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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Physics,
#10601
Noel Slater
1912 - 1973 (61 years)
Prof Noel Bryan Slater FRAS FRSE was a 20th-century British mathematician and astronomer. Life He was born on 29 July 1912 in Blackburn, Lancashire the son of Minnie Jane Bryan, and her husband, Doctor Albert Slater. His father was not a doctor but was christened with the name Doctor. He was generally known as D. Albert Slater. Slated was educated at Blackburn Grammar School. His parents then moved to Scotland where he was educated at North Berwick High School then Fordyce Academy in Banff.
Go to Profile#10602
Winfried Otto Schumann
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Winfried Otto Schumann was a German physicist and electrical engineer who predicted the Schumann resonances, a series of low-frequency resonances caused by lightning discharges in the atmosphere. Biography Winfried Schumann was born in Tübingen, Germany, the son of a physical chemist. His early years were spent in Kassel and in Berndorf, a town near Vienna. He majored in electrical engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 1912, he gained a doctorate with a thesis on high-voltage technology under the supervision of Engelbert Arnold. Prior to the First World War, he managed the ...
Go to Profile#10603
Harry Hemley Plaskett
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Harry Hemley Plaskett FRS was a Canadian astronomer who made significant contributions to the fields of solar physics, astronomical spectroscopy and spectrophotometry. From 1932 to 1960, he served as the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, and in 1963 was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Go to Profile#10604
Robert Brode
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Robert Bigham Brode was an American physicist, who during World War II led the group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the fuses used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Go to Profile#10605
Jason John Nassau
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Jason John Nassau was an American astronomer. He performed his doctoral studies at Syracuse, and gained his Ph.D. mathematics in 1920. He then became an assistant professor at the Case Institute of Technology in 1921, teaching astronomy. He continued to instruct at that institution, becoming the University's first chair of astronomy from 1924 until 1959 and chairman of the graduate division from 1936 until 1940. After 1959 he was professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#10606
Harold Masursky
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...
Go to Profile#10607
Marianus Czerny
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Marianus Czerny was a German experimental physicist who focused on molecular spectroscopy, especially infrared spectroscopy. He was Professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. Early life and education He was the son of the pediatrician Adalbert Czerny, his mother was the daughter of a large landowner in Upper Silesia. He attended high school in Strasbourg and later achieved the rank of lieutenant in the Guards Infantry.
Go to Profile#10608
Joseph Henry Keenan
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.
Go to Profile#10609
Ralph A. Sawyer
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Ralph Alanson Sawyer was an American physicist and a leader in American science. A New Hampshire native, he graduated from the Atkinson Academy in 1911 and in 1915 from Dartmouth. He then went to the University of Chicago where, under the direction of R. A. Millikan, he finished his PhD in 1919, a time during which he also served as a scientific liaison officer in the United States Navy. At the invitation of Harrison M. Randall, Sawyer then joined the faculty of the physics department at the University of Michigan, an affiliation that he retained for his entire career.
Go to Profile#10610
Bernard Lippmann
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Bernard Abram Lippmann. was an American theoretical physicist. A former Professor of Physics at New York University, Lippmann is mainly known for the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, a widely used tool in non-relativistic scattering theory, which he formulated together with his doctoral supervisor Julian Schwinger
Go to Profile#10611
Derek Jackson
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Derek Ainslie Jackson, OBE, DFC, AFC, FRS was a British physicist. Biography Derek Jackson was born in 1906, the son of Welsh businessman Sir Charles Jackson. Derek Jackson showed early promise in the field of spectroscopy under the guidance of Professor Frederick Lindemann, making the first quantitative determination of a nuclear magnetic spin using atomic spectroscopy to measure the hyperfine structure of caesium. His scientific research at Oxford did not, however, interfere with his other great passion – steeplechase riding – which led him from the foxhunting field to his first ride in the Grand National of 1935.
Go to Profile#10612
Stuart Thomas Butler
1926 - 1982 (56 years)
Stuart Thomas Butler was an Australian nuclear physicist who served as Director of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission from 1977 until 1982, and was noted for his contributions to theoretical physics including stripping reactionss, energy loss of particles in plasma and atmospheric tides induced by absorption of solar radiation in the ozone layer.
Go to Profile#10613
James Rainwater
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Leo James Rainwater was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs. In 1949, he began developing his theory that, contrary to what was then believed, not all atomic nuclei are spherical. His ideas were later tested and confirmed by Aage Bohr's and Ben Mottelson's experiments. He also contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission ...
Go to Profile#10614
Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner was a British physicist. Biography Skinner was born on 7 October 1900 at 15 Woodville Road, Ealing, the only son of George Herbert, director of the shoe firm Lilley & Skinner, and Mabel Elizabeth . He was taught at home before starting school, age 9, at Durston House, from where he won a mathematical scholarship to Rugby in 1914. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1919 to read natural sciences and mathematics; he graduated in 1922.
Go to Profile#10615
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.
Go to Profile#10616
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.
Go to Profile#10617
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.
Go to Profile#10618
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.
Go to Profile#10619
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.
Go to Profile#10620
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.
Go to Profile#10621
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.
Go to Profile#10622
Ernest Titterton
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Sir Ernest William Titterton was a British nuclear physicist. A graduate of the University of Birmingham, Titterton worked in a research position under Mark Oliphant, who recruited him to work on radar for the British Admiralty during the first part of the Second World War. In 1943, he joined the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he helped develop the first atomic bombs. He eventually became one of the laboratory's group leaders. He participated in the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll in 1946, where he performed the countdown for both tests. With the pass...
Go to Profile#10623
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.
Go to Profile#10624
Edgar W. Woolard
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Edgar William Woolard was an American meteorologist, mathematician and planetary scientist. He was born in El Paso, Texas and received his college education from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. During World War I, Woolard served in the U.S. Army. In 1919, he was employed at the U.S. Weather Bureau as an assistant meteorologist, where he would remain until 1928. He resigned to join the faculty of George Washington University as a mathematics instructor. Woolard was granted his Ph.D. from the university with a thesis titled, On the Geometrical Theory of Halos, published in 1929.
Go to Profile#10625
Dirk Reuyl
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Dirk Reuyl was a Dutch American physicist and astronomer. He was the cousin of astronomer Peter van de Kamp. Life Like his cousin, Reuijl was born in Kampen, Overijssel. He studied physics and mathematics at Utrecht University, where, in October 1931, he defended his PhD dissertation "Photographic measures of close double stars" with Albertus Antonie Nijland as advisor. He came to the United States a few years before Van de Kamp. He joined the staff at McCormick Observatory in 1929 and continued to work there until 1944. He originally worked on the parallax of stars, first publishing a list of 50 measurements in 1929 with fellow staff member Alexander N.
Go to Profile#10626
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...
Go to Profile#10627
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.
Go to Profile#10628
Vern Oliver Knudsen
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Vern Oliver Knudsen was an American acoustical physicist. Biography Knudsen received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University with an A.B. in 1915. Following his graduation from BYU Knudsen served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1915-1918 in the Northern States Mission, which was headquartered in Chicago. Knudsen then joined the staff of Bell Laboratories where he worked with Harvey Fletcher, who had been one of his professors at BYU.
Go to Profile#10629
John Quincy Stewart
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
John Quincy Stewart was an American astrophysicist. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1919. He taught astrophysics at Princeton from 1921 until he retired in 1963. Stewart was a civilian aeronautical engineer, an Army 1st Lieutenant, and later served as a chief instructor in the Army Engineering School, during World War I. He was later a research engineer in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. He became interested in social physics in 1946, , demonstrating the use of physical laws in the area of social sciences, for example, demographic gravitation.
Go to Profile#10630
Banesh Hoffmann
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Banesh Hoffmann was a British mathematician and physicist known for his association with Albert Einstein. Life Banesh Hoffmann was born in Richmond, Surrey, on 6 September 1906. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to earn his doctorate at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#10631
Engelbert Broda
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Engelbert Broda was an Austrian chemist and physicist suspected by some to have been a KGB spy code-named Eric, who could have been a main Soviet source of information on British and American nuclear research.
Go to Profile#10632
William V. Houston
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
William Vermillion Houston was an American physicist who made contributions to spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, and solid-state physics as well as being a teacher and administrator. He became the second president of Rice University in 1946.
Go to Profile#10633
Michael Ovenden
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Michael William Ovenden FRSE FRAS was a 20th-century British astronomer who was President of the Astronomical Society of Glasgow and Professor of Astronomy at University of British Columbia. Life He was born on 21 May 1926 in the Muswell Hill district of north London. His first degree was from Queen Mary College, London in 1947. He then went to Cambridge University where he received an MA.
Go to Profile#10634
Katharina Boll-Dornberger
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Katharina Boll-Dornberger , also known as Käte Dornberger-Schiff, was an Austrian-German physicist and crystallographer. She is known for her work on order-disorder structures. Life Katharina Boll-Dornberger was born in Vienna in 1909 as the daughter of the university professor and Alice Friederike Schiff. She studied physics and mathematics in Vienna and Göttingen. She wrote her dissertation under supervision of V. M. Goldschmidt on the crystal structure of water-free zinc sulfate in Göttingen and handed it in in Vienna in 1934. Afterwards, she conducted research in Philipp Gross's lab in Vienna.
Go to Profile#10635
Max Jakob
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Max Jakob was a German physicist known for his work in the field of thermal science. Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Jakob studied engineering at Technical University Munich, from which he graduated in 1903. From 1903 to 1906, he was an assistant to O. Knoblauch at the Laboratory for Technical Physics. In 1910, Jakob embarked on a 25-year career at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg, Berlin. During this time he founded and directed applied thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow laboratories.
Go to Profile#10636
George R. Harrison
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
George Russell Harrison was an American physicist. Harrison became professor of experimental physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930, and was appointed the school's dean of science in 1942; he also headed MIT's spectroscopy laboratory. During World War II, he was chief of the optics division of the National Defense Research Committee, and later head of the Office of Field Service of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Harrison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931. He served as president of the Optical Society of America from 1945–46 and was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal in 1949.
Go to Profile#10637
Max Born
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Max Born was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".
Go to Profile#10638
Paul Dirac
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He is credited with laying the foundations of quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.
Go to Profile#10639
Yaşar Önel
Yaşar Önel is a Turkish-born physicist who holds Swiss and American citizenship. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from London University in 1975. He worked at the Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom, and Neuchatel and Geneva Universities in Switzerland before joining the University of Texas at Austin in 1986. Then, he moved to the University of Iowa in 1988. He is a tenured faculty professor. of Physics at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA, USA.
Go to Profile#10640
Irving Langmuir
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Irving Langmuir was an American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry. Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis.
Go to Profile#10641
Robert S. Mulliken
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Robert Sanderson Mulliken was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Mulliken received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1966 and the Priestley Medal in 1983.
Go to Profile#10642
Vladimir Rojansky
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Vladimir Borisovich Rojansky was an American physicist, author and educator. He was born in Bologoye, Russian Empire. His father was a railroad construction engineer and one of his grandfathers was a general.
Go to Profile#10643
G. I. Taylor
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM FRS FRSE was a British physicist and mathematician, who made contributions to fluid dynamics and wave theory. Early life and education Taylor was born in St. John's Wood, London. His father, Edward Ingram Taylor, was an artist, and his mother, Margaret Boole, came from a family of mathematicians . As a child he was fascinated by science after attending the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and performed experiments using paint rollers and sticky-tape.
Go to Profile#10644
Albert Einstein
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was the greatest scientist of the 20th century, bar none. In fact, he’s probably the second-most original and influential scientist of all time-after Isaac Newton... But it’s close. To understand just a bit of his influence and genius, see our most influential people of all time. So, what did Einstein do, exactly? He published pioneering work on several phenomena that were deeply puzzling to physicists of his day, including Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. Then, he made two startling discoveries that went far beyond anything known at the time that implied matter-energy equivalence (E=mc2).
Go to Profile#10645
John C. Slater
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
John Clarke Slater was an American physicist who advanced the theory of the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solids. He also made major contributions to microwave electronics. He received a B.S. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1920 and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1923, then did post-doctoral work at the universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen. On his return to the U.S. he joined the physics department at Harvard.
Go to Profile#10646
William Shockley
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American inventor, physicist, and eugenicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
Go to Profile#10647
Philip M. Morse
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Philip McCord Morse , was an American physicist, administrator and pioneer of operations research in World War II. He is considered to be the father of operations research in the U.S. Biography Morse graduated from the Case School of Applied Science in 1926 with a B.S. in physics. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1929. In 1930, he was granted an International Fellowship, which he used to do postgraduate study and research at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld during the winter of 1930 to the spring of 1931.
Go to Profile#10648
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electronic magnetism in solids.
Go to Profile#10649
Erwin Schrödinger
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger , sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
Go to Profile#10650
Richard C. Tolman
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Richard Chace Tolman was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who made many contributions to statistical mechanics. He also made important contributions to theoretical cosmology in the years soon after Einstein's discovery of general relativity. He was a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile