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,
#10401
Rose Mooney-Slater
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Rose Camille LeDieu Mooney-Slater was a professor of physics at the Newcomb College of the Tulane University and the first female X-ray crystallographer in the United States. Life Rose Camille LeDieu was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Mooney-Slater received a B.S. and M.S. in physics from the Newcomb College of the Tulane University in 1926 and 1929, respectively. In 1932, she received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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Johannes Kuenen
1866 - 1922 (56 years)
Johannes Petrus Kuenen was a Dutch physicist. Biography Kuenen was the son of the professor of theology Abraham Kuenen and his wife Wiepkje Muurling. His son Philip Henry Kuenen was professor of geology. From 1884 to 1889 he studied at the University of Leiden, where he graduated in 1892. He became a professor in physics in 1895 at University College, Dundee in Dundee, Scotland, where he worked until 1907. For most of this period the College was part of the University of St Andrews. While at Dundee he performed early experiments with x-rays with the physiologist Edward Waymouth Reid. In 1907 he was appointed professor of physics at Leiden University.
Go to Profile#10403
Howard Turner Barnes
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Howard Turner Barnes was an American-Canadian physicist who specialized in calorimetry, electrolytes, ice formation and ice engineering. Education and career In 1879, Howard T. Barnes moved with his family from Massachusetts to Montreal. where his father was appointed minister of Montreal's Unitarian church. After attending secondary school in Montreal, he entered in 1889 McGill University, where he received in 1893 his bachelor's degree in physics and, after working there as a demonstrator in chemistry, an M.S. in Applied Science in 1896. He became at McGill a demonstrator in physics and worked under Hugh L.
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Carl Leo Stearns
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Carl Leo Stearns was an American astronomer. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1917 with high honors in general scholarship and special honors in mathematics, Stearns received his PhD from Yale University. He became an instructor in mathematics and astronomy at Wesleyan in 1919. He became an assistant professor in 1920, then an associate professor in 1942 and a full professor in 1944. He served as chairman of the astronomy department at Wesleyan, then in 1960 he was named as emeritus Fisk professor of astronomy. From 1960–71, after serving as an assistant, he became director of t...
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Hans Georg Küssner
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hans Georg Küssner was a German physicist and aeronautical scientist known for his work in the field of aeroelasticity. Work Hans Georg Küssner was born on September 14, 1900, in Bartenstein, then part of the East Prussian district of in the German Reich. Küssner studied at the Technical University of the Free City of Danzig and received his doctorate in 1928 with his dissertation "Das wirtschaftliche Ozeanflugzeug" under Viktor Rembold. In the same year he moved to the German Research Institute for Aviation in Berlin, where he worked on the aircraft problem of flutter, which was reflected ...
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Samuel Arthur Saunder
1852 - 1912 (60 years)
Samuel Arthur Saunder was a British mathematician and selenographer who taught at Wellington College, Berkshire. In 1894 he became a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1908 he was made Gresham Professor of Astronomy giving public lectures on the subject.
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Michael Radaković
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Michael Radaković was an Austrian physicist. From 1884, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Graz, where he was influenced by the philosophical teachings of Alexius Meinong . Following his studies at Graz, he continued his education in Berlin, where his instructors included Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff. He received his habilitation at the University of Innsbruck, where in 1902 he became an associate professor.
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John Nelson Stockwell
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
John Nelson Robin Stockwell was an American astronomer and mathematician. Life and Work John Nelson Stockwell grew up with an uncle and aunt on a farm in Brecksville, Ohio. He showed early mathematical talent and became interested in astronomy at the age of 12, when he experienced his first lunar eclipse. Largely self-taught, he acquired outstanding mathematical knowledge and skill. From 1854 he worked as a human computer for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey under Benjamin Apthorp Gould, with whom he had been friends for decades. In 1861 he was appointed to a similar position at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
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Donald Sadler
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Donald Harry Sadler was an English astronomer and mathematician who developed an international reputation for his work in preparing astronomical and navigational almanacs. He worked as the Superintendent of His Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office from 1937 to 1971.
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William Rudolph Kanne
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
William Rudolph Kanne , was a physicist, inventor and pioneer in the field of gas flow through ionization detectors, a member of the group responsible for the first self-sustained nuclear chain fission reaction at Staggs Field in Chicago, and participated in the Manhattan Project at the Chicago, Oak Ridge and Hanford sites.
Go to Profile#10411
Fritz Cohn
1866 - 1921 (55 years)
Fritz Cohn, RAS Associate was a German astronomer and professor of astronomy at the University of Berlin. Throughout his career he worked at numerous observatories and was director of the Astronomical Calculation Institute. His main work was in astrometry and minor planets, although he published star catalogues and oversaw the production of journals in his later life.
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Hiram Perkins
1833 - 1924 (91 years)
Hiram Mills Perkins was Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Ohio Wesleyan University and benefactor of the Perkins Telescope in the Perkins Observatory. He helped build to observatory buildings and also left an endowment for the school, and also his house was later used as a dormitory before it was sold off.
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Heinrich Siedentopf
1906 - 1963 (57 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Siedentopf was a German astronomer and physicist. He was born in Hannover. In 1930, he became an assistant to Heinrich Vogt, then joined the national observatory in Heidelberg. Between 1940–46 he was a professor of astronomy at the University of Jena, and director of the observatory. In 1949, he was a professor at the University of Tübingen, where he later died of a heart attack.
Go to Profile#10414
Julius Heinrich Franz
1847 - 1913 (66 years)
Julius Heinrich Franz was a German astronomer. Franz was born in Rummelsburg, Prussian Pomerania, he studied at the Universities of Greifswald, Halle and Berlin, after which he was the principal astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg. In 1882 he was a member of a team sent to the town of Aiken, South Carolina, to observe the transit of Venus. Toward the end of the century he replaced Johann Galle as the director of the observatory at the University of Breslau.
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Leonard Benedict Loeb
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Leonard Benedict Loeb was a Swiss-born American physicist. He was the son of Jacques Loeb a German-born American physiologist and biologist. Leonard B. Loeb wrote a number of physics books, including Atomic Structure.
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Dimitrios Stroumpos
1806 - 1890 (84 years)
Dimitrios Stroumpos was an astronomer, physicist, mathematician, author, and professor. He was a theoretical physicist. He was a pioneer in 19th-century Greek physics. He helped develop the physics department at the University of Athens. He was the dean. He did extensive research in the field of physics namely: the study of air and energy fields, electricity, magnetism, and telephones. He also studied the motion of molecules and developed a system of scientific observation. He developed the Strombo compass. His contemporaries at the time were Greek scientists Vassilios Lakon, Georgios Konstantinos Vouris, and Ioannis Papadakis.
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John Carroll
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Sir John Anthony Carroll was a British astronomer and physicist. In the 1920s he worked at the Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge, UK with F.J.M. Stratton and Richard van der Riet Woolley. He made major technological advances, inventing a high resolution spectrometer, and a coronal camera.
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Charles Elwood Mendenhall
1872 - 1935 (63 years)
Charles Elwood Mendenhall was an American physicist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early life Charles Elwood Mendenhall was born on August 1, 1872, in Columbus, Ohio. He was the son of Susan Allen and Thomas Corwin Mendenhall. At the age of six to nine, he lived in Japan while his father taught at the University of Tokyo. There he became friends with John Morse, son of Edward S. Morse.
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Olexander Smakula
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Olexander Smakula was a Ukrainian physicist known for the invention of anti-reflective lens coatings based on optical interference. Biography Smakula was born to a peasant family in Dobrovody village, Austria-Hungary . After finishing his studies at the Ternopil gymnasium he applied to the University of Göttingen from which he graduated in 1927. Afterwards he worked as an assistant of Prof. Robert Pohl. After his short stay at Odessa University, Smakula returned to Germany as head of an optics laboratory in Heidelberg. From 1934 he worked at the Carl Zeiss AG company in Jena. While at Zeiss,...
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Giovanni Camillo Glorioso
1572 - 1643 (71 years)
Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. He was a friend of Marino Ghetaldi and successor of Galileo Galilei in Pisa, then in Padua. Life Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was born in the village of Mercato or Santa Maria a Vico of Giffoni Valle Piana. He had a correspondence with Galileo Galilei in 1604 and he replaced him at the University of Padua, with an income of 350 florins per year, in 1613. He led observations on the 1618 comet, on Mars, and on some aspects of Saturn. He came closer to Antonio Santini and he had contrasts with Scipione Chiaramonti and his successor at the university of Pisa, Barthélemy Souvey, student of Fortunio Liceti.
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Valentin Stansel
1621 - 1705 (84 years)
Valentin Stansel or Stanzel was a Czech Jesuit astronomer who worked in Brazil. Biography Valentin Stanzel was born in Olomouc, Moravia. His family were of German minority ethnicity in Moravia. He entered the Society of Jesus on 1 October 1637, and taught rhetoric and mathematics at University of Olomouc and in Prague. After being ordained, he requested an appointment to the Jesuit mission in India, and went to Portugal to await an opportunity of taking ship for his destination. Meantime, he lectured on astronomy at the college of Évora. While there, in order to conform to the language of the...
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Evgeny Anichkov
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Evgeny Vasilyevich Anichkov was a Russian literary critic and historian who specialised in the Slavic folklore and mythology, as well as their relation to and use in the Russian literature. His 1905 book The Ritual Spring Song in the West and With the Slavic Peoples won him the Lomonosov Prize in 1907. His magnum opus Paganism and Ancient Rus came out in 1914.
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Karl Baedeker
1877 - 1914 (37 years)
Karl Wilhelm Sali Baedeker was a German physicist, and a professor at the University of Jena. He was the grandson of Karl Baedeker, the founder of the eponymous travel guide publishing house, and the son of Fritz Baedeker , who ran the same company from 1869 until his death in 1925.
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Edward Eisner
1929 - 1987 (58 years)
Edward Eisner FRSE FIP was a Hungarian-born physicist who was Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Strathclyde 1968-1987. He specialised in the physics of sound. The "Edward Eisner Memorial Fund Award" is named in his honour.
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Caspar Isenkrahe
1844 - 1921 (77 years)
Mathias Caspar Hubert Isenkrahe was a German mathematician, physicist and Catholic philosopher of nature. Life Isenkrahe's father died before Caspar's birth. Isenkrahe visited in 1856 the Progymnasium in Jülich, in 1857 the Marzellengymnasium in Cologne and from 1858 to 1863 the Realprogymnasium in Bonn. In 1868 he studied at the University of Bonn where he chose the subjects mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, philosophy, Latin and German. On 31 July 1866 he made his PhD with an award-winning work about the anatomy of Helicina titanica, a species of snail. He became...
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Yevgenia Bugoslavskaya
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Yevgenia Yakovlevna Bugoslavskaya was a Soviet astronomer. She had a lifelong career in astronomy and became professor of astronomy at Moscow University. Alternative spelling of her name, Evgeniia Iakovlevna Bugoslavskaia.
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Frederick A. P. Barnard
1809 - 1889 (80 years)
Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was an American academic and educator who served as the 10th President of Columbia University. Born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Yale University in 1828 and served in a succession of academic appointments, including as Chancellor of the University of Mississippi from 1856 to 1861. He assumed office as President of Columbia University in 1864, where he presided over a series of improvements to the university until his death in 1889. He was also known as an author of academic texts.
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Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon
1236 - 1304 (68 years)
Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon , of the Ibn Tibbon family, also known as Prophatius, was a Jewish astronomer; born, probably at Marseilles, about 1236; died at Montpellier about 1304. He was a grandson of Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon. His Provençal name was Don Profiat Tibbon; the Latin writers called him Profatius Judæus. Jacob occupies a considerable place in the history of astronomy in the Middle Ages. His works, translated into Latin, were quoted by Copernicus, Reinhold, and Clavius. He was also highly reputed as a physician, and, according to Jean Astruc , Ibn Tibbon was regent of the faculty...
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Maximilian Herzberger
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Maximilian Jacob Herzberger was a German-American mathematician and physicist, known for his development of the superachromat lens. Life Maximilian Herzberger was the son of Leopold Herzberger and Sonja/Sofia Behrendt/Berendt/Berends ; he had a sister Olga . The family was Jewish. He studied mathematics and physics at the Berlin University, where Albert Einstein was one of his professors, and later became a friend and advisor. In 1923, Herzberger finished his Ph.D. thesis Ueber Systeme hyperkomplexer Grössen under Ludwig Bieberbach and Issai Schur at the philosophical faculty. In 1925, he married Edith Kaufmann ; they had three children, born in Jena, viz.
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Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt
1240 - 1300 (60 years)
Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt , Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt , or Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt , was a French mathematician, physicist, and writer who conducted experiments on magnetism and wrote the first extant treatise describing the properties of magnets. His work is particularly noted for containing the earliest detailed discussion of freely pivoting compass needles, a fundamental component of the dry compass soon to appear in medieval navigation. He also wrote a treatise on the construction and use of a universal astrolabe.
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Gale Bruno van Albada
1912 - 1972 (60 years)
Gale Bruno van Albada was a Dutch astronomer, known for his orbital observations of binary stars and studies on the evolution of galaxy clusters. Biography Van Albada obtained his Ph.D. with Antonie Pannekoek at the University of Amsterdam in 1945. He shared Pannekoek's communist ideologies and back in the 1930s his brother Piet van Albada had been an associate of Marinus van der Lubbe.
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Peder Oluf Pedersen
1874 - 1941 (67 years)
Peder Oluf Pedersen was a Danish engineer and physicist. He is notable for his work on electrotechnology, his cooperation with Valdemar Poulsen on the developmental work on Wire recorders, which he called a telegraphone, the arc converter known as the Poulsen Arc Transmitter, and his work on electrical currents in the ionosphere.
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Hildegard Stücklen
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Hildegard Stücklen was a German-American physicist who dealt with spectroscopy. She worked initially as a lecturer and tutor in Switzerland in the 1930s and later moved to teach at women colleges in Massachusetts and Virginia after emigrating to the United States.
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Yahya ibn Abi Mansur
Yahya ibn Abi Mansur , also called Bizist, son of Firuzan was a senior Persian official from the Banu al-Munajjim family, who served as an astronomer and an astrologer at the court of Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun. Since his father Abu Mansur Aban was an astrologer in service of caliph al-Mansur, it can be concluded that Yahya spent his childhood in Baghdad.
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Louis Caryl Graton
1880 - 1970 (90 years)
Louis Caryl Graton , American geologist, chemist and educator, began his career in 1900 as assayer for Ledyard Gold Mines Ltd., near Rockdale, Ontario. He moved on to Canadian Goldfields Ltd. later in 1900, then entered McGill University as a graduate student, studying many of the famous mines of Ontario and Quebec. He continued his studies at Cornell University in 1902–1903.
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George Henry Bolsover
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
George Henry Bolsover CBE was the director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London from 1947 to 1976. The school, now known as UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is part of University College, London.
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Ivan Borgman
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Borgman was a physicist from the Russian Empire, who first demonstrated in 1897 that X-rays and radioactive materials induced thermoluminescence. Biography Borgman was born to a Russified Finnish-born father and a Russian mother. After graduating from the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, he entered the Physics and Mathematics department of Saint Petersburg State University, in 1866 and graduated in 1870. In 1873, Borgman went to the University of Heidelberg, where he attended lectures and studied in the laboratory under the German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. In 1875, he was appointed as a laboratory assistant at St.
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John J. Hopfield
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
John Joseph Hopfield was a Polish-American physicist. Hopfield's published research included vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy and solar ultraviolet spectroscopy. He was the discoverer of the "Hopfield bands" of oxygen and co-discoverer of the "Lyman–Birge–Hopfield bands" of nitrogen. For about a decade he was an industrial physicist working with technologies for fabricating glass windows, and was the inventor listed on several related patents.
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Mikhail Samoilovich Neiman
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Mikhail Samoilovich Neiman was a Soviet physicist, Doctor of Technical Sciences and professor. The main directions of his research were the study of the ultra-high frequency electromagnetic systems, theoretical and applied radio engineering, and automatic processes.
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Temistocle Zona
1848 - 1910 (62 years)
Temistocle Zona was an Italian astronomer. Born in Porto Tolle, in 1870 Zona graduated in architecture at the University of Padua, and he was a volunteer assistant at the Observatory of that city from 1868 to 1871. In October 1880, he entered the staff of Gaetano Cacciatore at the Observatory of Palermo, and in 1891 he became the director of the Observatory, a role he held until 1898. In 1882, he became professor at the University of Palermo. He is best known as the discoverer of the comet C/1890 V1 Zona, on November 15, 1890.
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Erik Gabrielsson Emporagrius
1606 - 1674 (68 years)
Erik Gabrielsson Emporagrius was a Swedish professor and bishop. Erik Emporagrius was born in Torsåker in Gästrikland, son of Gabriel Emporagrius, the vicar there. He studied at Uppsala University, where he was awarded a master's degree in 1632, and at universities abroad. On his return to Sweden in 1637, he was appointed professor of physics at Uppsala, but after a few years he exchanged this position for a chair in the faculty of theology. In 1645 he was appointed first court chaplain to Queen Christina, in 1649 pastor primarius in Stockholm, and in 1664 Bishop of Strängnäs.
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Nicholas E. Wagman
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Nicholas E. Wagman was an American astronomer and astrometrist. Beginning in 1930, Wagman was associated with Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory. He was director of the Observatory and also chairman of the University of Pittsburgh's Astronomy Department from 1941 until 1970. Under his direction, the 0.76-m Thaw refractor was renovated and used to set the standard for parallax determinations, of which over 1200 were made. Many binary stars were also discovered and characterized.
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Antonín Strnad
1746 - 1799 (53 years)
Antonín Strnad was a Czech geographer, professor and rector of the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague and director of the observatory in Clementinum, founder of Czech scientific meteorology, agrometeorology and phenology, and also one of the founders of the Czech national revival. He began recording his meteorological observations in Clementinum and in 1775 he began the longest continuous series of observations in the world.
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James Ralston Kennedy Paterson
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
James Ralston Kennedy "RP" Paterson, CBE, MC, MD, FRCSEd, FRCR, DMRE was a radiologist and oncologist in Scotland. Along with Herbert Parker, pioneered the development of the Paterson-Parker rules for the Radium Dosage System also known as the Manchester system.
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Jørg Tofte Jebsen
1888 - 1922 (34 years)
Jørg Tofte Jebsen was a physicist from Norway, where he was the first to work on Einstein's general theory of relativity. In this connection he became known after his early death for what many now call the Jebsen-Birkhoff theorem for the metric tensor outside a general, spherical mass distribution.
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Edward Taylor Jones
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Edward Taylor Jones F.R.S.E. LL.D. was a British physicist. He was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University from 1925 to 1943. Life He was born in Denbigh in north Wales on 24 December 1872. He studied Science at the University of North Wales and did further postgraduate of the University of Berlin. From 1899 until 1925 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy at his alma mater, the University of North Wales, and then moved to the University of Glasgow for the remainder of his career. The main focus of his work was electromagnetism, atomic physics and quantum theory.
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Baha' al-din al-'Amili
1547 - 1621 (74 years)
#10448
Josef Geitler von Armingen
1870 - 1923 (53 years)
Josef Karl Franz Otto Geitler, Ritter von Armingen was an Austrian physicist born in Smíchov, today a district in Prague. He is remembered for his investigations of electromagnetic waves. He studied in Prague and Bonn, later obtaining his habilitation at Prague. In 1906 he succeeded Alois Handl as chair of experimental physics at the University of Czernowitz. In 1919, when Czernowitz became a Romanian university, Geitler relocated to Graz, where he taught classes at the Technische Universität Graz.
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Otto von Fürth
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Otto von Fürth was an Austrian physician, physiologist and biochemist. Fürth studied at the University of Prague, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. He worked at the University of Vienna, the University of Prague and the University of Straßburg where received his habilitation in medical chemistry in 1899. From that point on he worked in Vienna focusing on biochemistry. In 1898 he announced the discovery of "suprerenin." He received the Lieben Prize in 1923.
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Johannes Hevelius
1611 - 1687 (76 years)
Johannes Hevelius was a councillor and mayor of Danzig , in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. As an astronomer, he gained a reputation as "the founder of lunar topography", and described ten new constellations, seven of which are still used by astronomers.
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