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
Robert Hooke
1635 - 1703 (68 years)
Robert Hooke FRS was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of the first two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that he built himself, the other scientist being Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1674. An impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood, he found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London's great fire of 1666. Hooke was also a member of the Royal Society and since 1662 was its curator of experiments. Hooke was also Professor of Geometry a...
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Rudolf Clausius
1822 - 1888 (66 years)
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius was a German physicist and mathematician and is considered one of the central founding fathers of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he gave the theory of heat a truer and sounder basis. His most important paper, "On the Moving Force of Heat", published in 1850, first stated the basic ideas of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1865 he introduced the concept of entropy. In 1870 he introduced the virial theorem, which applied to heat.
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Henry Norris Russell
1877 - 1957 (80 years)
Henry Norris Russell ForMemRS HFRSE FRAS was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram . In 1923, working with Frederick Saunders, he developed Russell–Saunders coupling, which is also known as LS coupling.
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Pierre Curie
1859 - 1906 (47 years)
Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. In 1903, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". With their win, the Curies became the first ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize, launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.
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Karl Schwarzschild
1873 - 1916 (43 years)
Karl Schwarzschild was a German physicist and astronomer. Schwarzschild provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to a derivation of the Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole.
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Wolfgang Gentner
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Wolfgang Gentner was a German experimental nuclear physicist. Gentner received his doctorate in 1930 from the University of Frankfurt. From 1932 to 1935 he had a fellowship which allowed him to do postdoctoral research and study at Curie's Radium Institute at the University of Paris. From 1936 to 1945, he was a staff scientist at the Institute of Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, in Heidelberg. One of his areas of specialization was nuclear photoeffects. He was granted his Habilitation from the University of Frankfurt in 1937. At the end of 1938 and early 1939, he ...
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Ibn al-Haytham
965 - 1038 (73 years)
Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham was a medieval mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age from present-day Iraq. Referred to as "the father of modern optics", he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. His most influential work is titled Kitāb al-Manāẓir , written during 1011–1021, which survived in a Latin edition. The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the scientific revolution by Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Galileo Galilei.
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Alessandro Volta
1745 - 1827 (82 years)
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist who was a pioneer of electricity and power and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the president of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement an...
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Henry Cavendish
1731 - 1810 (79 years)
Henry Cavendish was an English natural philosopher and scientist who was an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper, On Factitious Airs. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name.
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George Johnstone Stoney
1826 - 1911 (85 years)
George Johnstone Stoney FRS was an Irish physicist. He is most famous for introducing the term electron as the "fundamental unit quantity of electricity". He had introduced the concept, though not the word, as early as 1874, initially naming it "electrine", and the word itself came in 1891. He published around 75 scientific papers during his lifetime.
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James Jeans
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Sir James Hopwood Jeans was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician. Early life Born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, the son of William Tulloch Jeans, a parliamentary correspondent and author. Jeans was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell and Trinity College, Cambridge. As a gifted student, Jeans was counselled to take an aggressive approach to the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos competition:
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Henri Becquerel
1852 - 1908 (56 years)
Antoine Henri Becquerel was a French engineer, physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel , is named after him.
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Frédéric Joliot-Curie
1900 - 1958 (58 years)
Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie was a French physicist and husband of Irène Joliot-Curie, with whom he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity. They were the second ever married couple, after his wife's parents, to win the Nobel Prize, adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. Joliot-Curie and his wife also founded the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, part of the Paris-Saclay University.
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Svante Arrhenius
1859 - 1927 (68 years)
Svante August Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became the director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.
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George Ellery Hale
1868 - 1938 (70 years)
George Ellery Hale was an American astrophysicist, best known for his discovery of magnetic fields in sunspots, and as the leader or key figure in the planning or construction of several world-leading telescopes; namely, the 40-inch refracting telescope at Yerkes Observatory, 60-inch Hale reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, 100-inch Hooker reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson, and the 200-inch Hale reflecting telescope at Palomar Observatory. He played a key role in the foundation of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research and the National Research Council, a...
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Irène Joliot-Curie
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Irène Joliot-Curie was a French chemist, physicist and politician, the elder daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date. She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936.
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Daniel Bernoulli
1700 - 1782 (82 years)
Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family from Basel. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli's principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, which describes the mathematics of the mechanism underlying the operation of two important technologies of the 20th century: the carburetor and the airplane wing.
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Eudoxus of Cnidus
408 BC - 355 BC (53 years)
Eudoxus of Cnidus was an ancient Greek astronomer, mathematician, doctor, and lawmaker. He was a student of Archytas and Plato. All of his original works are lost, though some fragments are preserved in Hipparchus' Commentaries on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus. Spherics by Theodosius of Bithynia may be based on a work by Eudoxus.
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Wilhelm Eduard Weber
1804 - 1891 (87 years)
Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph. Biography Early years Weber was born in Schlossstrasse in Wittenberg, where his father, Michael Weber, was professor of theology. The building had previously been the home of Abraham Vater.
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Eratosthenes
276 BC - 194 BC (82 years)
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable to what is now known as the study of geography, and he introduced some of the terminology still used today.
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Brahmagupta
598 - 665 (67 years)
Brahmagupta was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. He is the author of two early works on mathematics and astronomy: the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta , a theoretical treatise, and the Khaṇḍakhādyaka , a more practical text.
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Albert A. Michelson
1852 - 1931 (79 years)
Albert Abraham Michelson FFRS FRSE was a Prussian-born American physicist of Jewish descent, known for his work on measuring the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize in a science. He was the founder and the first head of the physics departments of Case School of Applied Science and the University of Chicago.
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James Prescott Joule
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
James Prescott Joule was an English physicist, mathematician and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work. This led to the law of conservation of energy, which in turn led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived unit of energy, the joule, is named after him.
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Edmond Halley
1656 - 1742 (86 years)
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford.
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Gustav Kirchhoff
1824 - 1887 (63 years)
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term black-body radiation in 1860. Several different sets of concepts, concerning diverse subjects such as black-body radiation and spectroscopy, electrical circuits, and thermochemistry, are named "Kirchhoff's laws" after him. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after him and his colleague, Robert Bunsen.
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Lev Artsimovich
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Lev Andreyevich Artsimovich , also transliterated Arzimowitsch, was a Soviet physicist known for his contributions to the Tokamak— a device that produces controlled thermonuclear fusion power. Prior conceiving the idea on nuclear fusion, Artsimovich participated in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons, and was a recipient of many former Soviet honors and awards.
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William Crookes
1832 - 1919 (87 years)
Sir William Crookes was a British chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube which was made in 1875. This was a foundational discovery that eventually changed the whole of chemistry and physics.
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William Henry Bragg
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Sir William Henry Bragg was an English physicist, chemist, mathematician, and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son Lawrence Bragg – the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics: "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays". The mineral Braggite is named after him and his son. He was knighted in 1920.
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Walter Heitler
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Walter Heinrich Heitler was a German physicist who made contributions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. He brought chemistry under quantum mechanics through his theory of valence bonding.
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Robert Boyle
1627 - 1691 (64 years)
Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry. He was a devout and pi...
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Léon Rosenfeld
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Léon Rosenfeld was a Belgian physicist and Marxist. Rosenfeld was born into a secular Jewish family. He was a polyglot who knew eight or nine languages and was fluent in at least five of them. Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr. Rosenfeld published in 1930 the first systematic Hamiltonian approach to Lagrangian models that possess a local gauge symmetry, which predates by two decades the work by Paul Dirac and Peter Bergmann. Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics.
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Gabriel Lippmann
1845 - 1921 (76 years)
Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. His parents were French Jews.
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Pieter Zeeman
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Pieter Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect. Childhood and youth Pieter Zeeman was born in Zonnemaire, a small town on the island of Schouwen-Duiveland, Netherlands, the son of Rev Catharinus Forandinus Zeeman, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and his wife, Willemina Worst.
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K. S. Krishnan
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Sir Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan, was an Indian physicist. He was a co-discoverer of Raman scattering, for which his mentor C. V. Raman was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. Early life Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan generally referred to as K. S. Krishnan or KSK, was born in a Vaishnavite brahmin family on 4 December 1898 in Watrap, Tamil Nadu. His father was a farmer-scholar deeply versed in Tamil literature. He had his early education in Hindu Higher Secondary school, in Watrap, after which he attended the American College in Madurai and the Madras Christian College. After gai...
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Manne Siegbahn
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn FRS HFRSE was a Swedish physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy". Biography Siegbahn was born in Örebro, Sweden, the son of Georg Siegbahn and his wife, Emma Zetterberg.
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Joseph von Fraunhofer
1787 - 1826 (39 years)
Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer was a German physicist and optical lens manufacturer. He made optical glass, an achromatic telescope, and objective lenses. He also invented the spectroscope and developed diffraction grating. In 1814, he discovered and studied the dark absorption lines in the spectrum of the sun now known as Fraunhofer lines.
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Oliver Lodge
1851 - 1940 (89 years)
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of, and holder of key patents for, radio. He identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz's proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures , Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the "coherer". In 1898 he was awarded the "syntonic" patent by the United States Patent Office. Lodge was Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1920.
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John Dalton
1766 - 1844 (78 years)
John Dalton was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry. He also researched colour blindness, which he had; as a result, colour blindness is known as Daltonism in several languages.
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Josef Mattauch
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Josef Mattauch was a nuclear physicist and chemist. He was known for the development of the Mattauch-Herzog double-focusing mass spectrometer, for his work on the investigation of isotopic abundances using mass spectrometry, and the determination of atomic weights. Much of his career was spent at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry .
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Paul Scherrer
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Paul Hermann Scherrer was a Swiss physicist. Born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, he studied at Göttingen, Germany, before becoming a lecturer there. Later, Scherrer became head of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich.
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Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
1853 - 1926 (73 years)
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He exploited the Hampson–Linde cycle to investigate how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero and later to liquefy helium for the first time, in 1908. He also discovered superconductivity in 1911.
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Urbain Le Verrier
1811 - 1877 (66 years)
Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier FRS HFRSE was a French astronomer and mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics.
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Ludwig Prandtl
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Ludwig Prandtl was a German fluid dynamicist, physicist and aerospace scientist. He was a pioneer in the development of rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of aerodynamics, which have come to form the basis of the applied science of aeronautical engineering. In the 1920s, he developed the mathematical basis for the fundamental principles of subsonic aerodynamics in particular; and in general up to and including transonic velocities. His studies identified the boundary layer, thin-airfoils, and lifting-line theories. The Prandtl number was named a...
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Yoshio Nishina
1890 - 1951 (61 years)
Yoshio Nishina was a Japanese physicist who was called "the founding father of modern physics research in Japan". He led the efforts of Japan to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. Early life and career
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George Biddell Airy
1801 - 1892 (91 years)
Sir George Biddell Airy was an English mathematician and astronomer, and the seventh Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881. His many achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the Earth, a method of solution of two-dimensional problems in solid mechanics and, in his role as Astronomer Royal, establishing Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.
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John Flamsteed
1646 - 1719 (73 years)
John Flamsteed was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. His main achievements were the preparation of a 3,000-star catalogue, Catalogus Britannicus, and a star atlas called Atlas Coelestis, both published posthumously. He also made the first recorded observations of Uranus, although he mistakenly catalogued it as a star, and he laid the foundation stone for the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
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Friedrich Hund
1896 - 1997 (101 years)
Friedrich Hermann Hund was a German physicist from Karlsruhe known for his work on atoms and molecules. Scientific career Hund worked at the Universities of Rostock, Leipzig, Jena, Frankfurt am Main, and Göttingen.
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Isaak Pomeranchuk
1913 - 1966 (53 years)
Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk was a Soviet physicist of Polish origin in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. His career in physics spent mostly studying the particle physics , quantum field theory, electromagnetic and synchrotron radiation, condensed matter physics and the physics of liquid helium.
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Evgeny Lifshitz
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz was a leading Soviet physicist and brother of the physicist Ilya Lifshitz. Work Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family in Kharkiv, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire . Lifshitz is well known in the field of general relativity for coauthoring the BKL conjecture concerning the nature of a generic curvature singularity. , this is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in the subject of classical gravitation.
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Heinrich Hertz
1857 - 1894 (37 years)
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. The unit of frequency, cycle per second, was named the "hertz" in his honor.
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