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
Georg Ohm
1789 - 1854 (65 years)
Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist and mathematician. As a school teacher, Ohm began his research with the new electrochemical cell, invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm found that there is a direct proportionality between the potential difference applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current. This relation is called Ohm's law, and the ohm, the unit of electrical resistance, is named after him.
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George Darwin
1845 - 1912 (67 years)
Sir George Howard Darwin, was an English barrister and astronomer, the second son and fifth child of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. Biography George H. Darwin was born at Down House, Kent, the fifth child of biologist Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin.
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Ludwig Flamm
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Ludwig Flamm was an Austrian physicist. Biography Ludwig Flamm, who came from a family of watchmakers, studied physics at the University of Vienna. In 1916 he was awarded the pro venia legendi at the Technische Universität Wien and in 1919 achieved a professorship. From 1922 to 1956 Flamm was a full professor and board member for physics at the Technische Universität Wien. He acted as dean from 1929 to 1931 and as rector from 1930 to 1931. Flamm was also a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Flamm was married to Elsa, the youngest daughter of Ludwig Boltzmann. His son Dieter Flamm was...
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Pieter Rijke
1812 - 1899 (87 years)
Petrus Leonardus Rijke was a Dutch physicist, and a professor in experimental physics at the University of Leiden. Rijke spent his scientific career exploring the physics of electricity, and is known for the Rijke tube. On 1 July 1852 he married Johanna Hamaker. They had 6 sons and 6 daughters.
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Heinrich Welker
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Heinrich Johann Welker was a German theoretical and applied physicist who invented the "transistron", a transistor made at Westinghouse independently of the first successful transistor made at Bell Laboratories. He did fundamental work in III-V compound semiconductors, and paved the way for microwave semiconductor elements and laser diodes.
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Pierre Bouguer
1698 - 1758 (60 years)
Pierre Bouguer was a French mathematician, geophysicist, geodesist, and astronomer. He is also known as "the father of naval architecture". Career Bouguer's father, Jean Bouguer, one of the best hydrographers of his time, was Regius Professor of hydrography at Le Croisic in lower Brittany, and author of a treatise on navigation. He taught his sons Pierre and Jan at their home, where he also taught private students. In 1714, at the age of 16, Pierre was appointed to succeed his deceased father as professor of hydrography. In 1727 he gained the prize given by the French Academy of Sciences fo...
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Marie Alfred Cornu
1841 - 1902 (61 years)
Marie Alfred Cornu was a French physicist. The French generally refer to him as Alfred Cornu. Life Cornu was born at Orléans to François Cornu and Sophie Poinsellier. He was educated at the École polytechnique and the École des mines. Upon the death of Émile Verdet in 1866, Cornu became, in 1867, Verdet's successor as professor of experimental physics at the École polytechnique, where he remained throughout his life. Although he made various excursions into other branches of physical science, undertaking, for example, with Jean-Baptistin Baille about 1870 a repetition of Cavendish's experimen...
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Paul Alfred Biefeld
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld was a German-American electrical engineer, astronomer and teacher. Biography Paul Alfred Biefeld was born in Jöhstadt, Kingdom of Saxony on March 22, 1867. He was the son of Heinrich and Wilhelmina Biefeld, he moved to the United States in 1881. Biefeld received his B.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in 1894. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 1900.
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Alexander Macfarlane
1851 - 1913 (62 years)
Alexander Macfarlane FRSE LLD was a Scottish logician, physicist, and mathematician. Life Macfarlane was born in Blairgowrie, Scotland, to Daniel MacFarlane and Ann Small. He studied at the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral thesis "The disruptive discharge of electricity" reported on experimental results from the laboratory of Peter Guthrie Tait.
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Friedrich Ernst Dorn
1848 - 1916 (68 years)
Friedrich Ernst Dorn was a German physicist who was the first to discover that a radioactive substance, later named radon, is emitted from radium. Life and work Dorn was born in Guttstadt , Province of Prussia , and died in Halle, Province of Saxony. He was educated at Königsberg and went on to teach at the university level. In 1885, at Halle University, Dorn took over the position of personal ordinarius professor for theoretical physics from Anton Oberbeck. Since Dorn was already an ordinarius professor, he was allowed to assume the title so as to not appear as having been demoted. In 1895...
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Vilhelm Bjerknes
1862 - 1951 (89 years)
Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.
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Johann Wilhelm Hittorf
1824 - 1914 (90 years)
Johann Wilhelm Hittorf was a German physicist who was born in Bonn and died in Münster, Germany. Hittorf was the first to compute the electricity-carrying capacity of charged atoms and molecules , an important factor in understanding electrochemical reactions. He formulated ion transport numbers and the first method for their measurements.
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Johann Palisa
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Johann Palisa was an Austrian astronomer, born in Troppau, Austrian Silesia, now Czech Republic. He was a prolific discoverer of asteroids, discovering 122 in all, from 136 Austria in 1874 to 1073 Gellivara in 1923. Some of his notable discoveries include 153 Hilda, 216 Kleopatra, 243 Ida, 253 Mathilde, 324 Bamberga, and the near-Earth asteroid 719 Albert. Palisa made his discoveries without the aid of photography, and he remains the most successful visual asteroid discoverer of all time. He was awarded the Valz Prize from the French Academy of Sciences in 1906. The asteroid 914 Palisana, di...
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Al-Khwarizmi
750 - 846 (96 years)
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī , or al-Khwarizmi, was a polymath from Khwarazm, who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 CE, he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
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Rudolf Ladenburg
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Rudolf Walter Ladenburg was a German atomic physicist. He emigrated from Germany as early as 1932 and became a Brackett Research Professor at Princeton University. When the wave of German emigration began in 1933, he was the principal coordinator for job placement of exiled physicists in the United States. Albert Einstein gave the eulogy at Rudolf's funeral. He and his wife Elsa had three children, Margarethe, Kurt, and Eva. Kurt had two children, Toni and Nils Ladenburg.
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Zu Chongzhi
429 - 500 (71 years)
Zu Chongzhi , courtesy name Wenyuan , was a Chinese astronomer, mathematician, politician, inventor, and writer during the Liu Song and Southern Qi dynasties. He was most notable for calculating pi as between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, a record in accuracy which would not be surpassed for over 800 years.
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James E. McDonald
1920 - 1971 (51 years)
James Edward McDonald was an American physicist. He is best known for his research regarding UFOs. McDonald was a senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics and a professor of meteorology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
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Thomas Harriot
1560 - 1621 (61 years)
Thomas Harriot , also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Thomas Harriot was also recognized for his contributions in navigational techniques, working closely with John White to create advanced maps for navigation. While Harriot worked extensively on numerous papers on the subjects of astronomy, mathematics and navigation, he remains obscure because he published little of it, namely only The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia . This book includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time.
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Auguste Piccard
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Auguste Antoine Piccard was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer known for his record-breaking hydrogen balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth's upper atmosphere. Piccard was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean's depths.
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Vadim Knizhnik
1962 - 1987 (25 years)
Vadim Genrikhovich Knizhnik was a Soviet physicist of Jewish and Russian descent. Biography Knizhnik studied physics from 1978 to 1984 at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology. He has received his PhD at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. His supervisor was Prof. A. Polyakov, however, at the time of his PhD courses Vadim was already a first-class physicist, and supervising him was a pure formality. In 1986 he became a member of the Landau Institute. His distinguished abilities showed quite early. At the secondary school he won twice the USSR national physics olympiad. He wrote his first scientific article as a student in 1982.
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Robert Emden
1862 - 1940 (78 years)
Jacob Robert Emden was a Swiss astrophysicist and meteorologist. He is best known for his book, Gaskugeln: Anwendungen der mechanischen Wärmetheorie auf kosmologische und meteorologische probleme , published in 1907. It presents a mathematical model of the behaviour of polytropic gaseous stellar objects under the influence of their own gravity, known as the Lane-Emden equation.
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Archytas
428 BC - 347 BC (81 years)
Archytas was an Ancient Greek mathematician, music theorist, statesman, and strategist from the ancient city of Taras in Southern Italy. He was a scientist and philosopher affiliated with the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics and a friend of Plato.
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Charles Fabry
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Maurice Paul Auguste Charles Fabry was a French physicist working on optics. Together with Alfred Pérot he invented the Fabry–Pérot interferometer. He is also one of the co-discoverers of the ozone layer.
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Eise Eisinga
1744 - 1828 (84 years)
Eise Jeltes Eisinga was a Frisian amateur astronomer who built the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in his house in Franeker, Dutch Republic. The orrery still exists and is the oldest functioning planetarium in the world.
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Alfred Fowler
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Alfred Fowler, CBE FRS was an English astronomer and spectroscopist. Early life and career He was born in Wilsden on the outskirts of Bradford, Yorkshire and educated at London's Normal School of Science, which was later absorbed into Imperial College, London.
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Roman Ulrich Sexl
1939 - 1986 (47 years)
Roman Ulrich Sexl was one of the leading Austrian theoretical physicists. He is famous for his textbooks on Special relativity. Life His most cited work is "On the gravitational field of a massless particle" together with Peter C. Aichelburg. Since 1972 he was professor for Cosmology and General Relativity at the University of Vienna, where, from 1969, he was director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. From 1971 to 1975 he was the director of the Institute for Space Exploration at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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Samuel King Allison
1900 - 1965 (65 years)
Samuel King Allison was an American physicist, most notable for his role in the Manhattan Project, for which he was awarded the Medal for Merit. He was director of the Metallurgical Laboratory from 1943 until 1944, and later worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory — where he "rode herd" on the final stages of the project as part of the "Cowpuncher Committee", and read the countdown for the detonation of the Trinity nuclear test. After the war, he returned to the University of Chicago to direct the Institute for Nuclear Studies and was involved in the "scientists' movement", lobbying for civilian...
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Robert Retherford
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Robert Curtis Retherford was an American physicist. He was a graduate student of Willis Lamb at Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment revealing Lamb shift in the fine structure of hydrogen, a decisive experimental step toward a new understanding of quantum electrodynamics.
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Leonard Ornstein
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Leonard Salomon Ornstein was a Dutch physicist. Biography Ornstein studied theoretical physics with Hendrik Antoon Lorentz at University of Leiden. He subsequently carried out Ph.D. research under the supervision of Lorentz, concerning an application of the statistical mechanics of Gibbs to molecular problems.
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Petr Lazarev
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Petr Petrovich Lazarev was a biophysicist and a founder of the Soviet Institute of Physics and Biophysics . He also founded the journal Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk . Early life Lazarev was born in Moscow where his father worked as a civil engineer. After studies at a Moscow Gymnasium, he graduated from Moscow University in 1901 with a medical degree. After passing the examination to become a doctor of medicine in 1902 he worked at an ear clinic. He then became interested in mathematics and physics and passed the university examination in 1903 after studying the subjects entirely on his own.
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Louis Georges Gouy
1854 - 1926 (72 years)
Louis Georges Gouy was a French physicist. He is the namesake of the Gouy balance, the Gouy–Chapman electric double layer model and the Gouy phase. Gouy was born at Vals-les-Bains, Ardèche in 1854. He became a correspondent of the Académie des sciences in 1901, and a member in 1913.
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Walther Müller
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Walther Müller was a German physicist, most well known for his improvement of Hans Geiger's counter for ionizing radiation, now known as the Geiger-Müller tube. Walther Müller studied physics, chemistry and philosophy at the University of Kiel. In 1925 he became the first PhD student of Hans Geiger, who had just got a professorship in Kiel. Their work on ionization of gases by collision lead to the invention of the Geiger-Müller counter, a now indispensable tool for measuring radioactive radiation.
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George Frederick Charles Searle
1864 - 1954 (90 years)
George Frederick Charles Searle FRS was a British physicist and teacher. He also raced competitively as a cyclist while at the University of Cambridge. Biography Searle was born in Oakington, Cambridgeshire, England. His father was William George Searle.
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Francis G. Slack
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Francis Goddard Slack was an American physicist. He was a physics teacher, researcher, and administrator in academia who was renowned for placing equal emphasis on teaching and on research. Education Slack was born in Superior, Wisconsin on November 1, 1897. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Georgia in 1918. Thereupon, he entered the United States Army, where he was trained and commissioned as a pilot; he did not see combat in World War I, as the war ended before his graduation from pilot training. In 1921, he entered Columbia University; he received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1926.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Dove
1803 - 1879 (76 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove was a Prussian physicist and meteorologist. Early years Dove was born in Liegnitz in the Kingdom of Prussia. Dove studied history, philosophy, and the natural sciences at the University of Breslau from 1821 until 1824. In 1824 he continued his education at the University of Berlin, finishing in 1826. In 1826, he became a Privatdozent and in 1828 a Professor extraordinarius at the University of Königsberg. In 1829, he moved to Berlin and taught at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium.
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Georges Sagnac
1869 - 1928 (59 years)
Georges Sagnac was a French physicist who lent his name to the Sagnac effect, a phenomenon which is at the basis of interferometers and ring laser gyroscopes developed since the 1970s. Life and work Sagnac was born at Périgueux and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1889. While a lab assistant at the Sorbonne, he was one of the first in France to study X-rays, following Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. He belonged to a group of friends and scientists that notably included Pierre and Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin, and the mathematician Émile Borel. Marie Curie says that she and her husband had traded ideas with Sagnac around the time of the discovery of radioactivity.
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Walter H. Schottky
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Walter Hans Schottky was a German physicist who played a major early role in developing the theory of electron and ion emission phenomena, invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915 while working at Siemens, co-invented the ribbon microphone and ribbon loudspeaker along with Dr. Erwin Gerlach in 1924 and later made many significant contributions in the areas of semiconductor devices, technical physics and technology.
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Otto Lummer
1860 - 1925 (65 years)
Otto Richard Lummer was a German physicist and researcher. He was born in the city of Gera, Germany. With Leon Arons, Lummer helped to design and build the Arons–Lummer mercury-vapor lamp. Lummer primarily worked in the field of optics and thermal radiation. Lummer's findings, along with others, on black body radiators led Max Planck to reconcile his earlier Planck's law of black-body radiation by introducing the quantum hypothesis in 1900. In 1903, with Ernst Gehrcke, he developed the Lummer–Gehrcke interferometer. Lummer died in former Breslau, now Wrocław.
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José Antonio Balseiro
1919 - 1962 (43 years)
José Antonio Balseiro was an Argentine physicist. Balseiro studied at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in his home city, before moving to La Plata to study and research, obtaining a doctorate in physics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. His doctoral dissertation was directed by Dr. Guido Beck, an Austrian physicist who arrived as a refugee in 1943. In 1950 he received a scholarship granted by the British Council. Due to the limited funds provided by the scholarship, his wife and daughter remained in Argentina. Balseiro did his post-doctoral research at the University of Manchester, in the group directed by Léon Rosenfeld.
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Friedrich Kohlrausch
1840 - 1910 (70 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Kohlrausch was a German physicist who investigated the conductive properties of electrolytes and contributed to knowledge of their behaviour. He also investigated elasticity, thermoelasticity, and thermal conduction as well as magnetic and electrical precision measurements.
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Hans Ferdinand Mayer
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Hans Ferdinand Mayer was a German mathematician and physicist. He was the author of the "Oslo Report", a major military intelligence leak which revealed German technological secrets to the British Government shortly after the start of World War II.
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Ludwig Zehnder
1854 - 1949 (95 years)
Ludwig Louis Albert Zehnder was a Swiss physicist, one of the inventors of the Mach–Zehnder interferometer. Early life Zehnder studied mechanical engineering in Zurich from 1873 to 1875. After that, he ran a factory for electrical equipment in Basel for 15 years. However, this did not satisfy him in the long run and he went to Berlin in 1885 to study physics with Hermann von Helmholtz.
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Nikolai Kasterin
1869 - 1947 (78 years)
Nikolai Petrovich Kasterin was a physicist and a student of Aleksandr Stoletov. His 1903 doctoral dissertation, portions of which were published in German in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam under the sponsorship of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, is considered to be a pivotal contribution to multiple scattering theory by such experts as Paul Peter Ewald and Jan Korringa. The MST formalism is widely used for electronic structure calculations as well as diffraction theory, and is the subject of many books. He lived in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union.
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Giovanni Battista Riccioli
1598 - 1671 (73 years)
Giovanni Battista Riccioli, SJ was an Italian astronomer and a Catholic priest in the Jesuit order. He is known, among other things, for his experiments with pendulums and with falling bodies, for his discussion of 126 arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, and for introducing the current scheme of lunar nomenclature. He is also widely known for discovering the first double star. He argued that the rotation of the Earth should reveal itself because on a rotating Earth, the ground moves at different speeds at different times.
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Paul Ulrich Villard
1860 - 1934 (74 years)
Paul Ulrich Villard was a French chemist and physicist. He discovered gamma rays in 1900 while studying the radiation emanating from radium. Early research Villard was born in Saint-Germain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1881 and taught in several Lycées, ending with a Lycée in Montpellier. He would maintain a laboratory position at the Ecole Normale Supérieure until his retirement. At the time when he discovered what we now call gamma rays, Villard was working in the chemistry department of the École Normale Supérieure rue d'Ulm, Paris.
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Erich Regener
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Erich Rudolf Alexander Regener was a German physicist known primarily for the design and construction of instruments to measure cosmic ray intensity at various altitudes. He is also known for predicting a cosmic background radiation, for the invention of the scintillation counter which contributed to the discovery of the structure of the atom, for his calculation of the charge of an electron and for his early work on atmospheric ozone. He is also credited with the first use of rockets for scientific research.
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Edward Bouchet
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Edward Alexander Bouchet was an American physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale University in 1876. On the basis of his academic record he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1874, he became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.
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Ludvig Lorenz
1829 - 1891 (62 years)
Ludvig Valentin Lorenz was a Danish physicist and mathematician. He developed mathematical formulae to describe phenomena such as the relation between the refraction of light and the density of a pure transparent substance, and the relation between a metal's electrical and thermal conductivity and temperature .
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Werner Kolhörster
1887 - 1946 (59 years)
Werner Heinrich Gustav Kolhörster was a German physicist and a pioneer of research into cosmic rays. Kolhörster was born in Schwiebus , Brandenburg Province of Prussia. While attending the University of Halle, he studied physics under Friedrich Ernst Dorn.
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Carl Runge
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Carl David Tolmé Runge was a German mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist. He was co-developer and co-eponym of the Runge–Kutta method , in the field of what is today known as numerical analysis.
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