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,
#10351
Carl Eckart
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Carl Henry Eckart was an American physicist, physical oceanographer, geophysicist, and administrator. He co-developed the Wigner–Eckart theorem and is also known for the Eckart conditions in quantum mechanics, and the Eckart–Young theorem in linear algebra.
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Wolfgang Pauli
1900 - 1958 (58 years)
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.
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Fritz Zwicky
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Fritz Zwicky was a Swiss astronomer. He worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy. In 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to postulate the existence of unseen dark matter, describing it as "".
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John Stewart Bell
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
John Stewart Bell FRS was a physicist from Northern Ireland and the originator of Bell's theorem, an important theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden-variable theories. In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for work on Bell inequalities and the experimental validation of Bell's theorem.
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Robert Bruce Lindsay
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Robert Bruce Lindsay was an American physicist and physics professor, known for his prolific authorship of physics books in acoustics, and historical and philosophical analyses of physics. Biography R Bruce Lindsay's January 1, 1900, birth date hailed a new century. At the age of 20, he received both a BA and an MS in physics from Brown University. Before receiving his Ph.D. for atomic models of alkali metals from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1924, he spent the 1922–23 academic year as a Fellow of The American-Scandinavian Foundation at the University of Copenhagen under Niels Bohr and Hans Kramers.
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Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff, Sr. was an American scientist and pioneer of X-ray crystallography. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1949 and Foreign member of the Royal Society, on April 19, 1951.
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Brian Nord
Brian D. Nord is an American astrophysicist and machine learning researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory . Early life and education Nord grew up in Wisconsin. Nord studied physics at the Johns Hopkins University, graduating with a B.A. in physics in 2003, and went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he got a PhD in physics. Nord's doctoral dissertation is titled Virtual Sky Surveys and Multi-wavelength Investigations of Galaxy Clusters.
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Otto Struve
1897 - 1963 (66 years)
Otto Struve was a Russian-American astronomer of Baltic German origins. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as Otto Lyudvigovich Struve ; however, he spent most of his life and his entire scientific career in the United States. Otto was the descendant of famous astronomers of the Struve family; he was the son of Ludwig Struve, grandson of Otto Wilhelm von Struve and great-grandson of Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve. He was also the nephew of Karl Hermann Struve.
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Victor Francis Hess
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Victor Franz Hess was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays. Biography He was born to Vinzenz Hess and Serafine Edle von Grossbauer-Waldstätt, in Waldstein Castle, near Peggau in Styria, Austria, on 24 June 1883. His father was a royal forester in Prince Louis of Oettingen-Wallerstein's service. He attended secondary school at Graz Gymnasium from 1893 to 1901.
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John D. Eshelby
1916 - 1981 (65 years)
John Douglas Eshelby FRS was a scientist in micromechanics. He made significant contributions to the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including important aspects of the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.
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Douglas Hartree
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano.
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Harrie Massey
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey was an Australian mathematical physicist who worked primarily in the fields of atomic and atmospheric physics. A graduate of the University of Melbourne and Cambridge University, where he earned his doctorate at the Cavendish Laboratory, Massey became an independent lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1933. He was appointed Goldsmid Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London, in 1938. During the Second World War, Massey worked at the Admiralty Research Laboratory , where he helped devise countermeasures ...
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Lawrence Bragg
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Sir William Lawrence Bragg, was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays"; an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography.
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Louis de Broglie
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.
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John Lighton Synge
1897 - 1995 (98 years)
John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician and physicist, whose seven-decade career included significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the USA. He was a prolific author and influential mentor, and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity.
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Elliott Waters Montroll
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Elliott Waters Montroll was an American scientist and mathematician. Education Elliott Montroll was born on May 4, 1916, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his elementary and high school education at the Dormont Public Schools. In 1933 he entered the University of Pittsburgh and in 1937 he received a BS degree in Chemistry. From 1937 until 1939 he was a graduate assistant in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and during the first semester of the school year 1939–1940 he carried out research in the Chemistry Department of Columbia University. He was awarded a ...
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William Reginald Dean
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
William Reginald Dean was a British applied mathematician and fluid dynamicist. His research interests included Stokes flow, solid mechanics, and flow in curved channels. The Dean number bears his name.
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Gregory Wannier
1911 - 1983 (72 years)
Gregory Hugh Wannier was a Swiss physicist. He developed a complete set of orthogonal functions known as the Wannier functions which became tools of the trade for solid-state theorists. He also had made contributions to ferromagnetic theory via the Ising model. The Kramers–Wannier duality yields the exact location of the critical point for the Ising model on the square lattice.
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Hans Pettersson
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Prof Hans Pettersson FRSFor HFRSE RSAS was a 20th century Swedish physicist and oceanographer. Early life Hans Pettersson was born in Forshalla near Gothenburg on 26 August 1888, the son of the chemist and oceanographer Otto Pettersson . Hans Pettersson studied Sciences at Uppsala University, graduating in 1909.
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Hans Kramers
1894 - 1952 (58 years)
Hendrik Anthony "Hans" Kramers was a Dutch physicist who worked with Niels Bohr to understand how electromagnetic waves interact with matter and made important contributions to quantum mechanics and statistical physics.
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Eugene Guth
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Eugene Guth was a Hungarian American physicist who made contributions to polymer physics and to nuclear and solid state physics. He was awarded a Ph.D. in theoretical physics by the University of Vienna in 1928. He was a postdoctoral research associate with Wolfgang Pauli at the Austrian-German Science Foundation, Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and University of Leipzig, with Werner Heisenberg from 1930 to 1931. He was professor at the University of Vienna and the University of Notre Dame 1937-1955. He was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1955 to 1971.
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Isidor Isaac Rabi
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Isidor Isaac Rabi was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. He was also one of the first scientists in the United States to work on the cavity magnetron, which is used in microwave radar and microwave ovens.
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Karl Taylor Compton
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Karl Taylor Compton was a prominent American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1930 to 1948. The early years Karl Taylor Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio, on September 14, 1887, the eldest of three brothers and one sister, Mary. His father, Elias Compton, was from an old American Presbyterian family, and his mother, Otelia Augspurger Compton, was from an Alsatian and Hessian Mennonite family that had recently immigrated to the United States. He came from a remarkably accomplished family in which his brother Arthur became a prominent physicist and si...
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Ira Sprague Bowen
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Ira Sprague Bowen was an American physicist and astronomer. In 1927 he discovered that nebulium was not really a chemical element but instead doubly ionized oxygen. Life and work Bowen was born in Seneca Falls, New York in 1898 to Philinda Sprague and James Bowen. Due to frequent moves of his family he was home schooled until his father died in 1908. From that point on he attended Houghton College where his mother worked as teacher. After graduation from high school in 1915 Bowen stayed at the junior college of Houghton College, and later joined Oberlin College from which he graduated in 1919.
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Robert Hofstadter
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Robert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons".
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Donald MacCrimmon MacKay
1922 - 1987 (65 years)
Donald MacCrimmon MacKay was a British physicist, and professor at the Department of Communication and Neuroscience at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, known for his contributions to information theory and the theory of brain organisation.
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Edmund Clifton Stoner
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Edmund Clifton Stoner FRS was a British theoretical physicist. He is principally known for his work on the origin and nature of itinerant ferromagnetism , including the collective electron theory of ferromagnetism and the Stoner criterion for ferromagnetism. Stoner made significant contributions to the electron configurations in the periodic table.
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Marcel Schein
1902 - 1960 (58 years)
Marcel Schein was a Slovak-born American physicist, best known for his work on cosmic rays. He is the father of former MIT professor Edgar Schein. Biography Marcel Schein was born in Trstená, Kingdom of Hungary on June 9, 1902.
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Earle K. Plyler
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Earle Keith Plyler , was an American physicist and an important pioneer of infrared spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy. He is the namesake of the "Earle K. Plyler Prize" of the American Physical Society.
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Richard von Mises
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:
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Alfred Harrison Joy
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Alfred Harrison Joy was an astronomer best known for his work on stellar distances, the radial motion of stars, and variable stars. A crater on the Moon has been named in his honor. Early years He was born in Greenville, Illinois, the son of F.P. Joy, a prominent clothing merchant in Greenville and one-time mayor of the town. He received a BA from Greenville College in 1903 and an MA from Oberlin College the next year.
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Henry G. Booker
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Henry George Booker was an Anglo-American physicist and electrical engineer. Booker was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was head of panel on stratospheric pollution. He was a head of the Maths Group at Worth focused on radio propagation. He was director of the Cornell University’s school of electrical engineering, and the founder of department of electrical engineering and computer science at University of California, San Diego. The New York Times called Booker "worldwide authority on radio wave propagation", as well as "one of the world's foremost authorities on the propag...
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Harvey Fletcher
1884 - 1981 (97 years)
Harvey Fletcher was an American physicist. Known as the "father of stereophonic sound", he is credited with the invention of the 2-A audiometer and an early electronic hearing aid. He was an investigator into the nature of speech and hearing, and made contributions in acoustics, electrical engineering, speech, medicine, music, atomic physics, sound pictures, and education. Following his death, he was credited with collaborating with his doctoral advisor, Robert Millikan, on the Nobel-prize winning oil drop experiment which first determined the charge of the electron.
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Howard P. Robertson
1903 - 1961 (58 years)
Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
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Harold Hartley
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Brigadier-General Sir Harold Brewer Hartley was a British physical chemist. He moved from academia to important positions in business and industry, including serving as Chairman of the British Overseas Airways Corporation.
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Clyde Cowan
1919 - 1974 (55 years)
Clyde Lorrain Cowan Jr was an American physicist and the co-discoverer of the neutrino along with Frederick Reines. The discovery was made in 1956 in the neutrino experiment. Frederick Reines received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 in both their names.
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Emil Konopinski
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Emil John Konopinski was an American nuclear scientist of Polish descent. His parents were Joseph and Sophia . He was, with George Uhlenbeck as thesis advisor, a 1934 Ph.D graduate of the University of Michigan, and later a professor of physics at Indiana University. His doctoral students include Eugene Greuling. During WW II Konopinski collaborated with Enrico Fermi on the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago. He also joined the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapon .
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Willem Jacob Luyten
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Willem Jacob Luyten was a Dutch-American astronomer. Life Jacob Luyten was born in Semarang, Java, at the time part of the Dutch East Indies. His mother was Cornelia M. Francken and his father Jacob Luyten, a teacher of French.
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Walter Baade
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade was a German astronomer who worked in the United States from 1931 to 1959. Biography The son of a teacher, Baade finished school in 1912. He then studied maths, physics and astronomy at the universities of Münster and Göttingen. After receiving his PhD in 1919, Baade worked at Hamburg Observatory at Bergedorf from 1919 to 1931. There in 1920 he discovered 944 Hidalgo, the first of a class of minor planets now called Centaurs which cross the orbits of giant planets.
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Hugh Latimer Dryden
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Hugh Latimer Dryden was an American aeronautical scientist and civil servant. He served as NASA Deputy Administrator from August 19, 1958, until his death. Biography Early life and education Dryden was born in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the son of Samuel Isaac and Nova Hill Culver Dryden, and was named after a popular local Methodist clergyman. During the financial panic of 1907, his father lost his job and the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland.
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Alexey A. Petrov
Alexey A Petrov is an American physicist known for his theoretical research in the area of physics of heavy quarks. Petrov is a USC Endowed Chair in Physics and the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South Carolina. Previously he was a professor of physics at Wayne State University. He is the first particle theorist in the State of Michigan to receive National Science Foundation's CAREER award
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Emilio Segrè
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Emilio Gino Segrè was an Italian-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 along with Owen Chamberlain.
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Robert Karplus
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Robert Karplus was a theoretical physicist and leader in the field of science education. Early life Robert Karplus was born in Vienna, where he lived until the German occupation of Austria in 1938. He emigrated with his mother and brother to escape the Anschluss. After a six-month stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States and settled in the Boston area. He entered Harvard University in 1943 and completed his Ph.D at the age of twenty-one. His thesis under E. Bright Wilson was on microwave spectroscopy and included both experimental and theoretical work. He was recognized by t...
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Leo Goldberg
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Leopold Goldberg was an American astronomer who held professorships at Harvard and the University of Michigan and the directorships of several major observatories. He was president of both the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society. His research focused on solar physics and the application of atomic physics to astronomy, and he led many of the early efforts to study the Sun from space telescopes.
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Charlotte Moore Sitterly
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Charlotte Emma Moore Sitterly was an American astronomer. She is known for her extensive spectroscopic studies of the Sun and chemical elements. Her tables of data are known for their reliability and are still used regularly.
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Samuel Goudsmit
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. Life and career Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Netherlands, of Dutch Jewish descent. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit, a manufacturer of water-closets, and Marianne Goudsmit-Gompers, who ran a millinery shop. In 1943, his parents were deported to a concentration camp by the German occupiers of the Netherlands and were murdered there. Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1927. ...
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Paul I. Richards
1923 - 1978 (55 years)
Paul Irving Richards was a physicist and applied mathematician. Richard's is best known to electrical engineers for the eponymous Richards' transformation. However, much of his career was concerned with radiation transport and fluid flow. Notably, he produced one of the earliest models of traffic waves on busy highways.
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Allan C. G. Mitchell
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
Allan Charles Gray Mitchell was an American physicist. He was a professor and head of the Indiana University Bloomington department of physics. Early life and education Mitchell was born in 1902, the son of Milly Gray and astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell. He earned a master of arts in physics from University of Virginia in 1924. He completed his doctorate in physical chemistry at California Institute of Technology from 1924 to 1927. His advisor was Richard C. Tolman. He completed postdoctorate work in physics with James Franck and Arnold Sommerfeld.
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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Henry Brose
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Henry Herman Leopold Adolph Brose was an Australian physicist and translator. During the First World War, he was interned as a civilian prisoner in Germany. He was the first Australian to be awarded a PhD from the University of Oxford. Brose held the Lancaster-Spencer Chair of Physics at the University of Nottingham from 1931-1935, and he translated a number of key physics texts from German into English. His translations of crucial German texts on Einstein's theory of General Relativity have been essential for the theory's reception in the English-speaking world. In 1935, Brose moved to Australia where he engaged in cancer research.
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