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,
#10101
Gale Bruno van Albada
1912 - 1972 (60 years)
Gale Bruno van Albada was a Dutch astronomer, known for his orbital observations of binary stars and studies on the evolution of galaxy clusters. Biography Van Albada obtained his Ph.D. with Antonie Pannekoek at the University of Amsterdam in 1945. He shared Pannekoek's communist ideologies and back in the 1930s his brother Piet van Albada had been an associate of Marinus van der Lubbe.
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Peder Oluf Pedersen
1874 - 1941 (67 years)
Peder Oluf Pedersen was a Danish engineer and physicist. He is notable for his work on electrotechnology, his cooperation with Valdemar Poulsen on the developmental work on Wire recorders, which he called a telegraphone, the arc converter known as the Poulsen Arc Transmitter, and his work on electrical currents in the ionosphere.
Go to Profile#10103
Hildegard Stücklen
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Hildegard Stücklen was a German-American physicist who dealt with spectroscopy. She worked initially as a lecturer and tutor in Switzerland in the 1930s and later moved to teach at women colleges in Massachusetts and Virginia after emigrating to the United States.
Go to Profile#10104
Yahya ibn Abi Mansur
Yahya ibn Abi Mansur , also called Bizist, son of Firuzan was a senior Persian official from the Banu al-Munajjim family, who served as an astronomer and an astrologer at the court of Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun. Since his father Abu Mansur Aban was an astrologer in service of caliph al-Mansur, it can be concluded that Yahya spent his childhood in Baghdad.
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Louis Caryl Graton
1880 - 1970 (90 years)
Louis Caryl Graton , American geologist, chemist and educator, began his career in 1900 as assayer for Ledyard Gold Mines Ltd., near Rockdale, Ontario. He moved on to Canadian Goldfields Ltd. later in 1900, then entered McGill University as a graduate student, studying many of the famous mines of Ontario and Quebec. He continued his studies at Cornell University in 1902–1903.
Go to Profile#10106
George Henry Bolsover
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
George Henry Bolsover CBE was the director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London from 1947 to 1976. The school, now known as UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is part of University College, London.
Go to Profile#10107
Ivan Borgman
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Borgman was a physicist from the Russian Empire, who first demonstrated in 1897 that X-rays and radioactive materials induced thermoluminescence. Biography Borgman was born to a Russified Finnish-born father and a Russian mother. After graduating from the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, he entered the Physics and Mathematics department of Saint Petersburg State University, in 1866 and graduated in 1870. In 1873, Borgman went to the University of Heidelberg, where he attended lectures and studied in the laboratory under the German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. In 1875, he was appointed as a laboratory assistant at St.
Go to Profile#10108
John J. Hopfield
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
John Joseph Hopfield was a Polish-American physicist. Hopfield's published research included vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy and solar ultraviolet spectroscopy. He was the discoverer of the "Hopfield bands" of oxygen and co-discoverer of the "Lyman–Birge–Hopfield bands" of nitrogen. For about a decade he was an industrial physicist working with technologies for fabricating glass windows, and was the inventor listed on several related patents.
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Mikhail Samoilovich Neiman
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Mikhail Samoilovich Neiman was a Soviet physicist, Doctor of Technical Sciences and professor. The main directions of his research were the study of the ultra-high frequency electromagnetic systems, theoretical and applied radio engineering, and automatic processes.
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Temistocle Zona
1848 - 1910 (62 years)
Temistocle Zona was an Italian astronomer. Born in Porto Tolle, in 1870 Zona graduated in architecture at the University of Padua, and he was a volunteer assistant at the Observatory of that city from 1868 to 1871. In October 1880, he entered the staff of Gaetano Cacciatore at the Observatory of Palermo, and in 1891 he became the director of the Observatory, a role he held until 1898. In 1882, he became professor at the University of Palermo. He is best known as the discoverer of the comet C/1890 V1 Zona, on November 15, 1890.
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Erik Gabrielsson Emporagrius
1606 - 1674 (68 years)
Erik Gabrielsson Emporagrius was a Swedish professor and bishop. Erik Emporagrius was born in Torsåker in Gästrikland, son of Gabriel Emporagrius, the vicar there. He studied at Uppsala University, where he was awarded a master's degree in 1632, and at universities abroad. On his return to Sweden in 1637, he was appointed professor of physics at Uppsala, but after a few years he exchanged this position for a chair in the faculty of theology. In 1645 he was appointed first court chaplain to Queen Christina, in 1649 pastor primarius in Stockholm, and in 1664 Bishop of Strängnäs.
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Nicholas E. Wagman
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Nicholas E. Wagman was an American astronomer and astrometrist. Beginning in 1930, Wagman was associated with Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory. He was director of the Observatory and also chairman of the University of Pittsburgh's Astronomy Department from 1941 until 1970. Under his direction, the 0.76-m Thaw refractor was renovated and used to set the standard for parallax determinations, of which over 1200 were made. Many binary stars were also discovered and characterized.
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Antonín Strnad
1746 - 1799 (53 years)
Antonín Strnad was a Czech geographer, professor and rector of the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague and director of the observatory in Clementinum, founder of Czech scientific meteorology, agrometeorology and phenology, and also one of the founders of the Czech national revival. He began recording his meteorological observations in Clementinum and in 1775 he began the longest continuous series of observations in the world.
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James Ralston Kennedy Paterson
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
James Ralston Kennedy "RP" Paterson, CBE, MC, MD, FRCSEd, FRCR, DMRE was a radiologist and oncologist in Scotland. Along with Herbert Parker, pioneered the development of the Paterson-Parker rules for the Radium Dosage System also known as the Manchester system.
Go to Profile#10115
Jørg Tofte Jebsen
1888 - 1922 (34 years)
Jørg Tofte Jebsen was a physicist from Norway, where he was the first to work on Einstein's general theory of relativity. In this connection he became known after his early death for what many now call the Jebsen-Birkhoff theorem for the metric tensor outside a general, spherical mass distribution.
Go to Profile#10116
Edward Taylor Jones
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Edward Taylor Jones F.R.S.E. LL.D. was a British physicist. He was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University from 1925 to 1943. Life He was born in Denbigh in north Wales on 24 December 1872. He studied Science at the University of North Wales and did further postgraduate of the University of Berlin. From 1899 until 1925 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy at his alma mater, the University of North Wales, and then moved to the University of Glasgow for the remainder of his career. The main focus of his work was electromagnetism, atomic physics and quantum theory.
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Baha' al-din al-'Amili
1547 - 1621 (74 years)
#10118
Josef Geitler von Armingen
1870 - 1923 (53 years)
Josef Karl Franz Otto Geitler, Ritter von Armingen was an Austrian physicist born in Smíchov, today a district in Prague. He is remembered for his investigations of electromagnetic waves. He studied in Prague and Bonn, later obtaining his habilitation at Prague. In 1906 he succeeded Alois Handl as chair of experimental physics at the University of Czernowitz. In 1919, when Czernowitz became a Romanian university, Geitler relocated to Graz, where he taught classes at the Technische Universität Graz.
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Otto von Fürth
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Otto von Fürth was an Austrian physician, physiologist and biochemist. Fürth studied at the University of Prague, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. He worked at the University of Vienna, the University of Prague and the University of Straßburg where received his habilitation in medical chemistry in 1899. From that point on he worked in Vienna focusing on biochemistry. In 1898 he announced the discovery of "suprerenin." He received the Lieben Prize in 1923.
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Johannes Hevelius
1611 - 1687 (76 years)
Johannes Hevelius was a councillor and mayor of Danzig , in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. As an astronomer, he gained a reputation as "the founder of lunar topography", and described ten new constellations, seven of which are still used by astronomers.
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Emanuele Foà
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Emanuele Foà was an Italian engineer and engineering physicist, known for his contribution to mathematical fluid dynamics. In particular he proved the first known uniqueness theorem for the solutions to the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluids in bounded domains.
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Johann Baptist Cysat
1585 - 1657 (72 years)
Johann Baptist Cysat was a Swiss Jesuit mathematician and astronomer, after whom the lunar crater Cysatus is named. He was born in Lucerne, as the eighth of 14 children, to cartographer, historian and folklorist Renward Cysat .
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Ludwik Birkenmajer
1855 - 1929 (74 years)
Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer , Polish historian of science, physicist, astronomer, professor of the Jagiellonian University. Biography Descended from the German family settled in Galicia during the time of the Napoleon wars, later a part of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. He was the son of Józef Herman and Petronela de domo Stefanowski. Educated in the Franz Joseph High School in Lvov , than studied physics, chemistry and mathematics at the Kraków University till 1878. Supplementary studies in Vienna . In 1879 he defended his Ph. D. thesis in Kraków based on the study: On general methods of integration of the algebraic and transcendental functions .
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Christian Ludwig Gerling
1788 - 1864 (76 years)
Christian Ludwig Gerling studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss, obtaining his doctorate in 1812 for a thesis entitled: Methodi proiectionis orthographicae usum ad calculos parallacticos facilitandos explicavit simulque eclipsin solarem die, at the University of Göttingen. He is notable for his work on geodeticss and in 1927 some 60 letters of correspondence between Gerling and Gauss on the topic were published. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Julius Plücker.
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Gustav Eberhard
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Gustav E. Eberhard German astrophysicist. Eberhard published numerous investigations on spectroscopy and on photographic photogrametry. The photographic Eberhard effect is named after him and was published in 1926.
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Charles Thomas Whitmell
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Charles Thomas Whitmell was an English astronomer, mathematician and educationalist. Early life and education Whitmell was born into a middle-class family in Leeds, Yorkshire, where his father was a principal official of the Bank of England. As a teenage child he was pre-occupied by scientific experiments and investigations – especially in the fields of chemistry, optics, electricity and magnetism. At the age of 14 he was already corresponding with Michael Faraday and Professor John Tyndall. Whitmell was educated at Leeds Grammar School, London University and Trinity College, Cambridge . His experimental work was on the subject of highly refractive liquids.
Go to Profile#10127
Heinrich Ott
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Heinrich Ott was a German physicist. Education Ott studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His thesis was on the theory of crystal structure, and he was awarded his doctorate in 1924. He stayed on as Sommerfeld’s assistant. Subsequently, he completed his Habilitation and was a Privatdozent until 1929.
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William Hammond Wright
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
William Hammond Wright was an American astronomer and the director of the Lick Observatory from 1935 until 1942. Wright was born in San Francisco. After graduating in 1893 from the University of California, he became Assistant Astronomer at Lick Observatory. From 1903 to 1906 he worked on establishing the "Southern station" of the observatory at Cerro San Cristobal near Santiago de Chile. It only took him 6 months to start with observations from this new site, and he recorded a large series of radial velocity measurements of stars in the southern sky. In 1908 he was promoted to Astronomer. Fr...
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Prana Krushna Parija
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Prana Krushna Parija OBE was an Indian botanist. His research work comprised mainly fundamental and applied aspects of plant physiology, experimental plant morphology, and ecological studies of plant environment. He studied water hyacinth and other aquatic weeds, respiration in leaves and apples, transpiration and heat resistance in plants, rice and algae and storage of apples.
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John Larry Kelly Jr.
1923 - 1965 (42 years)
John Larry Kelly Jr. , was an American scientist who worked at Bell Labs. From a "system he'd developed to analyze information transmitted over networks," from Claude Shannon's earlier work on information theory, he is best known for his 1956 work in creating the Kelly criterion formula. With notable volatility in its sequence of outcomes, the Kelly criterion can be used to estimate what proportion of wealth to risk in a sequence of positive expected value bets to maximize the rate of return. As a substantial warning, the outcome for the Kelly criterion's recommendation on bet-size "relies h...
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John Torrence Tate Sr.
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
John Torrence Tate Sr. was an American physicist noted for his editorship of Physical Review between 1926 and 1950. He is the father of mathematician John Torrence Tate Jr. Biography Tate was born on 28 July 1889 in Lenox, Iowa. He attended the University of Nebraska, studying electrical engineering, earning a BS in 1910. He continued at the University of Nebraska, shifting his focus to physics and earning an MA in 1912. Like many American students interested in pursuing advanced degrees in physics, he departed for Germany to further his studies, earning a PhD under James Franck in 1914, with...
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Renate Chasman
1932 - 1977 (45 years)
Renate Wiener Chasman was a physicist. She was born Renate Wiener to German Jewish parents in Berlin. Her father, Hans Wiener, was a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1938, the Wiener family fled Nazi Germany through the Netherlands to Sweden, where Wiener grew up and attended school in Stockholm.
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Giambattista Pianciani
1784 - 1862 (78 years)
Giambattista Pianciani was an Italian Jesuit scientist. Biography He entered the Society of Jesus on 2 June 1805; after having received the ordinary Jesuit training he was sent to various cities in the Papal States to teach mathematics and physics and finally was appointed professor in the Roman College, where he lectured and wrote on scientific subjects for twenty-four years. He was an active member of the Accademia d'Arcadia, his academical pseudonym being "Polite Megaride", of the Accademia de' Lincei, and of other scientific societies. His scientific labours were abruptly brought to an e...
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Morton Masius
1883 - 1979 (96 years)
Morton Masius was a German-American physical chemist. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1928. Biography His parents were Alfred Masius, a translator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his wife Edith, née Bailey. Morton Massius's paternal grandfather was Hermann Masius, a professor of pedagogy. Morton Masius attended the humanistic St. Thomas School, Leipzig. After completing his Abitur, he studied physical chemistry at the Leipzig University and received in 1908 his Dr. rer. nat. with a dissertation supervised by Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich. In 1910 in Leipzig, Morton Masius married Paula Marie Wagner, daughter of a wealthy Leipzig family.
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Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar
1893 - 1954 (61 years)
Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar was a Swedish-born American experimental physicist. He was the eldest of six children of Anders Vilhelm Hammar and Elin Christina Hammar . He emigrated to the United States in 1913, attended Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and by 1920 was married and living with his wife, Louise , in King County, Washington.
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Ibn al-A'lam
901 - 985 (84 years)
'Alī ibn al-Ḥusayn Abū l-Qasim al-'Alawi Ashraf|al-Sharif al-Husayni ,, , was a 10th-century Islamic astronomer and astrologer. Little is known about Ibn al-A'lam's life, and his birth date has not been established by historians. He seems to have been one of the most prominent astronomers of the 10th century, demonstrated by the impact he had on Islamic and Byzantine astronomy. He appears to have been active in Baghdad, working under the patronage of its Buyid ruler, 'Adud al-Dawla . His Nisba "al-Alawi al-Sharif" indicates that he was a Sharif and a descendant of Ja’far al-Tayyar.
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Otto Wiener
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
Otto Heinrich Wiener was a German physicist. Life and work Otto Wiener was a son of Christian Wiener and Pauline Hausrath. Orphan of mother at the age of 3, he married Lina Fenner at 32. He was a pupil of August Kundt at the University of Strasbourg, where he received his doctorate in 1887 with a thesis on the phase change of light upon reflection, and methods to determine the thickness of thin films.
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Jean Lecomte
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Jean Lecomte was a French physicist, researcher and professor of physics at CNRS. Career In 1919, Lecomte started working in the laboratory of physical research at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lecomte presented his Doctoral Thesis in 1924 on localized vibrations in molecules. He was one of the founding members of the European Congress on Molecular Spectroscopy , together with French Nobel prize winning physicist Alfred Kastler and German physicist Reinhard Mecke . Lecomte was elected as a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1959 and as president of the French Association for the Advancement of Science in 1968.
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Robert Jack
1877 - 1957 (80 years)
Robert Jack was a Scottish-born physicist, professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Otago, and pioneer of radio broadcasting, New Zealand. Early life and education Robert Jack was born in the village of Quarter, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 4 November 1877 and was educated at Hamilton Academy and the University of Glasgow, graduating MA with Honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. Thereafter he attended the University of Paris and the University of Göttingen for postgraduate study and as a result of this research, including that into the effect o...
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Walter Drowley Filmer
1865 - 1944 (79 years)
Walter Drowley Filmer was an early pioneer of X-rays in Australia, a wireless engineer, for a time ran the British Royal Train, and a world class entomologist that discovered several new species in his homeland. Filmer was a naturalist and established a private collection at his residence that thousands of people visited.
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Christian Olufsen
1802 - 1855 (53 years)
Christian Friis Rottbøll Olufsen was a Danish astronomer and professor of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen. Olufsen was born in Copenhagen where his father Oluf Christian Olufsen was an economist and teacher . He grew up in Classens Have where his father taught at the agricultural institute. After some home schooling he joined Borgerdydskolen in 1812 where he excelled so much that the school thought he should already be sent to university, a proposal prevented by his father. He then went to university where he studied under C.F. Degenand and Erasmus Georg Fog Thune. He received the gold medal in 1824 for his study on eclipse calculations and became an assistant at the observatory.
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Eustachio Zanotti
1709 - 1782 (73 years)
Eustachio Zanotti was an Italian astronomer and engineer. He worked at the astronomical observatory in Bologna. Biography Zanotti was born in Bologna where his father Giampietro was a poet, painter and art historian. His mother was Constanza M. Teresa Gambari. An uncle was the philosopher Francesco Maria Zanotti. Zanotti studied at Jesuit schools and became interest in science and mathematics, trained under Eustachio Manfredi at the Bologna observatory where he began to work from 1729. He received a degree from the University of Bologna in 1730. In 1738 he examined Newton's theory of light. He became a director of the observatory in 1739 following Manfredi's death.
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Mordecai Comtino
1500 - 1487 (-13 years)
Mordecai ben Eliezer Comtino was a Talmudist and scientist. The earliest date attached to any of his writings is 1425. The form of his family name is doubtful, and has been transcribed by modern scholars as "Comtino." Mordecai's biographer, Jonah Hayyim Gurland, uses the form "Kumatyano," a name which he found still in use in Turkey . He was the pupil of Enoch Saporta, a distinguished Talmudist, known for his cultivation of the sciences and his tolerance toward the Karaites.
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Kurd von Mosengeil
1884 - 1906 (22 years)
Kurd Friedrich Rudolf von Mosengeil, also Curd Friedrich Rudolf von Mosengeil , was a German physicist. Kurd von Mosengeil was a student of Max Planck. In 1905, the latter became the most prominent early advocate of the theory of special relativity of Albert Einstein. In the subsequent years, Planck published several works, in which he explained further consequences of Einstein's theory. He conveyed his enthusiasm to his assistant Max von Laue and his student Kurd of Mosengeil, who became the first physicists to habilitate and graduate, respectively, in relativity-related subjects.
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Johan Aschehoug Kiær
1869 - 1931 (62 years)
Johan Aschehoug Kiær was a Norwegian paleontologist and geologist. Biography Johan Kiær was born in Drammen, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Hagbarth Kiær and grandson of shipowner and Member of Parliament Hans Andersen Kiær . He was a nephew of Elias C. Kiær operator of the family company And. H. Kiær & Co. which had been founded by his great-grandfather, Anders Hansen Kiær .
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Witold Wilkosz
1891 - 1941 (50 years)
Witold Wilkosz was a Polish mathematician, physicist, philosopher and popularizer of science. Life and career Witold Wilkosz was born on 14 August 1891 in Kraków to parents Jan, a Polish teacher, and Józefa née Vopalko. He showed a considerable talent for mathematics and languages since early childhood. He passed his final school-leaving Matura exam at the John III Sobieski High School . He was a friend of fellow mathematician Stefan Banach. Before graduating from high school, he had written an article on semitology for which he was offered a scholarship and membership from Morgenländische Gesselchaft Scienctific Society, which enabled him to study at the University of Beirut.
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Henrik Petrini
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Henrik Petrini was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are mainly connected with the theory of partial differential equations, in particular potential theory. He was born in Falun and received his PhD in 1890 from Uppsala University in mechanics, where he subsequently held a position as professor. In 1901 he moved to Växjö, where he worked as a lektor for mathematics and physics at the gymnasium. In 1914 he finally moved to Stockholm. He is best known for his counterexample of a continuous function for which the Newton potential is not twice differentiable. He was also int...
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Paul Santorini
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Paul Santorini was a Greek civil engineer, experimental and theoretical physicist, mathematician, electrical engineer, astronomer, author, and professor. He published over 350 articles and conducted research in the fields of solar energy, wind energy, electromagnetic microwaves as weapons of war, high-frequency electromagnetic waves, high-frequency currents, structural engineering, and hydraulics. Later in life, he wrote papers in the field of the birth of the universe and proposed the multiple successive small bangs theory of the universe. Some of his papers also dealt with mankind and the universe.
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Kazimierz Kordylewski
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Kazimierz Kordylewski was a Polish astronomer. In 1956, he claimed the discovery of the Kordylewski clouds, large transient concentrations of dust at the Trojan points of the Earth–Moon system, which were reported to have been confirmed to exist in October 2018.
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William Stephen Finsen
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
William Stephen Finsen FRAS was a South African astronomer. He discovered a number of double stars and took many photographs of Mars. He developed the Finsen eyepiece interferometer to measure very close double stars. He was the final director of Union Observatory in South Africa from 1957 to 1965 .
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