. He then became an assistant professor at the Case Institute of Technology in 1921, teaching astronomy. He continued to instruct at that institution, becoming the University's first chair of astronomy from 1924 until 1959 and chairman of the graduate division from 1936 until 1940. After 1959 he was professor emeritus.
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Rudolf Kompfner
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Rudolf Kompfner was an Austrian-born inventor, physicist and architect, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube . Life Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents. He was originally trained as an architect and after receiving his university degree in 1933 he moved to England , where he worked as an architect until 1941. He had a strong interest in physics and electronics, and after being briefly detained by the British at the start of World War II he was recruited to work in a secret microwave vacuum tube research program at the University of Birmingham. While there, Kompfner invented the TWT in 1943.
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Ernest Marsden
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Sir Ernest Marsden was an English-New Zealand physicist. He is recognised internationally for his contributions to science while working under Ernest Rutherford, which led to the discovery of new theories on the structure of the atom. In Marsden's later work in New Zealand, he became a significant member of the scientific community, while maintaining close links to the United Kingdom.
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Takahiko Yamanouchi
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for group theory in quantum mechanics first proposed by Yamanouchi in Japan. Yamanouchi was born in Kanagawa, graduated in physics from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1926. From 1926 to 1927 he was a research associate at the Imperial University of Tokyo. From 1927 to 1931 he was a professor at the Tokyo Higher School. He joined the faculty of the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1929 as a lecturer of engineering and became a full professor in 1942. He was a professor of physics at the University of Tokyo from 1949 to his retirement in 1963. During 1959–1961 he was the dean of the faculty of science.
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Noel Slater
1912 - 1973 (61 years)
Prof Noel Bryan Slater FRAS FRSE was a 20th-century British mathematician and astronomer. Life He was born on 29 July 1912 in Blackburn, Lancashire the son of Minnie Jane Bryan, and her husband, Doctor Albert Slater. His father was not a doctor but was christened with the name Doctor. He was generally known as D. Albert Slater. Slated was educated at Blackburn Grammar School. His parents then moved to Scotland where he was educated at North Berwick High School then Fordyce Academy in Banff.
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Winfried Otto Schumann
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Winfried Otto Schumann was a German physicist and electrical engineer who predicted the Schumann resonances, a series of low-frequency resonances caused by lightning discharges in the atmosphere. Biography Winfried Schumann was born in Tübingen, Germany, the son of a physical chemist. His early years were spent in Kassel and in Berndorf, a town near Vienna. He majored in electrical engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 1912, he gained a doctorate with a thesis on high-voltage technology under the supervision of Engelbert Arnold. Prior to the First World War, he managed the ...
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Harry Hemley Plaskett
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Harry Hemley Plaskett FRS was a Canadian astronomer who made significant contributions to the fields of solar physics, astronomical spectroscopy and spectrophotometry. From 1932 to 1960, he served as the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, and in 1963 was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Leslie H. Martin
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Sir Leslie Harold Martin, was an Australian physicist. He was one of the 24 Founding Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science and had a significant influence on the structure of higher education in Australia as chairman of the Australian Universities Commission from 1959 until 1966. He was Professor of Physics at the University of Melbourne from 1945 to 1959, and Dean of the Faculty of Military Studies and Professor of Physics at the University of New South Wales at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in Canberra from 1967 to 1970. He was the Defence Scientific Adviser and chairman of ...
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Sutherland Simpson
1863 - 1926 (63 years)
Sutherland Simpson FRSE was a Scottish physician who emigrated to the United States to become Professor of Physiology at Cornell University. Life He was born at Saraquoy on the island of Flotta in the Orkney Isles on 3 February 1863, the eldest son of Margaret and Sutherland Simpson. He attended a school on the island run by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. He worked on his father's croft and aimed to be master of a sailing ship so studied navigation under a teacher on the island, John Brown Gorrie.
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Marc Aaronson
1950 - 1987 (37 years)
Marc Aaronson was an American astronomer. Life Aaronson was born in Los Angeles. He was educated at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a BS in 1972. He completed his Ph.D. in 1977 at Harvard University with a dissertation on the near-infrared aperture photometry of galaxies. He joined Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona as a postdoctoral research associate in 1977 and became an Associate Professor of Astronomy in 1983. Aaronson and Jeremy Mould won the George Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1981 and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1984 from the American Astronomical Society.
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William G. Pollard
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
William Grosvenor Pollard was an American physicist and an Episcopal priest. He started his career as a professor of physics in 1936 at the University of Tennessee. In 1946 he championed the organization of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies . He was its executive director until 1974. He was ordained as a priest in 1954. He authored and co-authored a significant amount of material in the areas of Christianity and Science and Religion found in books, book chapters, and journal articles. He was sometimes referred to as the "atomic deacon".
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R. E. Siday
1912 - 1956 (44 years)
Raymond Eldred Siday was an English mathematician specialising in quantum mechanics. He obtained his BSc in Special Physics and later worked at the University of Edinburgh. He began collaborating with Werner Ehrenberg in 1933.
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George Yuri Rainich
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
George Yuri Rainich was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. Career Rainich studied mathematics from 1904 to 1908 in Odessa, in Göttingen , and in Munich , eventually obtaining his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Kazan. After teaching at the University of Kazan, in 1922 , he emigrated with his wife to the United States. After three years at Johns Hopkins University, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he remained until his retirement in 1956. After his retirement as professor emeritus, he was in 1957 at Brown University as a member...
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Robert Julius Trumpler
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Robert Julius Trumpler was a Swiss-American astronomer. Career After initial schooling, Trumpler entered the Universität Zürich but later transferred to the University of Göttingen where he earned his PhD in 1910. In 1915, during World War I, he emigrated to the United States and joined the University of California. He took a position at Allegheny Observatory, and later went to Lick Observatory. In 1921, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1932.
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Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was a Mexican physicist. He was a Physics professor at both MIT and the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . Biography Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico City into a family that descended from Ignacio Vallarta, a prominent liberal leader during the War of Reform. He received his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1921; in 1924, MIT awarded him his Ph.D. He joined MIT's physics faculty in 1923, eventually rising to the rank of full professor. In 1927, Vallarta received a two-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study physics in Germany. The Un...
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John J. Livingood
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
John Jacob Livingood was an American nuclear physicist specialising in the design of particle accelerators. With Glenn Seaborg he discovered and characterized a number of new radioisotopes useful for nuclear medicine, including cobalt-60, iodine-131 and iron-59.
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Brenna Flaugher
Brenna Lynn Flaugher is an experimental cosmologist who works as a distinguished scientist at Fermilab, where she heads the Astrophysics Department. Flaugher led the development of the Dark Energy Camera at the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile, part of the Dark Energy Survey; she has also been involved in the development of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. By seeking a greater understanding of dark matter, she aims to explain the observed accelerating expansion of the universe.
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Helmut Volz
1911 - 1978 (67 years)
Helmut Volz was a German experimental nuclear physicist who worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II. In the latter years of World War II, he became a professor at Erlangen University. He declined to take a position offered to him in the United States after the war, and he continued his teaching and research at Erlangen.
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Frances Lowater
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Frances Lowater was a British-American physicist and astronomer. Life and career Lowater studied in England for her undergraduate degrees, at University College, Nottingham, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She then moved to the United States, where she attended Bryn Mawr College and earned her Ph.D. in 1906. While studying for her Ph.D., she took a position as a physics demonstrator, and remained in that position until 1910. She spent a year at Westfield College and four years at Rockford College, then moved to Wellesley College, where she spent the rest of her career; with the exception of a...
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Alfred Landé
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Alfred Landé was a German-American physicist known for his contributions to quantum theory. He is responsible for the Landé g-factor and an explanation of the Zeeman effect. Life and achievements Alfred Landé was born on 13 December 1888 in Elberfeld, Rhineland, Germany, today part of the city of Wuppertal.
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Edward Victor Appleton
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Sir Edward Victor Appleton was an English physicist, Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in radiophysics. He studied, and was also employed as a lab technician, at Bradford College from 1909 to 1911. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1947 for his seminal work proving the existence of the ionosphere during experiments carried out in 1924.
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Gopinath Kartha
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Gopinath Kartha was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.
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Arthur Edward Ruark
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Arthur Edward Ruark was an American physicist and academic known for his role in the development of quantum mechanics. He wrote the book Atoms, Molecules, and Quanta with Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Harold Clayton Urey in 1930, and is the author of numerous scientific papers on quantum physics.
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Edgar Lipworth
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Edgar Lipworth was an American physicist, specializing "in research in molecular and atomic beams, nuclear physics, lasers and the symmetry of physical laws under time reversal." Born and educated in England, Edgar Lipworth worked from 1944 to 1946 as a civilian research assistant on radar for the Air Ministry. After graduating with a BA from the University of Manchester in 1947, he became a graduate student in physics at Manhattan's Columbia University. There he obtained his PhD with advisor Willis Lamb with a dissertation on measurement of the Lamb shift in singly ionized helium. From 1953 to 1954 Lipworth held a fellowship with RCA.
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Eni Njoku
1917 - 1974 (57 years)
Eni Njoku was a Nigerian botanist and educator. He was vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka . He served in the Nigerian House of Representatives as federal minister of Mines and Power, and was chairman of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria. He was an emissary at OAU-sponsored peace talks.
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Adriaan van Maanen
1884 - 1946 (62 years)
Adriaan van Maanen was a Dutch–American astronomer. Born in Friesland, he studied astronomy at the University of Utrecht, earning his Ph.D. in 1911, and worked briefly at the University of Groningen. In 1911, he came to the United States to work as a volunteer in an unpaid capacity at Yerkes Observatory. Within a year he got a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he remained active until his death in 1946.
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Arthur H. Benade
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
Arthur H. Benade was an American physicist and acoustician, researcher, professor, and author. He is best known for his research on the physics of woodwinds and brass instruments, and for two books, Horns, Strings, and Harmony , and Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics . He was a professor at Case Institute of Technology , in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1952 to 1987.
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William Freeman Twaddell
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
William Freeman Twaddell was a professor of German and linguistics, who worked at Brown University as a linguist during the 1950s and 1960s. He also served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1957.
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