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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#1001
Alexei Abrikosov
#17593
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov was a Soviet, Russian and American theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony James Leggett, for theories about how matter can behave at extremely low temperatures.
Go to Profile#1002
Robin Marshall
#26790
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robin Marshall is an Emeritus professor of Physics & Biology in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. He currently lives in the village of Castillon-du-Gard in the region of Occitanie, where he writes and paints.
Go to Profile#1003
Milton S. Plesset
#11331
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Milton Spinoza Plesset was an American applied physicist who worked in the field of fluid mechanics and nuclear energy. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1979 for his fundamental contributions to multiphase flows, bubble dynamics, and safety of nuclear reactors. Plesset served as professor of engineering science at California Institute of Technology during 1951 to 1978. Notable scientists Andrea Prosperetti, Norman Zabusky, and Chris Whipple finished their doctoral work under Plesset's guidance. Milton Plesset, Andrea Prosperetti, and Chris Whipple were elected to the N...
Go to Profile#1004
H. Jeff Kimble
#20708
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Harry Jeffrey Kimble , was the William L. Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech. His research is in quantum optics and is noted for groundbreaking experiments in physics including one of the first demonstrations of teleportation of a quantum state , quantum logic gate, and the development of the first single atom laser. According to Elizabeth Rogan, OSA CEO, "Jeff has led a revolution in modern physics through his pioneering research in the coherent control of the interactions of light and matter." Kimble's main research focus is in quantum information science and the qua...
Go to Profile#1005
Eugene D. Commins
#28331
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Eugene David Commins was a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987. He was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#1006
Massimo Porrati
#35680
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Massimo Porrati is a professor of physics and a member of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University. He graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy with a "Diploma di Scienze" degree in 1985. Later he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and UC Berkeley in the USA. He was a research scientist at the INFN section in Pisa, Italy, in collaboration with CERN, where he over the years has spent several periods, before joining NYU in 1992. His major research interests are string theory, supersymmetry and supergravity, nonperturbative aspects of strings an...
Go to Profile#1007
Robert Griffiths
#22044
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert B. Griffiths is an American physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the originator of the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics, which has since been developed by himself, Roland Omnès, Murray Gell-Mann, and James Hartle.
Go to Profile#1008
Brian Swimme
#7495
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Brian Thomas Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program. He received his Ph.D. from the department of mathematics at the University of Oregon for work with Richard Barrar on singularity theory, with a dissertation titled Singularities in the N-Body Problem.
Go to Profile#1009
Nikolay Dikansky
#26295
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Nikolay Sergeevich Dikansky — is a Russian/Soviet physicist, a scientist in the fields of accelerator physics and particle accelerators, the head of the laboratory in Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, since 2011 academician of Russian Academy of Sciences, the chancellor of Novosibirsk State University .
Go to Profile#1010
John Nye
#31175
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
John Frederick Nye was a British physicist and glaciologist. He was the first to apply plasticity to understand glacier flow. Career His early work was on the physics of plasticity, spanning ice rheology, ice flow mechanics, laboratory ice flow measurements, glacier surges, meltwater penetration in ice, and response of glaciers and ice sheets to seasonal and climatic changes. Later in his long career, he worked extensively in optics, publishing his last paper on electromagnetic wave polarization only a few days before his death.
Go to Profile#1011
Giovanni Jona-Lasinio
#14540
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Giovanni Jona-Lasinio , sometimes called Gianni Jona, is an Italian theoretical physicist, best known for his works on quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He pioneered research concerning spontaneous symmetry breaking, and the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model is named after him. When Yoichiro Nambu received the Nobel Prize, Jona-Lasinio gave the Nobel Lecture in his place, as a recognition from Nambu for their joint work. At present, he holds a faculty position in the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome, and is a full member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
Go to Profile#1012
Françoise Combes
#24290
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Françoise Combes is a French astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a professor at the Collège de France where she has been the chair of Galaxies and cosmology since 2014. On 15 September 2017 the 'City of Success' school at Montpellier was renamed as 'High school Françoise Combes'.
Go to Profile#1013
Clifford Martin Will
#23747
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Clifford Martin Will is a Canadian-born theoretical physicist noted for his contributions to general relativity. Life and work Will was born in Hamilton, Ontario. In 1968, he earned a B.Sc. from McMaster University. At Caltech, he studied under Kip Thorne, earning his Ph.D. in 1971. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, and in 1981 joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012, he moved to a faculty position at the University of Florida.
Go to Profile#1014
Gian Carlo Wick
#14459
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Gian Carlo Wick was an Italian theoretical physicist who made important contributions to quantum field theory. The Wick rotation, Wick contraction, Wick's theorem, and the Wick product are named after him.
Go to Profile#1015
Robert G. Sachs
#20964
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Robert G. Sachs was an American theoretical physicist, a founder and a director of the Argonne National Laboratory. Sachs was also notable for his work in theoretical nuclear physics, terminal ballistics, and nuclear power reactors. Sachs was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, chairman of the Academy's Physics Section, chairman of the Academy's Class I , and director of the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago. Sachs was the author of the standard textbook Nuclear Theory .
Go to Profile#1016
Gerhart Lüders
#21910
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Gerhart Lüders was a German theoretical physicist who worked mainly in quantum field theory and was well known for the discovery and a general proof of the CPT theorem. This theorem is also called the Pauli-Lüders theorem and is one of the most fundamental rules of particle physics.
Go to Profile#1017
Martin Beneke
#16155
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Martin Beneke is a German physicist. Biography Beneke studied Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz, University of Cambridge and University of Heidelberg. In 1993 he received his doctorate at the Technical University of Munich on the structure of perturbative series in higher order and habilitated in Heidelberg in 1998.
Go to Profile#1018
Vladimir Kadyshevsky
#26193
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Vladimir Kadyshevsky was a Russian theoretical physicist. Biography Kadyshevsky was born on 5 May 1937 in Moscow. He studied at the Suvorov Military School in Sverdlovsk from 1946 to 1954, before entering the physics department of the Lomonosov Moscow State University .
Go to Profile#1019
William Happer
#16474
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
William Happer is an American physicist who has specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy. He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Princeton University, and a long-term member of the JASON advisory group, where he pioneered the development of adaptive optics. From 1991 to 1993, Happer served as director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science as part of the George H.W. Bush administration. He was dismissed from the Department of Energy in 1993 by the Clinton Administration after disagreements on the ozone hole.
Go to Profile#1020
Glen Rebka
#26275
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Glen Anderson Rebka Jr. was an American physicist. Biography Rebka attained a doctorate 1961 at Harvard, where he began study in 1953. Starting from 1961 he was at Yale University and starting from 1970 at the University of Wyoming, where he was from 1983 to 1991 department head of the physics faculty and became in 1997 professor emeritus. In addition to his academic career he did much work as an experimental elementary-particle physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At the University of Wyoming he built up the astrophysics faculty.
Go to Profile#1021
Essam Heggy
#22870
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Essam Heggy is an Egyptian space scientist. Heggy obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy and planetary science in 2002 with distinguished honors from the Paris-Sorbonne University in Paris. His main science interests in space and planetary geophysics covers Mars, the Moon, icy satellites and near-Earth objects. His research involves probing structural, hydrological and volcanic elements in terrestrial and planetary environments using different types of radar imaging and sounding techniques as well as measuring the electromagnetic properties of rocks in the radar frequency range. His research experti...
Go to Profile#1022
Francesco Calogero
#19581
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Francesco Calogero is an Italian physicist, active in the community of scientists concerned with nuclear disarmament. Biography Born on 6 February 1935, he is the son of the philosopher Guido Calogero. After his father was sentenced to national exile by fascist police, Francesco Calogero spent more than one year in Scanno, a small Italian village. After World War II, Calogero graduated "laurea in fisica" cum laude at University of Rome La Sapienza, in February 1958. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics, in the same university in 1976.
Go to Profile#1023
Toichiro Kinoshita
#29348
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Tōichirō Kinoshita was a Japanese-born American theoretical physicist. Kinoshita was born in Tokyo on January 23, 1925. He studied physics at the University of Tokyo, earning his bachelor's degree in 1947 and then his PhD in 1952. Afterwards he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and then one year at Columbia University. His research interests included quantum field theory, and the Standard Model.
Go to Profile#1024
Seiji Ogawa
#8559
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Seiji Ogawa is a Japanese biophysicist and neuroscientist known for discovering the technique that underlies Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging . He is regarded as the father of modern functional brain imaging. He determined that the changes in blood oxygen levels cause its magnetic resonance imaging properties to change, allowing a map of blood, and hence, functional, activity in the brain to be created. This map reflected which neurons of the brain responded with electrochemical signals to mental processes. He was the first scientist who demonstrated that the functional brain imaging is dependent on the oxygenation status of the blood, the BOLD effect.
Go to Profile#1025
Lewis Ryder
#24549
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Lewis Howarth Ryder was a British theoretical physicist. Biography Ryder earned a master's degree in physics from Oxford University, a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Edinburgh University under supervision of Peter Higgs, and later an SERC fellowship.
Go to Profile#1026
Ernest M. Henley
#29978
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Ernest Mark Henley was an American atomic and nuclear physicist. In 1944 Henley received a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from the City College of New York. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the U.S. Navy, decommissioning and repairing electrical equipment on ships and submarines. He worked at the Airborne Instruments Laboratory as an electrical engineer from 1946 to 1948. Between 1950 and 1951 he worked at Stanford University, and received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1952. From 1952 to 1954, he was a Jewett Fellow and lecturer at Columbia University. In 1954, Henley accepted a faculty posit...
Go to Profile#1027
Chen Jia'er
#21450
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Chen Jia'er is a Chinese nuclear physicist, an accelerator physicist and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . Chen was born in Shanghai, and graduated from the department of physics of Northeast China People's University in Changchun in 1954. From 1955, he was a teacher in the department of technology physics at Peking University, and was elevated to vice department chair. From 1963 to 1965, Chen was invited by British Royal Society and became a visiting scholar in department of nuclear physics at Oxford University and Rutherfold High Energy Institute, studying serial electro-static accelerator and synchrotron.
Go to Profile#1028
Harold E. Puthoff
#3782
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Harold E. Puthoff is an American parapsychologist and electrical engineer. In the 2010s, he co-founded the company To the Stars with Tom DeLonge. Biography Puthoff was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BA and MSc in electrical engineering from the University of Florida. In 1967, Puthoff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University with a thesis on the topic of the stimulated Raman effect in lasers. He then worked on tunable lasers and electron beam devices, and co-authored Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics , published in English, French, Russian and Chinese. P...
Go to Profile#1029
Kenneth W. Ford
#24173
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Kenneth William Ford is an American theoretical physicist, teacher, and writer, currently residing near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the first chair of the physics department at the University of California, Irvine, and later served as president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and as Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics.
Go to Profile#1030
William Wootters
#12190
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
William "Bill" Kent Wootters is an American theoretical physicist, and one of the founders of the field of quantum information theory. In a 1982 joint paper with Wojciech H. Zurek, Wootters proved the no cloning theorem, at the same time as Dennis Dieks, and independently of James L. Park who had formulated the no-cloning theorem in 1970. He is known for his contributions to the theory of quantum entanglement including quantitative measures of it, entanglement-assisted communication and entanglement distillation. The term qubit, denoting the basic unit of quantum information, originated in...
Go to Profile#1031
K. H. Jürgen Buschow
#42894
Overall Influence
#1032
Dilhan Eryurt
#18936
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Dilhan Eryurt was a Turkish astrophysicist who made major contributions to scientific research on the formation and evolution of the Sun and other main sequence stars. From 1961 to 1973, Eryurt worked for NASA, performing research for the Apollo program. She then established the astrophysics department at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She was the Dean of METU's science and arts faculty from 1988 to 1993.
Go to Profile#1033
Joseph Klafter
#4103
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joseph Klafter is an Israeli chemical physics professor who is the Heineman Chair of Physical Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, and was the eighth President of Tel Aviv University from 2009 to 2019. He won the 2020 Israel Prize in the fields of Chemistry and Physics.
Go to Profile#1034
Michael Nielsen
#5021
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Michael Aaron Nielsen is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco. Work In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia's "youngest academic" and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#1035
Klaus Hentschel
#11200
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Klaus Hentschel is a German physicist, historian of science and professor. He is the head of the University of Stuttgart's History of Science and Technology section of its History department. Life and work Born in Bad Nauheim, Hentschel from 1979 to 1985 studied physics, philosophy, science, history and musicology at the University of Hamburg. He completed his studies in philosophy in 1985 with the master's examination, and a study in physics in 1987. After some studies in the United States, among others in Boston on a DAAD, he in 1989 received his PhD at the University of Hamburg. His thesis...
Go to Profile#1036
Luboš Kohoutek
#14371
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Luboš Kohoutek is a Czech astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets and comets, including Comet Kohoutek which was visible to the naked eye in 1973. He also discovered a large number of planetary nebulae.
Go to Profile#1037
Hiroshi Amano
#6201
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Hiroshi Amano is a Japanese physicist, engineer and inventor specializing in the field of semiconductor technology. For his work he was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura for "the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources".
Go to Profile#1038
Barry M. McCoy
#13571
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Barry Malcolm McCoy is an American physicist, known for his contributions to classical statistical mechanics, integrable models and conformal field theories. He earned a B.Sc. from California Institute of Technology , and a Ph.D. from Harvard University , the thesis entitled Spin Correlations of the Two Dimensional Ising Model advised by Tai Tsun Wu. The two of them also wrote the book The Two Dimensional Ising Model .
Go to Profile#1039
Robert J. Birgeneau
#7998
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Joseph Birgeneau is a Canadian-American physicist and university administrator. He was the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley from 2004-13, and the fourteenth president of the University of Toronto from 2000-04.
Go to Profile#1040
Tsutomu Yanagida
#34730
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Tsutomu Yanagida is a Japanese physicist who first proposed the seesaw mechanism in 1979 and developed the model of leptogenesis. The name of the seesaw mechanism was given by him in a Tokyo conference in 1981. In 1994, he predicted, together with M. Fukugita, the nonzero cosmological constant Λ = 4 four years prior to the observation in order to resolve the age discrepancy between the Universe and some old stars.
Go to Profile#1041
Fumiko Yonezawa
#9577
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Fumiko Yonezawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist. She was the first woman to be appointed as the President of the Physical Society of Japan and the first Japanese to have studied at Keele University, Staffordshire, United Kingdom. She was one of the founding members of the Department of Physics at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Japan. Her research covered semi-conductors and liquid metals. She led a group of scientists and pioneered in visualising computer simulation.
Go to Profile#1042
Eric Chaisson
#10258
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Eric J. Chaisson is an American astrophysicist known for his research, teaching, and writing on the interdisciplinary science of cosmic evolution. He is a member of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian, teaches natural science at Harvard University and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#1043
Ali Chamseddine
#20221
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ali H. Chamseddine is a Lebanese physicist known for his contributions to particle physics, general relativity and mathematical physics. , Chamseddine is a physics Professor at the American University of Beirut and the Institut des hautes études scientifiques.
Go to Profile#1044
Herman Carr
#15833
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Herman Y. Carr , who published as H. Y. Carr, was an American physicist and pioneer of magnetic resonance imaging. Carr was born in Alliance, Ohio, where he was an Alliance High School graduate in January 1943; he later was inducted into their Hall of Fame. He served in the army as a sergeant in the 12th Weather Squadron Air Corps during World War II in Italy.
Go to Profile#1045
Jorge Pullin
#17442
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jorge Pullin is an Argentine-American theoretical physicist known for his work on black hole collisions and quantum gravity. He is the Horace Hearne Chair in theoretical Physics at the Louisiana State University.
Go to Profile#1046
Ronald Rivlin
#11322
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Ronald Samuel Rivlin was a British-American physicist, mathematician, rheologist and a noted expert on rubber. Life Rivlin was born in London in 1915. He studied physics and mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, being awarded a BA in 1937 and a ScD in 1952. He worked for the General Electric Company, then the UK Ministry of Aircraft Production, then the British Rubber Producers Research Association, to which he was recruited to at the suggestion of L. R. G. Treloar by John Wilson, over a “lavish meal” and game of pool. This included one sabbatical year at the National Bureau of Standards, USA.
Go to Profile#1047
Nikita Nekrasov
#11827
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Nikita Alexandrovich Nekrasov is a mathematical and theoretical physicist at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and C.N.Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1048
Cees Dekker
#14763
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Cornelis "Cees" Dekker is a Dutch physicist, and Distinguished University Professor at the Technical University of Delft. He is known for his research on carbon nanotubes, single-molecule biophysics, and nanobiology.
Go to Profile#1049
David Halliday
#27886
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
David Halliday was an American physicist known for his physics textbooks, Physics and Fundamentals of Physics, which he wrote with Robert Resnick. Both textbooks have been in continuous use since 1960 and are available in more than 47 languages.
Go to Profile#1050
Werner Gruber
#12903
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Werner Gruber is an Austrian physicist, author, lecturer, and cabaret artist and is well known from ORF and as a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria . Biography Gruber was born in Ostermiething. Gruber grew up in Ansfelden, Upper Austria and graduated in 1999 with a degree in physics from the University of Vienna. He then worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna. Since February 2013 Gruber manages the astronomical institutions of the Adult Education centers in Vienna – the Planetarium Wien, the Kuffner Observatory and the Urania Observatory.
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