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,
#10501
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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Alexander Nikuradse
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Alexander Nikuradse , also known by his pseudonym Al. Sanders, was a Georgian-German physicist and Nazi political scientist. Born in Samtredia, Georgia, Russian Empire, he was sent by the Georgian government to complete his studies in Berlin. Nikuradse remained in Berlin and became a German citizen after the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia. Being in staunch opposition to Soviet rule in Georgia, he was actively involved in Georgian émigré activities, and had close Nazi connections. Since their common days as Soviet exiles in Munich in the early 1920s, he had been on friendly terms with Alfred Rosenberg whose views on the Caucasus were largely shaped under Nikuradse's influence.
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Herbert L. Anderson
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Herbert Lawrence Anderson was an American nuclear physicist who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He contributed to the Manhattan Project. He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University. He participated in the first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity. After the close of World War II, he was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1982. There, he helped Fermi establish the Enrico Fermi Institute and was its director from 1958 to 1962.
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James Franck
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
James Franck was a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom". He completed his doctorate in 1906 and his habilitation in 1911 at the Frederick William University in Berlin, where he lectured and taught until 1918, having reached the position of professor extraordinarius. He served as a volunteer in the German Army during World War I. He was seriously injured in 1917 in a gas attack and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class.
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Frederick Albert Saunders
1875 - 1963 (88 years)
Frederick Albert Saunders was a Canadian-born American physicist and academic remembered for his work in sub-infrared spectroscopy and acoustics. Early life Frederick Albert Saunders was born on August 18, 1875, in London, Ontario, a son of William Saunders and Sarah Agnes Saunders, née Robinson, both of whom were born in England and emigrated to Canada at an early age. His father was renowned in the fields of orchard pests and fruit hybridization, was a founding member of the Entomological Society of Ontario and published books including Insects Injurious to Fruits and numerous scientific papers.
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Andrei Sakharov
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world. Although he spent his career in physics in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons, overseeing the development of thermonuclear weapons, Sakharov also did fundamental work in understanding particle physics, magnetism, and physical cosmology. Sakharov is mostly known for his political activism for individual freedom, human rights, civil liberties and reforms in Russia, for which he was deemed a dissident and faced persecution from the So...
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Charles Christian Lauritsen
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Charles Christian Lauritsen was a Danish/American physicist. Early life and career Lauritsen was born in Holstebro, Denmark and studied architecture at the Odense Tekniske Skole, graduating in 1911. In 1916 he emigrated to the United States with his wife Sigrid Henriksen and son Tommy, first to Florida, where the family lived for a time on a houseboat, and later to Boston, where he worked as a draftsman during the Great War and was a witness to the Boston Molasses Disaster. By 1921 he was working in Palo Alto on radio for communicating between ship and shore. He became interested in the desig...
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Frances Woodworth Wright
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Woodworth Wright was an American astronomer based at Harvard University. During World War II, she taught celestial navigation to military officers and engineers. Early life Frances Woodworth Wright was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of George William Wright and Nellie Woodworth Wright. As a child in 1907, Wright wrote a short essay titled "My Favorite Poem", for the popular national children's magazine St. Nicholas. She earned a bachelor's degree at Brown University in 1920. She was granted a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1958, as a student of Fred Whipp...
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Richard Threlkeld Cox
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Richard Threlkeld Cox was a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, known for Cox's theorem relating to the foundations of probability. Biography He was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of attorney Lewis Cox and Elinor Cox. After Lewis Cox died, Elinor Cox married John Latané, who became a professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1913. In 1915 Richard enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to study physics, but his studies were cut short when he was drafted for World War I. He stayed in the US after being drafted and returned to Johns Hopkins University after the war, completing his BA in 1920.
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Joseph Valasek
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Joseph Valasek was an American physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Minnesota. He specialized in geometrical and physical optics, experimental optics and spectroscopy, and x-rays. He is credited with the discovery of ferroelectricity, which he identified using Rochelle salts.
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Alexander Obukhov
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Alexander Mikhailovich Obukhov was a Soviet and Russian geophysicist and applied mathematician known for his contributions to statistical theory of turbulence and atmospheric physics. He was one of the founders of modern boundary layer meteorology. He served as the Head of the theoretical department at Sternberg Astronomical Institute, a division of Moscow State University.
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George Van Biesbroeck
1880 - 1974 (94 years)
George A. Van Biesbroeck was a Belgian–American astronomer. He worked at observatories in Belgium, Germany and the United States. He specialized in the observation of double stars, asteroids and comets. He is notable for his long career as an observational astronomer.
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John Mauchly
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
John William Mauchly was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
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Robert Methven Petrie
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Robert Methven Petrie was a Canadian astronomer. He was born in Scotland but emigrated to Canada at the age of five. He grew up in Victoria, British Columbia and studied physics and mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He began working summer jobs at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory and became fascinated with astronomy.
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Wander Johannes de Haas
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Wander Johannes de Haas was a Dutch physicist and mathematician. He is best known for the Shubnikov–de Haas effect, the De Haas–Van Alphen effect and the Einstein–de Haas effect. Personal life Wander de Haas was born in Lisse, a small town near Leiden. He was the son of Albertus de Haas, principal of the Teacher's College in Middelburg, and Maria Efting. On 22 December 1910 he married Geertruida Luberta Lorentz, the eldest daughter of Hendrik Lorentz. They had two daughters and two sons. He was an atheist.
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Clinton Davisson
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Clinton Joseph Davisson was an American physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction in the famous Davisson–Germer experiment. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson.
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Vesto M. Slipher
1875 - 1969 (94 years)
Vesto Melvin Slipher was an American astronomer who performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies. He was the first to discover that distant galaxies are redshifted, thus providing the first empirical basis for the expansion of the universe. He was also the first to relate these redshifts to velocity.
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Günther Porod
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Günther Porod was an Austrian physicist. He is best known for his work on the small-angle X-ray scattering method, done in collaboration with his teacher Otto Kratky, and in particular for Porod's law, which describes the asymptote of the scattering intensity I for large scattering wave numbers q. In polymer physics, the worm-like chain model, introduced in a 1949 paper, is sometimes called the Kratky–Porod model.
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John P. Vinti
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
John Pascal Vinti was an American theoretical physicist, who published papers not only in physics, but also in mathematics and engineering. He is known for the Vinti integral. Biography His father, Giovanni Giuseppe Vinti , was born in Naples, Italy. In 1922 John P. Vinti graduated from Rogers High School in Newport, Rhode Island. At his high school graduation, he was honored with a prize in scholarship and a prize in mathematics. At age 15 Vinti matriculated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . There he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1927 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1932.
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David L. Webster
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
David Locke Webster was an American physicist and physics professor, whose early research on X-rays and Parson's magneton influenced Arthur Compton. Biography David Locke Webster was born November 6, 1888, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Andrew Gerrish Webster and Elizabeth Florence Briggs. He attended Harvard University, earning an A.B. in 1910 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1913. His teaching career began at Harvard as a mathematics instructor, 1910–1911; physics assistant, 1911–15; and physics instructor, 1915–1917, during which time he published several papers on X-ray theory. This work continu...
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S. Pancharatnam
1934 - 1969 (35 years)
Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam was an Indian physicist who did significant work in the field of optics. He is noted for his discovery of a type of geometric phase sometimes known as Pancharatnam phase for polarized beams passing through crystals.
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Niels Erik Nørlund
1885 - 1981 (96 years)
Niels Erik Nørlund was a Danish mathematician. His book Vorlesungen über Differenzenrechnung was the first book on complex function solutions of difference equations. His doctoral students include Georg Rasch.
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Frederick C. Leonard
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Frederick Charles Leonard was an American astronomer. As a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, he conducted extensive research on double stars and meteorites, largely shaping the university's Department of Astronomy. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1918 and his PhD in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1921. Leonard was an astronomer from his teenage years, founding the Society for Practical Astronomy in 1909. In 1933 he founded The Society for Research on Meteorites, which later became known as the Meteoritical Society.
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George O. Abell
1927 - 1983 (56 years)
George Ogden Abell was an American educator. Teaching at UCLA, priorly he worked as a research astronomer, administrator, as a popularizer of science and of education, and as a skeptic. He earned his B.S. in 1951, his M.S. in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1957, all from the California Institute of Technology. He was a Ph.D. student under Donald Osterbrock. His astronomical career began as a tour guide at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Abell made great contributions to astronomical knowledge which resulted from his work during and after the National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, especially concerning clusters of galaxies and planetary nebulae.
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Hans Geiger
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discovered the atomic nucleus. He was the brother of meteorologist and climatologist Rudolf Geiger.
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François Frenkiel
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
François Naftali Frenkiel was a physicist and one of the founders of the American Institute of Physics journal Physics of Fluids in 1958. He was the editor of Physics of Fluids from its establishment until 1981.
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Erwin Madelung
1881 - 1972 (91 years)
Erwin Madelung was a German physicist. He was born in 1881 in Bonn. His father was the surgeon Otto Wilhelm Madelung. He earned a doctorate in 1905 from the University of Göttingen, specializing in crystal structure, and eventually became a professor. It was during this time he developed the Madelung constant, which characterizes the net electrostatic effects of all ions in a crystal lattice, and is used to determine the energy of one ion.
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Gaja Alaga
1924 - 1988 (64 years)
Gaja Alaga was a Croatian theoretical physicist who specialised in nuclear physics. He was born in noble family of Bunjevac origin in the village of Lemeš in northwestern Bačka in Kingdom of SHS .
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Bergen Davis
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Bergen Davis was an American physicist and a professor at Columbia University. Davis was born March 31, 1869, near Whitehouse, New Jersey, son of John Davis, a farmer, and Katherine Dilts Davis. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1896 and was awarded a master's degree by Columbia University in 1900 and a Ph.D. in 1901, after which he studied in Europe for two years on a John Tyndall Fellowship under J. J. Thomson and others.
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Carl K. Seyfert
1911 - 1960 (49 years)
Carl Keenan Seyfert was an American astronomer. He is best known for his 1943 research paper on high-excitation line emission from the centers of some spiral galaxies, which are named Seyfert galaxies after him. Seyfert's Sextet, a group of galaxies, is also named after him.
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Louis Vessot King
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Louis Vessot King was a Canadian academic and physicist. Biography L. V. King received from McGill University B.A. in 1905 and D.Sc. in 1915 and from the University of Cambridge B.A. in 1908 and M.A. in 1913. In the department of physics of McGill University he became a lecturer in 1910, an assistant professor in 1913, an associate professor in 1915, and a full professor in 1920, retiring in 1938 as professor emeritus. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1915. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 5 May 1924. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1924 in T...
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Walter Bartky
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Walter Bartky was an American astronomer, applied mathematician, and educator, noteworthy for his role in the Manhattan Project. Education and career Walter Bartky received his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1923 and his Ph.D. in 1926. At the University of Chicago he was an instructor in 1926, an assistant professor of astronomy from 1927 to 1932, and an associate professor of astronomy from 1932 to 1942. At the University of Chicago he became in 1943 a professor of applied mathematics and associate dean in the Division of Physical Sciences, served from 1945 to 1955 as the dean of the...
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