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,
#10001
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
#10017
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)
#10024
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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Robert Watson-Watt
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt was a Scottish pioneer of radio direction finding and radar technology. Watt began his career in radio physics with a job at the Met Office, where he began looking for accurate ways to track thunderstorms using the radio waves given off by lightning. This led to the 1920s development of a system later known as high-frequency direction finding . Although well publicized at the time, the system's enormous military potential was not developed until the late 1930s. Huff-duff allowed operators to determine the location of an enemy radio transmitter in seconds and ...
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Iris Runge
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Iris Anna Runge was a German applied mathematician and physicist. Life and work Iris Runge was the eldest of six children of mathematician Carl Runge. She started studying physics, mathematics, and geography at the University of Göttingen in 1907, with the aim of becoming a teacher. At that time, she only attended the lectures, since women were not allowed to formally study at Prussian universities until 1908–1909. She attended lectures given by her father and spent a semester at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich working with Arnold Sommerfeld, which led to her first publication, Anwendungen der Vektorrechnung auf die Grundlagen der Geometrischen Optik in Annalen der Physik .
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Adelaide Ames
1900 - 1932 (32 years)
Adelaide Ames was an American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard University. She contributed to the study of galaxies with her co-authorship of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude, which was later known as the Shapley-Ames catalog. Ames was a member of the American Astronomical Society. She was a contemporary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and her closest friend at the observatory.
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Vsevolod Frederiks
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Vsevolod Konstantinovich Frederiks was a Russian/Soviet physicist. His primary contribution was in the field of liquid crystals. The Frederiks transition is named after him. After high school, Frederiks attended Geneva University and attended the lectures of Paul Langevin in Paris for one semester. After defending his thesis and obtaining his PhD, Frederiks decided to continue his studies at Göttingen University. He was there for more than eight years, and with the outbreak of World War I he became a civil prisoner. During that period, he became personal assistant to David Hilbert.
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Ludwig August Seeber
1793 - 1855 (62 years)
Ludwig August Seeber was a German physicist. From 1819 to 1822 he was teacher at the cadet school at Karlsruhe. Subsequently, he was professor ordinarius for physics at the University of Freiburg until 1834. From 1834 to 1840, he was professor of physics at the Lyceum and Polytechnicum in Karlsruhe.
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Christian August Friedrich Peters
1806 - 1880 (74 years)
Christian August Friedrich Peters was a German astronomer. He was the father of astronomer Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Peters. He was born in Hamburg and died in Kiel. Peters was the son of a merchant and, although he did not attend secondary school regularly, he obtained a good knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. In 1826 he became assistant to Heinrich Christian Schumacher at Altona Observatory. Schumacher encouraged him to study astronomy and Peters did a PhD under Friedrich Bessel at the University of Königsberg. In 1834 he became an assistant at Hamburg Observatory and in 1839 joined the staff of Pulkovo Observatory.
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Guillaume Bigourdan
1851 - 1932 (81 years)
Camille Guillaume Bigourdan was a French astronomer. Personal life Bigourdan was born at Sistels, Tarn-et-Garonne to Pierre Bigourdan and Jeanne Carrière. When his teachers and local curate recognised his intelligence, he was transferred to a local boarding school in Valence d’Agen, where he excelled. In 1870, he received his Baccalauréat with mention of "Assez Bien".
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Maurice Couette
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Maurice Marie Alfred Couette was a French physicist known for his studies of fluidity. Couette is best known for his contributions to rheology and the theory of fluid flow. He designed a concentric cylinder viscometer that he used to accurately measure the viscosity of fluids. The laminar flow observed in the gap between the two cylinders is known as Couette flow. He studied the boundary conditions of a fluid and showed that the "no slip" condition was satisfied for the fluids and wall materials tested.
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Nathaniel Bliss
1700 - 1764 (64 years)
Nathaniel Bliss was an English astronomer of the 18th century, serving as Britain's fourth Astronomer Royal between 1762 and 1764. Bliss studied at Oxford University and later became the Savilian Professor of Geometry. He made important meridian observations of a comet and a solar eclipse visible from Greenwich, and many of his observations proved useful in solving the longitude problem, and were bought by the Board of Longitude after his death.
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Heinz London
1907 - 1970 (63 years)
Heinz London was a German-British physicist. Together with his brother Fritz London he was a pioneer in the field of superconductivity. Biography London was born in Bonn in a liberal Jewish-German family. His father, Franz London, was professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn and his mother, Luise Burger, was the daughter of a prosperous textile manufacturer. His father died of heart failure when Heinz was nine years old. The greatest influence on Heinz's childhood was his older brother Fritz. Throughout their lives the two brothers maintained a close relationship.
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Amos Dolbear
1837 - 1910 (73 years)
Amos Emerson Dolbear was an American physicist and inventor. Dolbear researched electrical spark conversion into sound waves and electrical impulses. He was a professor at University of Kentucky in Lexington from 1868 until 1874. In 1874 he became the chair of the physics department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is known for his 1882 invention of a system for transmitting telegraph signals without wires. In 1899 his patent for it was purchased in an unsuccessful attempt to interfere with Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraphy patents in the United States.
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Fritz Reiche
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Fritz Reiche was a German physicist, a student of Max Planck and a colleague of Albert Einstein, who was active in, and made important contributions to the early development of quantum mechanics including co-authoring the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule.
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Arthur Korn
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Arthur Korn was a German physicist, mathematician and inventor. He was involved in the development of the fax machine, specifically the transmission of photographs or telephotography, known as the Bildtelegraph, related to early attempts at developing a practical mechanical television system.
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Boris Hessen
1893 - 1936 (43 years)
Boris Mikhailovich Hessen , also Gessen , was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He is most famous for his paper on Newton's Principia which became foundational in historiography of science.
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Maurice Loewy
1833 - 1907 (74 years)
Maurice Loewy was a French astronomer. Loewy was born in Vienna. Loewy's Jewish parents moved to Vienna in 1841 to escape the antisemitism of their home town. Loewy became an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, working on celestial mechanics. However, the institutions of Austria-Hungary did not permit a Jew to advance to a senior position without renouncing his faith and embracing Catholicism. The director of the observatory Karl L. Littrow was a correspondent of Urbain Le Verrier, director of the Paris Observatory and he secured a position there for Loewy in 1860. After going to France, Lo...
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Eva von Bahr
1874 - 1962 (88 years)
Eva Wilhelmina Julia von Bahr-Bergius, was a Swedish physicist and teacher at a folk high school. She was the first woman in Sweden to become a docent in physics. She is known for her contact with and support of the poet Dan Andersson, for her friendship and support of the physicist Lise Meitner, and as a Catholic writer.
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Al-Zarqali
1027 - 1087 (60 years)
Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh al-Zarqālī al-Tujibi ; also known as Al-Zarkali or Ibn Zarqala , was an Arab maker of astronomical instruments and an astrologer from the western part of the Islamic world.
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Robert Stawell Ball
1840 - 1913 (73 years)
Sir Robert Stawell Ball was an Irish astronomer who founded the screw theory. He was Royal Astronomer of Ireland at Dunsink Observatory. Life He was the son of naturalist Robert Ball and Amelia Gresley Hellicar. He was born in Dublin. and was educated at Trinity College Dublin where he won a scholarship in 1859 and was a senior moderator in both mathematics and experimental and natural science in 1861.
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Éleuthère Mascart
1837 - 1908 (71 years)
Éleuthère Élie Nicolas Mascart was a noted French physicist, a researcher in optics, electricity, magnetism, and meteorology. Life Mascart was born in Quarouble, Nord. Starting in 1858, he attended the École normale supérieure , earning his agrégé-préparateur three years later. He acquired his doctoral degree in science in 1864. After serving at various posts in secondary education, in 1868 he moved to the Collège de France to become Henri Victor Regnault's assistant. Mascart was appointed to succeed Régnault as the tenured Régnault chair in 1872, which he held until his death. In 1878 he ...
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Julius Plücker
1801 - 1868 (67 years)
Julius Plücker was a German mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions to the field of analytical geometry and was a pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that led eventually to the discovery of the electron. He also vastly extended the study of Lamé curves.
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Giovanni Battista Beccaria
1716 - 1781 (65 years)
Giovanni Battista Beccaria was an Italian physicist. A fellow of the Royal Society, he published several papers on electrical subjects in the Phil. Trans. Beccaria was one of Benjamin Franklin's more conspicuous correspondents. His students included Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Giovanni Francesco Cigna, Giuseppe Angelo Saluzzo, and the successor to the Chair of physics, Antonio Vassalli Eandi; moreover, his researches inspired the physicists of Pavia, Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani.
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Richard Mollier
1863 - 1935 (72 years)
Richard Mollier was a German professor of Applied Physics and Mechanics in Göttingen and Dresden, a pioneer of experimental research in thermodynamics, particularly for water, steam, and moist air.
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Wolfgang Finkelnburg
1905 - 1967 (62 years)
Wolfgang Karl Ernst Finkelnburg was a German physicist who made contributions to spectroscopy, atomic physics, the structure of matter, and high-temperature arc discharges. His vice-presidency of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft 1941-1945, was influential in that organization’s ability to assert its independence from National Socialist policies.
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