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,
#10301
Christian Møller
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Christian Møller was a Danish chemist and physicist who made fundamental contributions to the theory of relativity, theory of gravitation and quantum chemistry. He is known for Møller–Plesset perturbation theory and Møller scattering.
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Franz Ernst Neumann
1798 - 1895 (97 years)
Franz Ernst Neumann was a German mineralogist and physicist. Biography Neumann was born in Joachimsthal, Margraviate of Brandenburg, near Berlin. In 1815 he interrupted his studies at Berlin to serve as a volunteer in the Hundred Days against Napoleon, and was wounded in the Battle of Ligny. Subsequently, he entered Berlin University as a student of theology, but soon turned to scientific subjects. His earlier papers were mostly concerned with crystallography, and the reputation they gained him led to his appointment as Privatdozent at the University of Königsberg, where in 1828 he became extraordinary, and in 1829 ordinary, professor of mineralogy and physics.
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Wilhelm Holtz
1836 - 1913 (77 years)
Wilhelm Holtz was a German physicist who was a native of Saatel bei Barth, Mecklenburg. Between 1857 and 1862, he studied physics and natural sciences in Berlin, Dijon and Edinburgh. Afterwards, he performed experiments with electricity in Berlin, and later became associated with research at the universities of Halle and Greifswald, where in 1884 he became a professor of physics.
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Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
1736 - 1806 (70 years)
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French officer, engineer, and physicist. He is best known as the eponymous discoverer of what is now called Coulomb's law, the description of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. He also did important work on friction.
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Aldo Pontremoli
1896 - 1928 (32 years)
Aldo Pontremoli was an Italian physicist who held a chair of theoretical physics at the physics department of the University of Milan from 1926 and who founded and directed the Institute of Advanced Physics at the University of Milan from 1924 until his disappearance and presumed death in May 1928. Pontremoli was one of the six men who disappeared with the airborne envelope of the airship Italia after it had crashed on the Arctic ice on 25 May 1928.
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Johann Franz Encke
1791 - 1865 (74 years)
Johann Franz Encke was a German astronomer. Among his activities, he worked on the calculation of the periods of comets and asteroids, measured the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and made observations of the planet Saturn.
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George William Hill
1838 - 1914 (76 years)
George William Hill was an American astronomer and mathematician. Working independently and largely in isolation from the wider scientific community, he made major contributions to celestial mechanics and to the theory of ordinary differential equations. The importance of his work was explicitly acknowledged by Henri Poincaré in 1905. In 1909 Hill was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal, "on the ground of his researches in mathematical astronomy". Today, he is chiefly remembered for the Hill differential equation.
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Laura Bassi
1711 - 1778 (67 years)
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti was an Italian physicist and academic. Recognized and depicted as "Minerva" , she was the first woman to have a doctorate in science, and the second woman in the world to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Working at the University of Bologna, she was also the first salaried female teacher in a university. At one time the highest paid employee of the university, by the end of her life Bassi held two other professorships. She was also the first female member of any scientific establishment, when she was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute o...
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Bart Bok
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Bartholomeus Jan "Bart" Bok was a Dutch-American astronomer, teacher, and lecturer. He is best known for his work on the structure and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, and for the discovery of Bok globules, which are small, densely dark clouds of interstellar gas and dust that can be seen silhouetted against brighter backgrounds. Bok suggested that these globules may be in the process of contracting, before forming into stars.
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Karl Ludwig Harding
1765 - 1834 (69 years)
Karl Ludwig Harding was a German astronomer, who discovered Juno, the third asteroid of the main-belt in 1804. Life and career Harding was born in Lauenburg. From 1786–89, he was educated at the University of Göttingen, where he studied theology, mathematics, and physics. In 1796 Johann Hieronymus Schröter hired Harding as a tutor for his son. Schröter was an enthusiastic astronomer and owner of a well-equipped observatory in Lilienthal near Bremen, where Harding was soon appointed observer and inspector.
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George B. Pegram
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
George Braxton Pegram was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. He graduated from Trinity College in 1895, and taught high school before becoming a teaching assistant in physics at Columbia University in 1900. He was to spend the rest of his working life at Columbia, taking his doctorate there in 1903 and becoming a full professor in 1918. His administrative career began as early as 1913 when he became the department's executive officer. By 1918, he was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences but he resigned in 1930 to relaunch ...
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Ivan Puluj
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Ivan Puluj was a Ukrainian physicist and inventor, who has been championed as an early developer of the use of X-rays for medical imaging. His contributions were largely neglected until the end of the 20th century.
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Walther Kossel
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Walther Ludwig Julius Kossel was a German physicist known for his theory of the chemical bond , Sommerfeld–Kossel displacement law of atomic spectra, the Kossel-Stranski model for crystal growth, and the Kossel effect. Walther was the son of Albrecht Kossel who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1910.
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Klara Döpel
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Klara Renate Döpel was a feminist and a German lawyer until 1933. Then she married the German nuclear physicist Robert Döpel, and they worked together as a team at Leipzig University studying nuclear reactor configurations for the German nuclear energy project. Klara was killed in an air raid near the end of World War II.
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Pierre Weiss
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Pierre-Ernest Weiss was a French physicist who specialized in magnetism. He developed the domain theory of ferromagnetism in 1907. Weiss domainss and the Weiss magneton are named after him. Weiss also developed the molecular or mean field theory, which is often called Weiss-mean-field theory, that led to the discovery of the Curie–Weiss law. Alongside Auguste Piccard, Pierre Weiss is considered one of the first discoverers of the magnetocaloric effect in 1917.
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Henrietta Swan Leavitt
1868 - 1921 (53 years)
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the understanding of the nature of the universe. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a human computer, tasked with measuring photographic plates to catalog the positions and brightness of stars. This work led her to discover the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables. Leavitt's discovery provided astronomers with the first standard candle with which to measure the distance t...
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Wilhelm Müller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Wilhelm Carl Gottlieb Müller was a German physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. He is best known as the successor of Arnold Sommerfeld as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich.
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Pierre Méchain
1744 - 1804 (60 years)
Pierre François André Méchain was a French astronomer and surveyor who, with Charles Messier, was a major contributor to the early study of deep-sky objects and comets. Life Pierre Méchain was born in Laon, the son of the ceiling designer and plasterer Pierre François Méchain and Marie–Marguerite Roze. He displayed mental gifts in mathematics and physics but had to give up his studies for lack of money. However, his talents in astronomy were noticed by Jérôme Lalande, for whom he became a friend and proof-reader of the second edition of his book "L'Astronomie". Lalande then secured a position...
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Hasan Tahsini
1811 - 1881 (70 years)
Hoxhë Hasan Tahsini or simply Hoxha Tahsim was an Albanian alim, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. He was the first rector of Istanbul University and one of the founders of the Central Committee for Defending Albanian Rights. Tahsini is regarded as one of the most prominent scholars of the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
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Friedrich Bopp
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik and with the Uranverein. He was a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a President of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. He signed the Göttingen Manifesto.
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Nevil Maskelyne
1732 - 1811 (79 years)
Nevil Maskelyne was the fifth British Astronomer Royal. He held the office from 1765 to 1811. He was the first person to scientifically measure the mass of the planet Earth. He created The Nautical Almanac, in full the British Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris for the Meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich using Tobias Mayer's corrections for Euler's Lunar Theory tables.
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Fritz Sauter
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Fritz Eduard Josef Maria Sauter was an Austrian-German physicist who worked mostly in quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics. Education From 1924 to 1928, Sauter studied mathematics and physics at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. He received his doctorate in 1928 under Arthur March, with a thesis on Kirchhoff’s theory of diffraction. After graduation, he did postdoctoral studies with Arnold Sommerfeld and was his assistant at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In January 1931, Sommerfeld recommended Sauter to Max Born, director of the Institute of Theoretical Phy...
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Ulugh Beg
1394 - 1449 (55 years)
Mīrzā Muhammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrukh , better known as Ulugh Beg , was a Timurid sultan, as well as an astronomer and mathematician. Ulugh Beg was notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry, as well as his general interests in the arts and intellectual activities. It is thought that he spoke five languages: Arabic, Persian, Chaghatai Turkic, Mongolian, and a small amount of Chinese. During his rule the Timurid Empire achieved the cultural peak of the Timurid Renaissance through his attention and patronage. Samarkand was captured and give...
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Pierre Gassendi
1592 - 1655 (63 years)
Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, Catholic priest, astronomer, and mathematician. While he held a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
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Johann Bayer
1572 - 1625 (53 years)
Johann Bayer was a German lawyer and uranographerer . He was born in Rain, Lower Bavaria, in 1572. At twenty, in 1592 he began his study of philosophy and law at the University of Ingolstadt, after which he moved to Augsburg to begin work as a lawyer, becoming legal adviser to the city council in 1612.
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Philolaus
470 BC - 390 BC (80 years)
Philolaus was a Greek Pythagorean and pre-Socratic philosopher. He was born in a Greek colony in Italy and migrated to Greece. Philolaus has been called one of three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition and the most outstanding figure in the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras developed a school of philosophy that was dominated by both mathematics and mysticism. Most of what is known today about the Pythagorean astronomical system is derived from Philolaus's views. He may have been the first to write about Pythagorean doctrine. According to August Böckh , who cites Nicomachus, Philo...
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Friedrich Paschen
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Louis Carl Heinrich Friedrich Paschen , was a German physicist, known for his work on electrical discharges. He is also known for the Paschen series, a series of hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region that he first observed in 1908. He established the now widely used Paschen curve in his article "Über die zum Funkenübergang in Luft, Wasserstoff und Kohlensäure bei verschiedenen Drücken erforderliche Potentialdifferenz". He is known for the Paschen-Back effect, which is the Zeeman effect's becoming non-linear at high magnetic field. He helped explain the hollow cathode effect in 1916...
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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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