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,
#10151
Ptolemy
100 - 170 (70 years)
Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treat...
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Ernest Rutherford
1871 - 1937 (66 years)
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. Rutherford has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday". In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." He was the first Oceanian Nobel laureate, and the first to perform the awarded work in Canada.
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Richard Feynman
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.
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Anatoly Vlasov
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Anatoly Aleksandrovich Vlasov was a Russian, later Soviet, theoretical physicist prominent in the fields of statistical mechanics, kinetics, and especially in plasma physics. Biography Anatoly Vlasov was born in Balashov, in the family of a steamfitter. In 1927 he entered into the Moscow State University and graduated from the MSU in 1931. After the graduation Vlasov continued to work in the MSU, where he spent all his life, collaborating with Nobelists Pyotr Kapitsa, Lev Landau, and other leading physicists. He became a full Professor at the Moscow State University in 1944 and was the head ...
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Heinrich Schwabe
1789 - 1875 (86 years)
Samuel Heinrich Schwabe was a German astronomer remembered for his work on sunspots. Schwabe was born in Dessau, Germany. At first an apothecary, he turned his attention to astronomy, and in 1826 commenced his observations on sunspots. Schwabe was looking for a theoretical planet inside the orbit of Mercury, known as Vulcan. Because of the proximity to the Sun, it would have been very difficult to observe such a planet, and Schwabe believed one possibility to detect a new planet might be to see it during its transit in front of the Sun. For 17 years, from 1826 to 1843, on every clear day, Schwabe would scan the Sun and record its spots trying to detect any new planet among them.
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Marcel Brillouin
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Louis Marcel Brillouin was a French physicist and mathematician. Born in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy. There he attended the Lycée Condorcet. The Brillouin family returned to Saint-Martin-lès-Melle during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to escape the fighting. There he spent time teaching himself from his grandfather's philosophy books. After the war, he returned to Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874 and graduated in 1878. He became a physics assistant to Éleuthère Mascart at the Collège de...
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Theodor Wulf
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Theodor Wulf was a German physicist and Jesuit priest who was one of the first experimenters to detect excess atmospheric radiation. Theodor Wulf became a Jesuit priest at the age of 20, before studying physics with Walther Nernst at the University of Göttingen. He taught physics at Valkenburg, a Jesuit University from 1904 to 1914 and 1918-1935. He designed and built an electrometer which could detect the presence of energetic charged particles . Since natural radiation sources on the ground were detected by his electrometer, he predicted that if he moved far enough away from those sources h...
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Heber Doust Curtis
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Heber Doust Curtis was an American astronomer. He participated in 11 expeditions for the study of solar eclipses, and, as an advocate and theorist that additional galaxies existed outside of the Milky Way, was involved in the 1920 Shapley–Curtis Debate concerning the size and galactic structure of the universe.
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Albert Marth
1828 - 1897 (69 years)
Albert Marth was a German astronomer who worked in Britain and Ireland. Life After studying theology at the University of Berlin, his interest in astronomy and mathematics led him to study astronomy under C. A. F. Peters at the University of Königsberg.
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Edward Emerson Barnard
1857 - 1923 (66 years)
Edward Emerson Barnard was an American astronomer. He was commonly known as E. E. Barnard, and was recognized as a gifted observational astronomer. He is best known for his discovery of the high proper motion of Barnard's Star in 1916, which is named in his honor.
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Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve
1793 - 1864 (71 years)
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was a Baltic German astronomer and geodesist. He is best known for studying double stars and for initiating a triangulation survey later named Struve Geodetic Arc in his honor.
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Nicholas of Cusa
1401 - 1464 (63 years)
Nicholas of Cusa , also referred to as Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus , was a German Catholic cardinal, philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, and astronomer. One of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism, he made spiritual and political contributions in European history. A notable example of this is his mystical or spiritual writings on "learned ignorance," as well as his participation in power struggles between Rome and the German states of the Holy Roman Empire.
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Theon of Alexandria
335 - 400 (65 years)
Theon of Alexandria was a Greek scholar and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He edited and arranged Euclid's Elements and wrote commentaries on works by Euclid and Ptolemy. His daughter Hypatia also won fame as a mathematician.
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James David Forbes
1809 - 1868 (59 years)
James David Forbes was a Scottish physicist and glaciologist who worked extensively on the conduction of heat and seismology. Forbes was a resident of Edinburgh for most of his life, educated at its University and a professor there from 1833 until he became principal of the United College of St Andrews in 1859.
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Madhava of Sangamagrama
1350 - 1425 (75 years)
Mādhava of Sangamagrāma was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who is considered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of the greatest mathematician-astronomers of the Late Middle Ages, Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".
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David Rittenhouse
1732 - 1796 (64 years)
David Rittenhouse was an American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman, and public official. Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint.
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Regiomontanus
1436 - 1476 (40 years)
Johannes Müller von Königsberg , better known as Regiomontanus , was a mathematician, astrologer and astronomer of the German Renaissance, active in Vienna, Buda and Nuremberg. His contributions were instrumental in the development of Copernican heliocentrism in the decades following his death.
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Bhāskara II
1114 - 1185 (71 years)
Bhāskara II , also known as Bhāskarāchārya , and as Bhāskara II to avoid confusion with Bhāskara I, was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. From verses, in his main work, Siddhānta Shiromani , it can be inferred that he was born in 1114 in Vijjadavida and living in the Satpuda mountain ranges of Western Ghats, believed to be the town of Patana in Chalisgaon, located in present-day Khandesh region of Maharashtra by scholars. He is the only ancient mathematician who has been immortalized on a monument. In a temple in Maharashtra, an inscription supposedly created by his grandson Changadeva...
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Mihajlo Pupin
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin , also known as Michael Pupin, was a Serbian physicist, physical chemist and philanthropist based in the United States. Pupin is best known for his numerous patents, including a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire . Pupin was a founding member of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics on 3 March 1915, which later became NASA, and he participated in the founding of American Mathematical Society and American Physical Society.
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Horia Hulubei
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Horia Hulubei was a Romanian nuclear physicist, known for his contributions to the development of X-ray spectroscopy. Education and military service Born in Iași, he graduated in 1915 first in his class at the Boarding High School of Iași. He then enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Iași, but his studies were interrupted by the entry of Romania in World War I; conscripted into the army, he fought as a second lieutenant at the battles of Nămoloasa, Băltăreți, and Mărășești in the summer of 1917. General Henri Mathias Berthelot, the head of the French military mission to Ro...
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Karol Olszewski
1846 - 1915 (69 years)
Karol Stanisław Olszewski was a Polish chemist, mathematician and physicist. Together with Zygmunt Wróblewski, he was the first scientist in the world to liquify oxygen and nitrogen in 1883. Biography Olszewski was a graduate of Kazimierz Brodziński High School in Tarnów . He studied at Kraków's Jagiellonian University in the departments of mathematics and physics, and chemistry and biology. He carried out his first experiments using a personally improved compressor, compressing and condensing carbon dioxide.
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Svein Rosseland
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Svein Rosseland was a Norwegian astrophysicist and a pioneer in the field of theoretical astrophysics. Biography Svein Rosseland was born in Kvam, in Hardanger, Norway. Rosseland grew up the youngest of nine siblings. He went to his final exams in Haugesund in 1917 and then went to the University of Oslo. After only three semesters at the University he left in 1919 to work as an assistant professor with the meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes at the Bergen School of Meteorology. In 1920 he went to the Institute of Physics in Copenhagen, where he met Niels Bohr and other prominent physicists, and where he wrote two seminal papers.
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Wilhelm Westphal
1882 - 1978 (96 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Westphal was a German physicist. From 1918, he was a professor at the University of Berlin. During the period 1922 to 1924, he was also an expert adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Arts and Culture. From 1928, he was simultaneously a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin. His position at the former ended when it fell in the Russian sector at the close of World War II, but he achieved emeritus status at the latter in 1955.
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Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
1778 - 1850 (72 years)
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume , for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.
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Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen was a Dutch physicist known for her early contributions to the theory of magnetism. She studied at Leiden University under the guidance of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, obtaining her doctorate in 1919. Her thesis explained why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect, a result now referred to as the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem. She continued to investigate magnetic materials at the "Technische Hogeschool Delft" , first as "assistant" between September 1920 and April 1947, and then she was promoted to "lector in de theoretische en toegepaste natuurkunde" .
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Orest Khvolson
1852 - 1934 (82 years)
Orest Danilovich Khvolson or Chwolson was a Russian and later Soviet physicist and honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . He is most noted for being one of the first to study the gravitational lens effect.
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Heinrich Gustav Magnus
1802 - 1870 (68 years)
Heinrich Gustav Magnus was a notable German experimental scientist. His training was mostly in chemistry but his later research was mostly in physics. He spent the great bulk of his career at the University of Berlin, where he is remembered for his laboratory teaching as much as for his original research. He did not use his first given name, and was known throughout his life as Gustav Magnus.
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Maria Mitchell
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar College in 1865. She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association ...
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Stefan Meyer
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Stefan Meyer was an Austrian physicist involved in research on radioactivity. He became director of the Institute for Radium Research in Vienna and received the Lieben Prize in 1913 for his research on radium. He was the brother of Hans Leopold Meyer who was also awarded the Lieben Prize.
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Enrico Persico
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Enrico Persico was an Italian physicist notable for propagating the field of quantum mechanics in Italy. He was a professor at the University of Turin and is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Ugo Fano.
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Johannes de Sacrobosco
1195 - 1256 (61 years)
Johannes de Sacrobosco, also written Ioannes de Sacro Bosco, later called John of Holywood or John of Holybush , was a scholar, monk, and astronomer who taught at the University of Paris. He wrote a short introduction to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Judging from the number of manuscript copies that survive today, for the next 400 years it became the most widely read book on that subject. He also wrote a short textbook which was widely read and influential in Europe during the later medieval centuries as an introduction to astronomy. In his longest book, on the computation of the date of Ea...
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Bruno Touschek
1921 - 1978 (57 years)
Bruno Touschek was an Austrian physicist, a survivor of the Holocaust, and initiator of research on electron-positron colliders. Biography Touschek was born and attended school in Vienna. In 1937, he was not allowed to finish high school since his mother was Jewish. He passed the final year exam in a different school as an external pupil. Shortly after he started studying physics and mathematics at the University in Vienna, he again had to quit for racial reasons. Thanks to a couple of friends, he could keep on studying in Hamburg, where nobody knew of his origins. In order to make a living, ...
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Ole Rømer
1644 - 1710 (66 years)
Ole Christensen Rømer was a Danish astronomer who, in 1676, made the first measurement of the speed of light and discovery that light travels at a finite speed. Rømer also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between two fixed points, namely the points at which water respectively boils and freezes.
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Marcello Conversi
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Marcello Conversi was an Italian particle physicist. He is best known for his 1946 cosmic ray experiment where he showed that the "mesotron", now known as the muon, was not a strongly interacting particle.
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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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