The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#10001
David van Goorle
1591 - 1612 (21 years)
David van Goorle was a Dutch philosopher and theologian, and one of the first modern atomists. Biography Van Goorle was the son of David van Goorle Sr., a Protestant refugee from Antwerp, who at the time of his birth was treasurer for stadtholder Adolf van Nieuwenaar. His uncle was Abraham Gorlaeus. His mother was a Frisian noblewoman, the daughter of admiral Doecke van Martena, known for his role in the Dutch and Frisian wars of independence. Although he called himself Ultrajectinus , he grew up with his maternal grandparents in their stins in the Frisian village of Cornjum.
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Selim Lemström
1838 - 1904 (66 years)
Karl Selim Lemström , was a Finnish geophysicist. Lemström is best known on his research of aurora borealis. He had several expeditions in Finnish Lapland and even tried to create an artificial northern lights in the laboratory. In 1870 Lemström studied the metric system in Paris and introduced the system to Finland. Since 1872 he was a professor in the University of Helsinki. Lemström has been described as the "forgotten pioneer of northern light studies," and some of his experiments have been compared with the ones made by Nikola Tesla.
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Richard Heinzel
1838 - 1905 (67 years)
Richard Heinzel was an Austrian philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Richard Heinzel studied classical and German philology at the University of Vienna, where his instructors were Franz Pfeiffer and Johannes Vahlen. From 1860 to 1864 he worked as a school teacher at gymnasiums in Trieste, Linz and Vienna, and in 1868 became a professor at the University of Graz. In 1873 he succeeded Wilhelm Scherer as professor of German language and literature at the University of Vienna. In 1874 he became a member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.
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Hermann Ambronn
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Ernst Ludwig Victor Hermann Ambronn was a German botanist and microscopist. Ambronn studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin, where his instructors were Leopold Kny and Simon Schwendener. Following graduation , he worked as an assistant to August Schenk in the botanical institute at Leipzig, where from 1882 to 1887, he was curator of the university herbarium. In 1889 he received the title of associate professor. During the 1880s, he also spent time conducting research in Trieste and at the zoological station in Naples.
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Carl Gustav Witt
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Carl Gustav Witt was a German astronomer and discoverer of two asteroids who worked at the Berlin Urania Observatory, a popular observatory of the Urania astronomical association of Berlin. He wrote a doctoral thesis under the direction of Julius Bauschinger.
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Ruth Wheeler
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Ruth Wheeler was an American chemist specialising in the field of nutrition and public education. Early life and education Ruth Wheeler was born on 5 August 1877 in Plains, Pennsylvania, to Jared Ward Wheeler and Martha Jane Wheeler . She was taught to read by her mother, and graduated from West Pittston High School in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Her thinking was influenced by her Welsh grandfather, Rev. Dr. Evan Benjamin Evans, a minister concerned with feeding the poor.
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Ibn al-Raqqam
1250 - 1315 (65 years)
Ibn Al‐Raqqam Muḥammad Ibn Ibrahim Al‐Mursi Al‐Andalusi Al‐Tunisi Al‐Awsi also known as Ibn Al‐Raqqam was a 13th century Andalusian-Arab astronomer, mathematician and physician; but also a Sunni Muslim theologian and jurist.
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Federico Delpino
1833 - 1905 (72 years)
Giacomo Giuseppe Federico Delpino was an Italian botanist who made early observations on floral biology, particularly the pollination of flowers by insects. Delpino introduced a very broad view of plant ecology and was the first to suggest pollination syndromes, sets of traits associated with specific kinds of pollinators. He wrote Pensieri sulla Biologia Vegetale in 1867 and this failed to gather sufficient notice due to it being written in Italian. He corresponded with Charles Darwin and was one of the first to speculate on the idea of "plant intelligence".
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Johann Holetschek
1846 - 1923 (77 years)
Johann Holetschek was an Austrian astronomer, known for his research on comets. Born in Thuma, in Lower Austria, he worked at the observatory of the University of Vienna. He died at Vienna. The crater Holetschek on the Moon is named after him.
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Christoph Gottfried Andreas Giebel
1820 - 1881 (61 years)
Christoph Gottfried Andreas Giebel was a German zoologist and palaeontologist. He was a professor of zoology at the University of Halle where he managed the zoology collections at the museum. His interests were in systematics and paleontology and he opposed Darwinian evolution. He published several works including Palaozoologie ; Fauna der Vorwelt ; Deutschlands Petrefacten ; Odontographie ; Lehrbuch der Zoologie ; and Thesaurus ornithologiae .
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Ladislaus Weinek
1848 - 1913 (65 years)
Ladislaus Weinek was an Austro-Hungarian astronomer. He was educated in Vienna, and worked for a period at the photography laboratories in Schwerin. In 1874 he joined a German expedition to the Kerguelen Islands to observe a transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. His results from the expedition were published in Nova Acta Leopoldina.
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Samuel Christian Hollmann
1696 - 1787 (91 years)
Samuel Christian Hollmann was a German philosopher. Between 1750 and 1776, Hollmann published numerous volumes in the fields of logic and medicine. Background Samuel Christian Hollmann was born in 1696 in Szczecin, Poland. In 1730, Hollmann worked as a supervisor to Anton Wilhelm Amo both during his work at the University of Wittenberg, and a few months later when Hollman was appointed to the newly opened University of Göttingen. Samuel Christian Hollmann was also a professor of logic to Henry Muhlenberg.
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Leopold Heinrich Fischer
1817 - 1886 (69 years)
Leopold Heinrich Fischer was a German zoologist and mineralogist. Biography He was the son of Aloys Fischer. He studied medicine at Freiburg and Vienna, and afterwards, worked as a general practitioner in Freiburg-in-Brisgau. From 1845 he taught classes in zoology and mineralogy, and in 1854 was named an associate professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of Freiburg, where in 1859 he attained a full professorship. From 1855 he served as director of the mineralogical-geognostic collection.
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William Gunion Rutherford
1853 - 1907 (54 years)
William Gunion Rutherford was a Scottish scholar. Life He was born in Peeblesshire on 17 July 1853 and educated at St Andrews and Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in natural science. His intention to enter medical profession was abandoned in favour of a scholastic career. From 1883 to 1901 he was Head Master of Westminster School; and his death deprived classical scholarship in the UK of one of its most brilliant modern representatives. He was also a Fellow of University College, Oxford for a time.
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Holger Thiele
1878 - 1946 (68 years)
Holger Thiele was a Danish American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets and comets. He was the son of Thorvald Nicolai Thiele , the noted Danish astronomer, actuary and mathematician, after whom the main-belt asteroid 1586 Thiele is named.
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Charles-Eusèbe Dionne
1846 - 1925 (79 years)
Charles-Eusèbe Dionne , also known as Charles Eusebe or C. E. Dionne, was a French Canadian naturalist and taxidermist. He is considered the first professional French Canadian ornithologist. Dionne was a self-taught scientist and wrote several books on the natural history of Quebec, including the first field guide to the province's mammal fauna; he was a well-respected scholar and became a fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union.
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Francesco Serao
1702 - 1783 (81 years)
Francesco Serao was an Italian physician, physicist, geologist, philosopher and scholar. He was born in San Cipriano d'Aversa and died in Naples, Italy. Biography Serao was taught by the Jesuits in Naples. He followed the thinking of Descartes. At eighteen, he graduated in medicine and in 1727 he was awarded the chair of theoretical medicine. In 1732 he was professor of anatomy, then of medicine.
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F. Franklin Moon
1880 - 1929 (49 years)
Frederick Franklin Moon was a forester, and head of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University from 1920-27. Early life and education Moon born in Easton, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1880, to William White and Ophelia Frances Nightingale Moon. He attended Amherst College , spent two years conducting postgraduate work at Harvard University , before attending Yale University .
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Alois Purgathofer
1925 - 1984 (59 years)
Alois Purgathofer , was an Austrian astronomer at the Vienna Observatory from 1954 to 1984. He mainly worked on the photometry of galactic star clusters, but also on the asteroid 51 Nemausa. In 1969 the Leopold Figl observatory was built on the Mitterschöpfl mountain under his technical and astronomical advice, containing a 1.5 m Ritchey–Chrétien telescope. His knowledge of astronomical instruments was legendary, especially of optical and electronic devices and of image converters. He died unexpectedly on 13 March 1984 during a business trip to the Calar Alto Observatory in Almería, Spain.
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Anton Willem Nieuwenhuis
1864 - 1953 (89 years)
Anton Willem Nieuwenhuis was a Dutch explorer and physician who travelled extensively in central Borneo in the 1890s, recording valuable ethnographic information about the Dayak people and making biological collections.
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Rolla Ramsey
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Rolla Roy Ramsey was an American physicist, university professor, and radio electronics pioneer. Early life and education Ramsey was born in the unincorporated community of Morning Sun, Preble County, Ohio, son of Sarah Rachel McQuiston and Joseph Steele Ramsey . He grew up on a farm. As a university teacher, Rolla took a special interest in "farm boys" who took physics courses; he observed that "they were not afraid to work." Rolla had a sister, Leila Jane Ramsey Lemon , and a brother, Arthur McQuiston Ramsey .
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Charlotte Moore Sitterly
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Charlotte Emma Moore Sitterly was an American astronomer. She is known for her extensive spectroscopic studies of the Sun and chemical elements. Her tables of data are known for their reliability and are still used regularly.
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George Barker Jeffery
1891 - 1957 (66 years)
George Barker Jeffery FRS was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. He is probably best known to the scientifically literate public as the translator of papers by Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, and other fathers of relativity theory.
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Paul I. Richards
1923 - 1978 (55 years)
Paul Irving Richards was a physicist and applied mathematician. Richard's is best known to electrical engineers for the eponymous Richards' transformation. However, much of his career was concerned with radiation transport and fluid flow. Notably, he produced one of the earliest models of traffic waves on busy highways.
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Allan C. G. Mitchell
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
Allan Charles Gray Mitchell was an American physicist. He was a professor and head of the Indiana University Bloomington department of physics. Early life and education Mitchell was born in 1902, the son of Milly Gray and astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell. He earned a master of arts in physics from University of Virginia in 1924. He completed his doctorate in physical chemistry at California Institute of Technology from 1924 to 1927. His advisor was Richard C. Tolman. He completed postdoctorate work in physics with James Franck and Arnold Sommerfeld.
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David Adler
1935 - 1987 (52 years)
David Adler was an American physicist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. In condensed matter physics, Adler made significant contributions to the understanding of transition-metal oxides, the electronic properties of low-mobility materials, transport phenomena in amorphous materials, metal-insulator transitions, and electronic defects in amorphous semiconductors.
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Francis Bitter
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Francis Bitter was an American physicist. Bitter invented the Bitter plate used in resistive magnets . He also developed the water cooling method inherent to the design of Bitter magnets. Prior to this development, there was no way to cool electromagnets, limiting their maximum flux density.
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Hitoshi Kihara
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
was a Japanese geneticist known for his work on the genetics of wheat. Biography Hitoshi Kihara was born on 21 October 1893 in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from the Faculty of Agriculture, Hokkaido Imperial University and served as a professor at the Faculty of Agriculture, Kyoto University from 1927 to 1956 and the National Institute of Genetics from 1955 to 1969, and also served at Kihara Institute for Biological Research from 1942 to 1984. He was elected a member of the Japan Academy, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American P...
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Rosalind Franklin
1920 - 1958 (38 years)
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA , RNA , viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which Franklin has been variously referred to as the "wronged heroine", the "dark lady of DNA", the "forgotten heroine", a "feminist icon", and the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology".
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Otto Hahn
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Otto Hahn was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear w...
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Michael Moravcsik
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Michael Julius Alexander Moravcsik was a Hungarian-born American theoretical high energy physicist whose areas of research included the two nucleon system, particle spin symmetries. He also made important contributions to the practice and study of science policy in developing nations, scientific methodology, and scientometrics , especially the study of citation and citation indices.
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David Rank
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
David Herr Rank was an American spectroscopist. Rank was born in Annville, Pennsylvania and attended Lebanon Valley College in his hometown. He pursued graduate study at Pennsylvania State University beginning in 1930 and joined the faculty in 1935. Rank was appointed the Evan Pugh Professor in Physics in 1961. He retired in 1972 and died at Centre County Community Hospital in State College, Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1981, aged 74.
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Jesse Beams
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Jesse Wakefield Beams was an American physicist at the University of Virginia. Biography Beams completed his undergraduate B.A. in physics at Fairmount College in 1921 and his master's degree the next year at the University of Wisconsin. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Virginia, where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1925. He spent the next three years in a physics fellowship at Yale University, where he performed research on the photoelectric effect with Ernest Lawrence. Beams was appointed a professor of physics at the University of Virginia in 1929 and was chair of the department from 1948 to 1962.
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Rolf Maximilian Sievert
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Rolf Maximilian Sievert was a Swedish medical physicist whose major contribution was in the study of the biological effects of ionizing radiation. The sievert , the SI unit representing the stochastic health risk of ionizing radiation, is named for him. He has been called the "Father of Radiation Protection".
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Hartland Snyder
1913 - 1962 (49 years)
Hartland Sweet Snyder was an American physicist who, together with Robert Oppenheimer, showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes. This work modeled the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free homogeneous fluid sphere and found that it would be unable to communicate with the rest of the universe. This discovery was depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, where Snyder was portrayed by actor Rory Keane. Historian of physics David C. Cassidy assessed that this prediction of black holes might have won a Nobel Prize in Physics had the authors been alive in the 1990s when evidence was a...
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Denis Haydon
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
Denis Arthur Haydon FRS was a Professor of Membrane Biophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1980. He was educated at Dartford Grammar School and King's College London . He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975. He was also a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he was Vice-Master from 1978 to 1982.
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Frits Zernike
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Frits Zernike was a Dutch physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953 for his invention of the phase-contrast microscope. Early life and education Frits Zernike was born on 16 July 1888 in Amsterdam, Netherlands to Carl Friedrich August Zernike and Antje Dieperink. Both parents were teachers of mathematics, and he especially shared his father's passion for physics. He studied chemistry , mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam.
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Ronald Wilfred Gurney
1899 - 1953 (54 years)
Ronald Wilfred Gurney was a British theoretical physicist and research pupil of William Lawrence Bragg at the Victoria University of Manchester during the 1920s and 1930s, Bristol University during the 1930s and later in the US, where he died.
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Cyrus Levinthal
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Levinthal graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from University of California, Berkeley and taught physics at the University of Michigan before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1957. In 1968 he joined Columbia University as the Chairman and from 1969 Professor of the newly established Department of Biological Sciences, where he remained until his death from lung cancer in 1990. While at MIT Levinthal made significant discoveries in molecular genetics relating to the mechanisms of DNA replication, the relationship between genes and proteins, and the nature of messenger RNA.
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James Chadwick
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Sir James Chadwick, was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atom bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was knighted in Britain in 1945 for his achievements in physics.
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Dirk Brouwer
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Dirk Brouwer was a Dutch-American astronomer. He received his PhD in 1927 at Leiden University under Willem de Sitter and then went to Yale University. From 1941 until 1966 he was editor of the Astronomical Journal.
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Karl Herzfeld
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld was an Austrian-American physicist. Education Herzfeld was born in Vienna during the reign of the Habsburgs over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. "He came from a prominent, recently assimilated Jewish family." His father was a physician and ordinarius professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Vienna. His mother, Camilla née Herzog, was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and sister of the organic chemist R. O. Herzog.
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Jesse DuMond
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Jesse William Monroe DuMond was an American experimental physicist. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards and later at Caltech where he was involved in experimental approaches to establish accurate measurements of a number of physical constants including the mass and charge of the electron; and Planck's constant.
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Owen Willans Richardson
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law. Biography Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England, the only son of Joshua Henry and Charlotte Maria Richardson. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained First Class Honours in Natural Sciences. He then got a DSc from University College London in 1904.
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Gerald Pearson
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Gerald L. Pearson was a physicist whose work on silicon rectifiers at Bell Labs led to the invention of the solar cell. In 2008, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Biography Pearson was born in Salem, Oregon. He took a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Willamette University and a master's degree in physics from Stanford University. From 1929 he worked as a research physicist at Bell Labs and his early work on temperature-sensitive resistors led to 13 patents on thermistors. After World War II he was part of William Shockley's group, where his experimental results were essential in developing models of semiconductor behaviour.
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Erwin Wilhelm Müller
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Erwin Wilhelm Müller was a German physicist who invented the Field Emission Electron Microscope , the Field Ion Microscope , and the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope. He and his student, Kanwar Bahadur, were the first people to experimentally observe atoms.
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Aneesur Rahman
1927 - 1987 (60 years)
Aneesur Rahman pioneered the application of computational methods to physical systems. His 1964 paper on liquid argon studied a system of 864 argon atoms on a CDC 3600 computer, using a Lennard-Jones potential. His algorithms still form the basis for many codes written today. Moreover, he worked on a wide variety of problems, such as the microcanonical ensemble approach to lattice gauge theory, which he invented with David J E Callaway.
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Pyotr Kapitsa
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa or Peter Kapitza was a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate, whose research focused on low-temperature physics. Biography Kapitsa was born in Kronstadt, Russian Empire, to the Bessarabian Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa , a military engineer who constructed fortifications, and to the Volhynian Olga Ieronimovna Kapitsa, from a noble Polish Stebnicki family. Besides Russian, the Kapitsa family also spoke Romanian. Kapitsa's studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver for two years on the Polish front. He graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918.
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Ross Gunn
1897 - 1966 (69 years)
Ross Gunn was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. The New York Times described him as "one of the true fathers of the nuclear submarine program". From 1927 to 1947, Gunn worked at the Naval Research Laboratory. He was the author of over 28 papers, and received 45 patents. He designed radio devices for controlling aircraft, which were used in the development of the first droness. He was one of the first to appreciate the possibility of using nuclear power for submarine propulsion. During World War II he was involved in the development of thermal diffu...
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Jan Burgers
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Johannes Martinus Burgers was a Dutch physicist and the brother of the physicist Wilhelm G. Burgers. Burgers studied in Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1918. He is known for the Burgers' equation, the Burgers vector in dislocation theory and the Burgers material in viscoelasticity.
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