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,
#9951
Ye Qisun
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Ye Qisun , also named Ye Hongjuan , was a Chinese physicist and one of the founders of modern physics in China. Education Ye's family had a very strong educational background. His great-grandfather served in a government office during the Qing Dynasty and contributed official records for an edition of Shanghai History. His grandfather Ye Jiazhen worked in The Imperial College. His father Ye Jingyun was a successful candidate in the imperial examinations at the provincial level, and was designated as the headmaster of Jingye School , as well as a Chinese professor at Tsinghua University and t...
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William Henry Pickering
1858 - 1938 (80 years)
William Henry Pickering was an American astronomer. Pickering constructed and established several observatories or astronomical observation stations, notably including Percival Lowell's Flagstaff Observatory. He led solar eclipse expeditions and studied craterss on the Moon, and hypothesized that changes in the appearance of the crater Eratosthenes were due to "lunar insects". He spent much of the later part of his life at his private observatory in Jamaica.
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Lewis Morris Rutherfurd
1816 - 1892 (76 years)
Lewis Morris Rutherfurd was an American lawyer and astronomer, and a pioneering astrophotographer. Early life and work Rutherfurd was born in Morrisania, New York, to Robert Walter Rutherfurd and Sabina Morris of Morrisania. He was the grandson of U.S. Senator John Rutherfurd from 1791 to 1798, and great-grandson of Lewis Morris, the Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Major General William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, was the uncle of his grandfather.
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George Green
1793 - 1841 (48 years)
George Green was a British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism in 1828. The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theorem similar to the modern Green's theorem, the idea of potential functions as currently used in physics, and the concept of what are now called Green's functions. Green was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism and his theory formed the foundation for the work of other scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, and others.
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Frederick Thomas Trouton
1863 - 1922 (59 years)
Frederick Thomas Trouton FRS was an Irish physicist known for Trouton's rule and experiments to detect the Earth's motion through the luminiferous aether. Life and work Trouton was born in Dublin on 24 November 1863, the youngest son of the wealthy and prominent Thomas Trouton. He attended Royal School Dungannon and went on to Trinity College, Dublin in 1884, where he studied engineering and physical science. While still an undergraduate student, Trouton observed a relationship between boiling points and energies of vaporisationss, which he presented in two short papers. He found the change o...
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Joseph Plateau
1801 - 1883 (82 years)
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope.
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Shin Hirayama
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Shin Hirayama, also read as Makoto Hirayama, was the first Japanese astronomer to discover an asteroid. In 1900 he discovered 498 Tokio and 727 Nipponia. The crater Hirayama on the Moon is jointly named after him and Kiyotsugu Hirayama.
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Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt
1728 - 1810 (82 years)
Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt was a Polish–Lithuanian Jesuit, astronomer and mathematician. He was professor of Vilnius University for over 50 years, serving as its rector from 1780 to 1799. The crater Poczobutt on the Moon is named after him.
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Cleomedes
1 - 1 (0 years)
Cleomedes was a Greek astronomer who is known chiefly for his book On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies , also known as The Heavens . Placing his work chronologically His birth and death dates are not known—historians have suggested that he wrote his work sometime between the mid-1st century BC and 400 AD. The earlier estimates rely on the fact that Cleomedes refers extensively in his writing to the work of mathematician and astronomer Posidonius of Rhodes , and yet seemingly not at all to the work of Ptolemy .
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Wilhelm Julius Foerster
1832 - 1921 (89 years)
Wilhelm Julius Foerster was a German astronomer. His name can also be written Förster, but is usually written "Foerster" even in most German sources where 'ö' is otherwise used in the text. Biography A native of Grünberg, Silesia, he studied at the University of Berlin and Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and worked as Johann Franz Encke's assistant. In 1860, he co-discovered asteroid 62 Erato with Oskar Lesser, the first co-discovery on record. He became professor of astronomy at the University of Berlin in 1863. After Encke's death in 1865, he became director of the Berlin Observatory and served in this position until 1904.
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Giorgio Abetti
1882 - 1982 (100 years)
Prof Giorgio Abetti HFRSE was an Italian solar astronomer. Life He was born in Padua, the son of noted astronomer Antonio Abetti. He was educated at the Universities of Padua and of Rome. He began his career at the Collegio Romano observatory in Rome as an assistant astronomer.
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André Lallemand
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
André Lallemand was a French astronomer and director of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. Lallemand made important contributions to the development of photomultipliers for astronomical use and the "electronic telescope" . He was awarded the Lalande Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1938 and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1962 for his work.
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William Mitchinson Hicks
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Mitchinson Hicks, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1873, and became a fellow at the college. Hicks spent most of his career at Sheffield, contributing to the development of the university there. He was principal of Firth College from 1892 to 1897. In 1897, Firth College merged with two other colleges to form the University College of Sheffield, and Hicks was its first principal until 1905, when the college received its own royal charter and became the University of Sheffield. Hicks was the first vice chancellor of...
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William Francis Magie
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
William Francis Magie was an American physicist, a founder of the American Physical Society and the first professor of physics at Princeton University, where he had graduated and where he served for two decades as dean of the faculty. His papers on the contact angle of liquids and solids and on the specific heat of solutions were notable, as was his text Principles of Physics.
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Tobias Mayer
1723 - 1762 (39 years)
Tobias Mayer was a German astronomer famous for his studies of the Moon. He was born at Marbach, in Württemberg, and brought up at Esslingen in poor circumstances. A self-taught mathematician, he earned a living by teaching mathematics while still a youth. He had already published two original geometrical works when, in 1746, he entered J. B. Homann's cartographic establishment at Nuremberg. Here he introduced many improvements in mapmaking, and gained a scientific reputation which led to his election to the chair of economy and mathematics at the University of Göttingen. In 1754 he became s...
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Franz Brünnow
1821 - 1891 (70 years)
Franz Friedrich Ernst Brünnow was a German astronomer. He was the first foreigner to become director of an American observatory, serving as director of Detroit Observatory from 1854 to 1863. He played a major role in establishing the study of astronomy in the United States at a time when the only other serious faculty was run by Benjamin Peirce at Harvard University. He introduced the teaching of rigorous German analytical methods and trained a number of students who went on to further American astronomy, including Asaph Hall and James Craig Watson . In addition, Charles Augustus Young lea...
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Jerzy Pniewski
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Jerzy Pniewski was a Polish physicist. Pniewski was born in Płock. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Warsaw. In 1952, he co-discovered the hypernucleus with Marian Danysz. In 1962, he discovered hypernuclear isomery.
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Emil Cohn
1854 - 1944 (90 years)
Emil Georg Cohn , was a German physicist. Life Cohn was born in Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg on 28 September 1854. He was the son of August Cohn, a lawyer, and Charlotte Cohn. At the age of 17, Cohn began to study jurisprudence at the University of Leipzig. However, at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg and the University of Strasbourg he began to study physics. In Strasbourg, he graduated in 1879. From 1881 to 1884, he was an assistant of August Kundt at the physical institute. In 1884 he habilitated in theoretical physics and was admitted as a private lecturer. From 1884 to 1918, he was ...
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Hermann Arthur Jahn
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Hermann Arthur Jahn was a British scientist of German descent. With Edward Teller, he identified the Jahn–Teller effect. Early life He was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Jahn and Marion May Curtiss. He attended City School in Lincoln.
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Moritz von Jacobi
1801 - 1874 (73 years)
Moritz Hermann or Boris Semyonovich Jacobi was a Prussian and Russian Imperial engineer and physicist of Jewish descent. Jacobi worked mainly in the Russian Empire. He furthered progress in galvanoplasticss, electric motors, and wire telegraphy.
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Bertil Lindblad
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Bertil Lindblad was a Swedish astronomer. After finishing his secondary education at Örebro högre allmänna läroverk, Lindblad matriculated at Uppsala University in 1914. He received his filosofie magister degree in 1917, his filosofie licentiat degree in 1918 and completed his doctorate and became a docent at the university in 1920. From 1927 he was professor and astronomer of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and head of the Stockholm Observatory. In the latter capacity he was responsible for the observatory's move from the old building in the centre of Stockholm to a newly built facilit...
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Ernst Brüche
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Ernst Carl Reinhold Brüche was a German physicist. From 1944 to 1972, he was the editor of the Physikalische Blätter, a publication of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. Education Brüche studied physics at the Danzig Technische Hochschule from 1919 to 1924. From 1920, he was a teaching assistant in the physics department. In 1926 he completed his doctorate under Carl Ramsauer at the Danzig Technische Hochschule. He completed his Habilitation in 1927.
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Dominique, comte de Cassini
1748 - 1845 (97 years)
Jean-Dominique, comte de Cassini was a French astronomer, son of César-François Cassini de Thury and great-grandson of Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Cassini was born at the Paris Observatory. He succeeded his father as director of the observatory in 1784; but his plans for its restoration and re-equipment were wrecked in 1793 by the animosity of the National Assembly. His position having become intolerable, he resigned on 6 September and was thrown into prison in 1794, but released after seven months. He then withdrew to Thury, where he died in 1845.
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Heinrich Bruns
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Ernst Heinrich Bruns was a German mathematician and astronomer, who also contributed to the development of the field of theoretical geodesy. Early life Heinrich Bruns was born on 4 September 1848 in Berlin to Christian Gerhard Bruns, a landscape painter, and his wife, Caroline Henriette Hasse.
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Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin
1717 - 1783 (66 years)
Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin , Swedish astronomer and demographer. Wargentin was the son of the vicar of Sunne Wilhelm Wargentin and his spouse Christina Aroselia, and the great grandson of Joachim Wargentin , a Lübeck-born burgher of Åbo in Finland.
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Eugène Joseph Delporte
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Eugène Joseph Delporte was a Belgian astronomer born in Genappe. He discovered a total of sixty-six asteroids. Notable discoveries include 1221 Amor and the Apollo asteroid 2101 Adonis. He discovered or co-discovered some comets as well, including periodic comet 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte. He worked in the Observatoire Royal de Belgique , situated in the town of Uccle . He started there in 1903 after receiving his doctorate that year from the Free University of Brussels.
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Georges-Louis Le Sage
1724 - 1803 (79 years)
Georges-Louis Le Sage was a Genevan physicist and is most known for his theory of gravitation, for his invention of an electric telegraph and his anticipation of the kinetic theory of gases. Furthermore, he was a contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander
1799 - 1875 (76 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander was a German astronomer. He is known for his determinations of stellar brightnesses, positions, and distances. Life and work Argelander was born in Memel in the Kingdom of Prussia , the son of a father of Finnish descent, Johann Gottlieb Argelander, and German mother, Dorothea Wilhelmina Grünhagen. He studied with Friedrich Bessel, whose assistant he became in 1820, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1822 at University of Königsberg. From 1823 until 1837, Argelander was the head of the Finnish observatory, first in Turku and then in Helsinki. He then moved to Bonn, Germany.
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August Kopff
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
August Kopff was a German astronomer and discoverer of several comets and asteroids. Kopff studied and worked in Heidelberg, getting his PhD there in 1906 and he then joined the Humboldt University of Berlin where he became the Director of the Institute for Astronomical Calculation.
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Louis Harold Gray
1905 - 1965 (60 years)
Louis Harold Gray FRS was an English physicist who worked mainly on the effects of radiation on biological systems. He was one of the earliest contributors of the field of radiobiology A summary of his work is given below. Amongst many other achievements, he defined a unit of radiation dosage which was later named after him as an SI unit, the gray.
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Theodor Meyer
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Theodor Meyer was a German mathematician, a student of Ludwig Prandtl, and a founder of the scientific discipline now known as compressible flow or gas dynamics. Biography As a youth, Meyer studied mathematics and physics. He was privileged to learn from several of the great minds in these fields, including David Hilbert, Carl Runge, Hermann Minkowski, and Ludwig Prandtl. He and Prandtl made a great team, for Prandtl's intuitive and experimental approach to fluid mechanics has become legendary, and Meyer complemented his advisor's strengths with a formidable mathematical talent.
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Theodore Lyman IV
1874 - 1954 (80 years)
Theodore Lyman IV was an American physicist and spectroscopist, born in Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1897, from which he also received his Ph.D. in 1900. Career Lyman became an assistant professor in physics at Harvard, where he remained, becoming full professor in 1917, and where he was also director of the Jefferson Physical Laboratory . He made important studies in phenomena connected with diffraction gratings, on the wavelengths of vacuum ultraviolet light discovered by Victor Schumann and also on the properties of light of extremely short wavelength, on all of which he contribute...
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Erwin Fues
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Erwin Richard Fues , was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to atomic physics and molecular physics, quantum wave mechanics, and solid-state physics. Education and career During the period 1912 to 1914, Fues studied at the University of Berlin and then the University of Munich. He served in the military in 1914 to circa 1915, and then attended the University of Tübingen from 1916 to 1918. During 1918, he became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld and he received the doctor rerum naturalium from the University of Munich in 1920. From 1922 he did postgraduate work at the Stuttgart ...
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Egon Orowan
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Egon Orowan FRS was a Hungarian-British physicist and metallurgist. According to György Marx, he was one of The Martians. Life Orowan was born in the Óbuda district of Budapest. His father, Berthold , was a mechanical engineer and factory manager, and his mother, Josze Spitzer Ságvári, was the daughter of an impoverished land owner.
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Walter Herrmann
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Walter Herrmann was a German nuclear physicist and mechanical engineer who worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II. After the war, he headed a laboratory for special issues of nuclear disintegration at Laboratory V in the Soviet Union.
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Frederick Sumner Brackett
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Frederick Sumner Brackett , was an American physicist and spectroscopist. Born in Claremont, California, to Frank and Lucretia Brackett, he graduated from Pomona College and worked as an observer at Mount Wilson Observatory until 1920. He observed the infra-red radiation of the Sun. Brackett received a doctorate in physics from the Johns Hopkins University in 1922. Applying a hydrogen filled discharge tube, he discovered the hydrogen Brackett series, where an electron jumps up from or drops down to the fourth fundamental level, in 1922.
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James Edward Keeler
1857 - 1900 (43 years)
James Edward Keeler was an American astronomer. He was an early observer of galaxies using photography, as well as the first to show observationally that the rings of Saturn do not rotate as a solid body.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes
1777 - 1834 (57 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes was a German physicist, meteorologist, and astronomer. Brandes was born in 1777 in Groden near Ritzebüttel , the third son of Albert Georg Brandes, a preacher. He studied at the University of Göttingen from 1796 to 1798 under Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Carl Friedrich Gauss was a fellow student. He attained his doctorate in 1800, and spent a short time teaching privately. As an astronomer, he was noted for demonstrating that meteors occur in the upper atmosphere and thus not really a meteorological phenomenon.
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Thomas Andrew Broadbent
#9990
Giovanni Caselli
1815 - 1891 (76 years)
Giovanni Caselli was an Italian priest, inventor, and physicist. He studied electricity and magnetism as a child which led to his invention of the pantelegraph , the forerunner of the fax machine. The world's first practical operating facsimile machine system put into use was by Caselli. He had worldwide patents on his system. His technology idea was further developed into today's analog television.
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André-Louis Danjon
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
André-Louis Danjon was a French astronomer born in Caen to Louis Dominique Danjon and Marie Justine Binet. Danjon devised a method to measure "earthshine" on the Moon using a telescope in which a prism split the Moon's image into two identical side-by-side images. By adjusting a diaphragm to dim one of the images until the sunlit portion had the same apparent brightness as the earthlit portion on the unadjusted image, he could quantify the diaphragm adjustment, and thus had a real measurement for the brightness of earthshine. He recorded the measurements using his method from 1925 until the ...
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Johann Daniel Titius
1729 - 1796 (67 years)
Johann Daniel Titius was a German astronomer and a professor at Wittenberg. Titius was born in Konitz , Royal Prussia to Jakob Tietz, a merchant and council member from Konitz, and Maria Dorothea, née Hanow. His original name was Johann Tietz, but as was customary in the 18th century, when he became a university professor, he Latinized his surname to Titius. Tietz attended school in Danzig and studied at the University of Leipzig . He died in Wittenberg, Electorate of Saxony.
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Cornelis Bakker
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Cornelis Jan Bakker was a Dutch physicist and second Director General of CERN. He was also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Biography Bakker studied physics at the University of Amsterdam under Pieter Zeeman.
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Carl Barus
1856 - 1935 (79 years)
Carl Barus was an American physicist and the maternal great-uncle of the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Barus was born in Cincinnati, United States. The son of German immigrants , Barus graduated from Woodward High School, together with William Howard Taft, in 1874.
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John Gamble Kirkwood
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Early life and background Kirkwood was born in Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an attorney and was a distributor for the Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline and Margaret .
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Maurice de Broglie
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
#9997
William Cranch Bond
1789 - 1859 (70 years)
William Cranch Bond was an American astronomer, and the first director of Harvard College Observatory. Upbringing William Cranch Bond was born in Falmouth, Maine on September 9, 1789. When he was young, his father, William Bond, established himself as a clockmaker after a failed business venture; trained by his father and aided by his penchant for engineering, W. C. Bond built his first clock when he was fifteen years old. He eventually took over his father’s business, becoming an expert clockmaker himself. The William Bond clock shop remained in existence at 9 Park Street in Boston until t...
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Otto Wilhelm von Struve
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Otto Wilhelm von Struve was a Russian astronomer of Baltic German origins. In Russian, his name is normally given as Otto Vasil'evich Struve . Together with his father, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, Otto Wilhelm von Struve is considered a prominent 19th century astronomer who headed the Pulkovo Observatory between 1862 and 1889 and was a leading member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Zygmunt Florenty Wróblewski
1845 - 1888 (43 years)
Zygmunt Florenty Wróblewski was a Polish physicist and chemist. Together with Karol Olszewski, he was the first scientist in the world to liquify oxygen and nitrogen in 1883. Biography Wróblewski was born in Grodno . He studied at Kiev University. After a six-year exile for participating in the January 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, he studied in Berlin and Heidelberg. He defended his doctoral dissertation at Munich University in 1876 and became an assistant professor at Strasburg University. In 1880 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.
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Barnaba Oriani
1752 - 1832 (80 years)
Barnaba Oriani was an Italian priest, geodesist, astronomer and scientist. Life Oriani was born in Garegnano , the son of a mason, and died in Milan. After getting his elementary education in Garegnano, he went on to study at the College of San Alessandro in Milan, under the tutelage and with the support of the Order of Barnabites, which he later joined. After completing his studies in the humanities, physical and mathematical sciences, philosophy, and theology, he was ordained a priest in 1775.
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