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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#101
Jayant Narlikar
#1821
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jayant Vishnu Narlikar is an Indian astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics . He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesises Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Mach's principle. It proposes that the inertial mass of a particle is a function of the masses of all other particles, multiplied by a coupling constant, which is a function of cosmic epoch.
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Howard Georgi
#3995
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Howard Mason Georgi III is an American theoretical physicist and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. He is also director of undergraduate studies in physics. He was co-master and then faculty dean of Leverett House with his wife, Ann Blake Georgi, from 1998 to 2018. His early work was in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification within SU and SO groups .
Go to Profile#103
Carlo Rovelli
#1135
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Italian Quantum Physicist Carlo Rovelli currently holds the title of Director of the quantum gravity team at the Centre de Physique Théorique at Aix-Marseille University in Provence, France. Previously, Rovelli was a professor at Pittsburgh University, and held fellowships at Syracuse University and Yale University. Rovelli completed his BS and MS in physics at the University of Bologna in 1981, and his PhD at the University of Padova in 1986. Rovelli is a prominent figure in quantum and theoretical physics. In particular, he is recognized as a co-founder of the loop quantum gravity theory, along with Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashtekar.
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John C. Mather
#2599
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Cromwell Mather is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite with George Smoot. This work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science."
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Geoffrey Burbidge
#3752
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was an English astronomy professor and theoretical astrophysicist, most recently at the University of California, San Diego. He was married to astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge and was the second author of the influential B2FH paper which she led.
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Brandon Carter
#1898
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Brandon Carter, is an Australian theoretical physicist who explores the properties of black holes, and was the first to name and employ the anthropic principle in its contemporary form. He is a researcher at the Meudon campus of the Laboratoire Univers et Théories, part of the CNRS.
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Frank Drake
#1211
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Frank Donald Drake was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist. He began his career as a radio astronomer, studying the planets of the Solar System and later pulsars. Drake expanded his interests to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence , beginning with Project Ozma in 1960, an attempt at extraterrestrial communications. He developed the Drake equation, which attempts to quantify the number of intelligent lifeforms that could potentially be discovered. Working with Carl Sagan, Drake helped to design the Pioneer plaque, the first physical message flown beyond the Solar System, and was part of the team that developed the Voyager record.
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Bryce DeWitt
#1444
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Bryce Seligman DeWitt was an American theoretical physicist noted for his work in gravitation and quantum field theory. Personal life He was born Carl Bryce Seligman, but he and his three brothers, including the noted ichthyologist, Hugh Hamilton DeWitt, added "DeWitt" from their mother's side of the family, at the urging of their father, in 1950. In the early-1970s, this change of name so angered Felix Bloch that he blocked DeWitt's appointment to Stanford University and DeWitt and his wife Cecile DeWitt-Morette, a mathematical physicist, accepted faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Arthur B. McDonald
#3096
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Arthur Bruce McDonald, P.Eng is a Canadian astrophysicist. McDonald is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration and held the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 2006 to 2013. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita.
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Riazuddin
#2415
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Riazuddin, also spelled as Riaz-Ud-Din , was a Pakistani theoretical physicist, specialising in high-energy physics and nuclear physics. Starting his scientific research in physics in 1958, Riazuddin was considered one of the early pioneers of Pakistan's nuclear weapons development and atomic deterrence development. He was the director of the Theoretical Physics Group of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission from 1974 until 1984. Riazuddin was a pupil of the winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, Abdus Salam.
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Joseph Rotblat
#692
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
Sir Joseph Rotblat was a Polish and British physicist. During World War II he worked on Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project, but left the Los Alamos Laboratory on grounds of conscience after it became clear to him in 1944 that Germany had ceased development of an atomic bomb.
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Gerhard Herzberg
#1242
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, was a German-Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Herzbe...
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Alain Aspect
#1335
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alain Aspect is a French physicist noted for his experimental work on quantum entanglement. Aspect was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
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Takaaki Kajita
#2189
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamioka Observatory – Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald. On 1 October 2020, he became the president of the Science Council of Japan.
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Riccardo Giacconi
#1619
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Riccardo Giacconi was an Italian-American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid down the foundations of X-ray astronomy. He was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University. Biography Born in Genoa, Italy, Giacconi received his Laurea from the Physics Department of University of Milan before moving to the US to pursue a career in astrophysics research. In 1956, his Fulbright Fellowship led him to go to the United States to collaborate with physics professor R. W. Thompson at Indiana University.
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Brian Schmidt
#2534
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Brian Paul Schmidt is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University . He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter ...
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Leo Esaki
#490
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Reona Esaki , also known as Leo Esaki, is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his work in electron tunneling in semiconductor materials which finally led to his invention of the Esaki diode, which exploited that phenomenon. This research was done when he was with Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo . He has also contributed in being a pioneer of the semiconductor superlattices.
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Chandra Wickramasinghe
#2426
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist of Sinhalese ethnicity. His research interests include the interstellar medium, infrared astronomy, light scattering theory, applications of solid-state physics to astronomy, the early Solar System, comets, astrochemistry, the origin of life and astrobiology. A student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle, the pair worked jointly for over 40 years as influential proponents of panspermia. In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic, later proven t...
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Donald A. Glaser
#1214
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Donald Arthur Glaser was an American physicist, neurobiologist, and the winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics. Education Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Glaser completed his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from Case School of Applied Science in 1946. He completed his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949. Glaser accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949, and was promoted to professor in 1957. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1959, as a professor of physics.
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Samuel C. C. Ting
#1401
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Samuel Chao Chung Ting is an American physicist who, with Burton Richter, received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. More recently he has been the principal investigator in research conducted with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a device installed on the International Space Station in 2011.
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Sidney Coleman
#3174
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Sidney Richard Coleman was an American theoretical physicist noted for his research in high-energy theoretical physics. Life and work Sidney Coleman grew up on the Far North Side of Chicago. In 1957, he received his undergraduate degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology physics department.
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Thomas Gold
#2246
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Thomas Gold was an Austrian-born American astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society . Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in 1948 proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed boundaries of academic and scientific disciplines, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.
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Bruno Rossi
#2667
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Bruno Benedetto Rossi was an Italian experimental physicist. He made major contributions to particle physics and the study of cosmic rays. A 1927 graduate of the University of Bologna, he became interested in cosmic rays. To study them, he invented an improved electronic coincidence circuit, and travelled to Eritrea to conduct experiments that showed that cosmic ray intensity from the West was significantly larger than that from the East.
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Arno Allan Penzias
#3615
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Arno Allan Penzias is an American physicist, radio astronomer and Nobel laureate in physics. Along with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped establish the Big Bang theory of cosmology.
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Leon Cooper
#1571
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Leon N. Cooper is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate who, with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity. His name is also associated with the Cooper pair and the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.
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Jogesh Pati
#3166
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jogesh C. Pati is an Indian-American theoretical physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Biography Jogesh Pati started his schooling at Guru Training School, Baripada and then admitted to M.K.C High School where he passed the Matriculation. He was admitted in MPC College and passed I Sc.
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Alan Sokal
#148
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
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Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
#1202
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991. Education and early life He was born in Paris, France, and was home-schooled to the age of 12. By the age of 13, he had adopted adult reading habits and was visiting museums. Later, de Gennes studied at the École Normale Supérieure. After leaving the École in 1955, he became a research engineer at the Saclay center of the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, working mainly on neutron scattering and magnetism, with advice from Anatole Abragam and Jacques Friedel. He defended his Ph.D. in 1957 at the U...
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Brian Josephson
#1623
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Brian David Josephson is a Welsh theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. Josephson is the first Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.
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Ivar Giaever
#879
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Ivar Giaever is a Norwegian-American engineer and physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors".
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Lyman Spitzer
#3114
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Lyman Spitzer Jr. was an American theoretical physicist, astronomer and mountaineer. As a scientist, he carried out research into star formation, plasma physics, and in 1946, conceived the idea of telescopes operating in outer space. Spitzer invented the stellarator plasma device and is the namesake of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. As a mountaineer, he made the first ascent of Mount Thor, with Donald C. Morton.
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Aaron Klug
#373
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Sir Aaron Klug was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
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John Iliopoulos
#4118
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Iliopoulos is a Greek physicist. He is the first person to present the Standard Model of particle physics in a single report. He is best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Glashow and Luciano Maiani . Iliopoulos is also known for demonstrating the cancellation of anomalies in the Standard model. He is further known for the Fayet-Iliopoulos D-term formula, which was introduced in 1974. He is currently an honorary member of Laboratory of theoretical physics of École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
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Maarten Schmidt
#3925
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Maarten Schmidt was a Dutch-born American astronomer who first measured the distances of quasars. He was the first astronomer to identify a quasar, and so was pictured on the March cover of Time magazine in 1966.
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Dennis W. Sciama
#5193
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Dennis William Siahou Sciama, was an English physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD supervisor to many famous physicists and astrophysicists, including John D. Barrow, David Deutsch, George F. R. Ellis, Stephen Hawking, Adrian Melott and Martin Rees, among others; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.
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Robert Serber
#1680
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Robert Serber was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer. The New York Times called him “the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb.”
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Robert Marshak
#3195
Overall Influence
1916 - 1992 (76 years)
Robert Eugene Marshak was an American physicist, educator, and eighth president of the City College of New York. Biography Marshak was born in the Bronx, New York City. His parents, Harry and Rose Marshak, were immigrants from Minsk. He went to the City College of New York for one semester and then "received a Pulitzer Scholarship which provided full tuition and a stipend which allowed him to continue his education at Columbia University." In 1939, Marshak received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Along with his thesis advisor, Hans Bethe, he discovered many of the fusion aspects involved in star formation.
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Konstantin Novoselov
#1412
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov is a Russian–British physicist, and a professor at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials, National University of Singapore. He is also the Langworthy Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. His work on graphene with Andre Geim earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.
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Michael E. Brown
#2634
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Michael E. Brown is an American astronomer, who has been professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology since 2003. His team has discovered many trans-Neptunian objects , including the dwarf planet Eris, which was originally thought to be bigger than Pluto, triggering a debate on the definition of a planet.
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Frederick Reines
#1695
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Frederick Reines was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties."
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Philip Morrison
#2890
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Philip Morrison was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics high energy astrophysics, and SETI.
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Abraham Pais
#2405
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Abraham Pais was a Dutch-American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war. He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics.
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Stanley Mandelstam
#2305
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Stanley Mandelstam was a South African theoretical physicist. He introduced the relativistically invariant Mandelstam variables into particle physics in 1958 as a convenient coordinate system for formulating his double dispersion relations. The double dispersion relations were a central tool in the bootstrap program which sought to formulate a consistent theory of infinitely many particle types of increasing spin.
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Nicola Cabibbo
#6068
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Nicola Cabibbo was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction. Life Cabibbo, son of a Sicilian lawyer, was born in Rome. He graduated in theoretical physics at the Università di Roma "Sapienza University of Rome" in 1958 under the supervision of Bruno Touschek. In 1963, while working at CERN, Cabibbo found the solution to the puzzle of the weak decays of strange particles, formulating what came to be known as Cabibbo universality. In 1967 Nicola settled back in Rome where he taught theoretical physics and created a large school. He was president of the INFN from 1983 to 1992, during which time the Gran Sasso Laboratory was inaugurated.
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Charles H. Townes
#2086
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton .
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Raymond Gosling
#533
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Raymond George Gosling was a British scientist. While a PhD student at King's College, London he worked under the supervision of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. The crystallographic experiments of Franklin and Gosling, together with others by Wilkins, produced data that helped James Watson and Francis Crick to infer the structure of DNA.
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E. C. George Sudarshan
#2933
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan was an Indian American theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Texas. Prof.Sudarshan has been credited with numerous contributions to the field of theoretical physics, including Glauber–Sudarshan P representation, V-A theory, tachyons, quantum Zeno effect, open quantum system and quantum master equations, spin–statistics theorem, non-invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices, and quantum computation.
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Stephen Shenker
#2896
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stephen Hart Shenker is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory. He is a professor at Stanford University and former director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His brother Scott Shenker is a computer scientist.
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Matthew Sands
#2464
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Matthew Linzee Sands was an American physicist and educator best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. A graduate of Rice University, Sands served with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
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John Gribbin
#2660
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.
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