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,
#10601
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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Emanuele Foà
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Emanuele Foà was an Italian engineer and engineering physicist, known for his contribution to mathematical fluid dynamics. In particular he proved the first known uniqueness theorem for the solutions to the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluids in bounded domains.
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Johann Baptist Cysat
1585 - 1657 (72 years)
Johann Baptist Cysat was a Swiss Jesuit mathematician and astronomer, after whom the lunar crater Cysatus is named. He was born in Lucerne, as the eighth of 14 children, to cartographer, historian and folklorist Renward Cysat .
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Ludwik Birkenmajer
1855 - 1929 (74 years)
Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer , Polish historian of science, physicist, astronomer, professor of the Jagiellonian University. Biography Descended from the German family settled in Galicia during the time of the Napoleon wars, later a part of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. He was the son of Józef Herman and Petronela de domo Stefanowski. Educated in the Franz Joseph High School in Lvov , than studied physics, chemistry and mathematics at the Kraków University till 1878. Supplementary studies in Vienna . In 1879 he defended his Ph. D. thesis in Kraków based on the study: On general methods of integration of the algebraic and transcendental functions .
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Christian Ludwig Gerling
1788 - 1864 (76 years)
Christian Ludwig Gerling studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss, obtaining his doctorate in 1812 for a thesis entitled: Methodi proiectionis orthographicae usum ad calculos parallacticos facilitandos explicavit simulque eclipsin solarem die, at the University of Göttingen. He is notable for his work on geodeticss and in 1927 some 60 letters of correspondence between Gerling and Gauss on the topic were published. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Julius Plücker.
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Gustav Eberhard
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Gustav E. Eberhard German astrophysicist. Eberhard published numerous investigations on spectroscopy and on photographic photogrametry. The photographic Eberhard effect is named after him and was published in 1926.
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Charles Thomas Whitmell
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Charles Thomas Whitmell was an English astronomer, mathematician and educationalist. Early life and education Whitmell was born into a middle-class family in Leeds, Yorkshire, where his father was a principal official of the Bank of England. As a teenage child he was pre-occupied by scientific experiments and investigations – especially in the fields of chemistry, optics, electricity and magnetism. At the age of 14 he was already corresponding with Michael Faraday and Professor John Tyndall. Whitmell was educated at Leeds Grammar School, London University and Trinity College, Cambridge . His experimental work was on the subject of highly refractive liquids.
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Heinrich Ott
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Heinrich Ott was a German physicist. Education Ott studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His thesis was on the theory of crystal structure, and he was awarded his doctorate in 1924. He stayed on as Sommerfeld’s assistant. Subsequently, he completed his Habilitation and was a Privatdozent until 1929.
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William Hammond Wright
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
William Hammond Wright was an American astronomer and the director of the Lick Observatory from 1935 until 1942. Wright was born in San Francisco. After graduating in 1893 from the University of California, he became Assistant Astronomer at Lick Observatory. From 1903 to 1906 he worked on establishing the "Southern station" of the observatory at Cerro San Cristobal near Santiago de Chile. It only took him 6 months to start with observations from this new site, and he recorded a large series of radial velocity measurements of stars in the southern sky. In 1908 he was promoted to Astronomer. Fr...
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Prana Krushna Parija
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Prana Krushna Parija OBE was an Indian botanist. His research work comprised mainly fundamental and applied aspects of plant physiology, experimental plant morphology, and ecological studies of plant environment. He studied water hyacinth and other aquatic weeds, respiration in leaves and apples, transpiration and heat resistance in plants, rice and algae and storage of apples.
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John Larry Kelly Jr.
1923 - 1965 (42 years)
John Larry Kelly Jr. , was an American scientist who worked at Bell Labs. From a "system he'd developed to analyze information transmitted over networks," from Claude Shannon's earlier work on information theory, he is best known for his 1956 work in creating the Kelly criterion formula. With notable volatility in its sequence of outcomes, the Kelly criterion can be used to estimate what proportion of wealth to risk in a sequence of positive expected value bets to maximize the rate of return. As a substantial warning, the outcome for the Kelly criterion's recommendation on bet-size "relies h...
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John Torrence Tate Sr.
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
John Torrence Tate Sr. was an American physicist noted for his editorship of Physical Review between 1926 and 1950. He is the father of mathematician John Torrence Tate Jr. Biography Tate was born on 28 July 1889 in Lenox, Iowa. He attended the University of Nebraska, studying electrical engineering, earning a BS in 1910. He continued at the University of Nebraska, shifting his focus to physics and earning an MA in 1912. Like many American students interested in pursuing advanced degrees in physics, he departed for Germany to further his studies, earning a PhD under James Franck in 1914, with...
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Renate Chasman
1932 - 1977 (45 years)
Renate Wiener Chasman was a physicist. She was born Renate Wiener to German Jewish parents in Berlin. Her father, Hans Wiener, was a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1938, the Wiener family fled Nazi Germany through the Netherlands to Sweden, where Wiener grew up and attended school in Stockholm.
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Giambattista Pianciani
1784 - 1862 (78 years)
Giambattista Pianciani was an Italian Jesuit scientist. Biography He entered the Society of Jesus on 2 June 1805; after having received the ordinary Jesuit training he was sent to various cities in the Papal States to teach mathematics and physics and finally was appointed professor in the Roman College, where he lectured and wrote on scientific subjects for twenty-four years. He was an active member of the Accademia d'Arcadia, his academical pseudonym being "Polite Megaride", of the Accademia de' Lincei, and of other scientific societies. His scientific labours were abruptly brought to an e...
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Morton Masius
1883 - 1979 (96 years)
Morton Masius was a German-American physical chemist. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1928. Biography His parents were Alfred Masius, a translator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his wife Edith, née Bailey. Morton Massius's paternal grandfather was Hermann Masius, a professor of pedagogy. Morton Masius attended the humanistic St. Thomas School, Leipzig. After completing his Abitur, he studied physical chemistry at the Leipzig University and received in 1908 his Dr. rer. nat. with a dissertation supervised by Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich. In 1910 in Leipzig, Morton Masius married Paula Marie Wagner, daughter of a wealthy Leipzig family.
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Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar
1893 - 1954 (61 years)
Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar was a Swedish-born American experimental physicist. He was the eldest of six children of Anders Vilhelm Hammar and Elin Christina Hammar . He emigrated to the United States in 1913, attended Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and by 1920 was married and living with his wife, Louise , in King County, Washington.
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Ibn al-A'lam
901 - 985 (84 years)
'Alī ibn al-Ḥusayn Abū l-Qasim al-'Alawi Ashraf|al-Sharif al-Husayni ,, , was a 10th-century Islamic astronomer and astrologer. Little is known about Ibn al-A'lam's life, and his birth date has not been established by historians. He seems to have been one of the most prominent astronomers of the 10th century, demonstrated by the impact he had on Islamic and Byzantine astronomy. He appears to have been active in Baghdad, working under the patronage of its Buyid ruler, 'Adud al-Dawla . His Nisba "al-Alawi al-Sharif" indicates that he was a Sharif and a descendant of Ja’far al-Tayyar.
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Otto Wiener
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
Otto Heinrich Wiener was a German physicist. Life and work Otto Wiener was a son of Christian Wiener and Pauline Hausrath. Orphan of mother at the age of 3, he married Lina Fenner at 32. He was a pupil of August Kundt at the University of Strasbourg, where he received his doctorate in 1887 with a thesis on the phase change of light upon reflection, and methods to determine the thickness of thin films.
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Jean Lecomte
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Jean Lecomte was a French physicist, researcher and professor of physics at CNRS. Career In 1919, Lecomte started working in the laboratory of physical research at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lecomte presented his Doctoral Thesis in 1924 on localized vibrations in molecules. He was one of the founding members of the European Congress on Molecular Spectroscopy , together with French Nobel prize winning physicist Alfred Kastler and German physicist Reinhard Mecke . Lecomte was elected as a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1959 and as president of the French Association for the Advancement of Science in 1968.
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Robert Jack
1877 - 1957 (80 years)
Robert Jack was a Scottish-born physicist, professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Otago, and pioneer of radio broadcasting, New Zealand. Early life and education Robert Jack was born in the village of Quarter, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 4 November 1877 and was educated at Hamilton Academy and the University of Glasgow, graduating MA with Honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. Thereafter he attended the University of Paris and the University of Göttingen for postgraduate study and as a result of this research, including that into the effect o...
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Walter Drowley Filmer
1865 - 1944 (79 years)
Walter Drowley Filmer was an early pioneer of X-rays in Australia, a wireless engineer, for a time ran the British Royal Train, and a world class entomologist that discovered several new species in his homeland. Filmer was a naturalist and established a private collection at his residence that thousands of people visited.
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Christian Olufsen
1802 - 1855 (53 years)
Christian Friis Rottbøll Olufsen was a Danish astronomer and professor of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen. Olufsen was born in Copenhagen where his father Oluf Christian Olufsen was an economist and teacher . He grew up in Classens Have where his father taught at the agricultural institute. After some home schooling he joined Borgerdydskolen in 1812 where he excelled so much that the school thought he should already be sent to university, a proposal prevented by his father. He then went to university where he studied under C.F. Degenand and Erasmus Georg Fog Thune. He received the gold medal in 1824 for his study on eclipse calculations and became an assistant at the observatory.
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Eustachio Zanotti
1709 - 1782 (73 years)
Eustachio Zanotti was an Italian astronomer and engineer. He worked at the astronomical observatory in Bologna. Biography Zanotti was born in Bologna where his father Giampietro was a poet, painter and art historian. His mother was Constanza M. Teresa Gambari. An uncle was the philosopher Francesco Maria Zanotti. Zanotti studied at Jesuit schools and became interest in science and mathematics, trained under Eustachio Manfredi at the Bologna observatory where he began to work from 1729. He received a degree from the University of Bologna in 1730. In 1738 he examined Newton's theory of light. He became a director of the observatory in 1739 following Manfredi's death.
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Mordecai Comtino
1500 - 1487 (-13 years)
Mordecai ben Eliezer Comtino was a Talmudist and scientist. The earliest date attached to any of his writings is 1425. The form of his family name is doubtful, and has been transcribed by modern scholars as "Comtino." Mordecai's biographer, Jonah Hayyim Gurland, uses the form "Kumatyano," a name which he found still in use in Turkey . He was the pupil of Enoch Saporta, a distinguished Talmudist, known for his cultivation of the sciences and his tolerance toward the Karaites.
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Kurd von Mosengeil
1884 - 1906 (22 years)
Kurd Friedrich Rudolf von Mosengeil, also Curd Friedrich Rudolf von Mosengeil , was a German physicist. Kurd von Mosengeil was a student of Max Planck. In 1905, the latter became the most prominent early advocate of the theory of special relativity of Albert Einstein. In the subsequent years, Planck published several works, in which he explained further consequences of Einstein's theory. He conveyed his enthusiasm to his assistant Max von Laue and his student Kurd of Mosengeil, who became the first physicists to habilitate and graduate, respectively, in relativity-related subjects.
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Johan Aschehoug Kiær
1869 - 1931 (62 years)
Johan Aschehoug Kiær was a Norwegian paleontologist and geologist. Biography Johan Kiær was born in Drammen, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Hagbarth Kiær and grandson of shipowner and Member of Parliament Hans Andersen Kiær . He was a nephew of Elias C. Kiær operator of the family company And. H. Kiær & Co. which had been founded by his great-grandfather, Anders Hansen Kiær .
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Witold Wilkosz
1891 - 1941 (50 years)
Witold Wilkosz was a Polish mathematician, physicist, philosopher and popularizer of science. Life and career Witold Wilkosz was born on 14 August 1891 in Kraków to parents Jan, a Polish teacher, and Józefa née Vopalko. He showed a considerable talent for mathematics and languages since early childhood. He passed his final school-leaving Matura exam at the John III Sobieski High School . He was a friend of fellow mathematician Stefan Banach. Before graduating from high school, he had written an article on semitology for which he was offered a scholarship and membership from Morgenländische Gesselchaft Scienctific Society, which enabled him to study at the University of Beirut.
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Henrik Petrini
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Henrik Petrini was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are mainly connected with the theory of partial differential equations, in particular potential theory. He was born in Falun and received his PhD in 1890 from Uppsala University in mechanics, where he subsequently held a position as professor. In 1901 he moved to Växjö, where he worked as a lektor for mathematics and physics at the gymnasium. In 1914 he finally moved to Stockholm. He is best known for his counterexample of a continuous function for which the Newton potential is not twice differentiable. He was also int...
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Paul Santorini
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Paul Santorini was a Greek civil engineer, experimental and theoretical physicist, mathematician, electrical engineer, astronomer, author, and professor. He published over 350 articles and conducted research in the fields of solar energy, wind energy, electromagnetic microwaves as weapons of war, high-frequency electromagnetic waves, high-frequency currents, structural engineering, and hydraulics. Later in life, he wrote papers in the field of the birth of the universe and proposed the multiple successive small bangs theory of the universe. Some of his papers also dealt with mankind and the universe.
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Kazimierz Kordylewski
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Kazimierz Kordylewski was a Polish astronomer. In 1956, he claimed the discovery of the Kordylewski clouds, large transient concentrations of dust at the Trojan points of the Earth–Moon system, which were reported to have been confirmed to exist in October 2018.
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William Stephen Finsen
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
William Stephen Finsen FRAS was a South African astronomer. He discovered a number of double stars and took many photographs of Mars. He developed the Finsen eyepiece interferometer to measure very close double stars. He was the final director of Union Observatory in South Africa from 1957 to 1965 .
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Johannes Phocylides Holwarda
1618 - 1651 (33 years)
Johannes Phocylides Holwarda was a Frisian astronomer, physician, and philosopher. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Franeker from 1639 to 1651. Born in Holwerd, he is best remembered for his discovery of the length of Mira's varying appearance cycle. In a systematic study in 1638, he found that Mira disappeared and reappeared in a varying cycle of about 330 days.
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Hermann von Struve
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
Karl Hermann von Struve was a Baltic German astronomer. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as German Ottovich Struve or German Ottonovich Struve . Hermann von Struve was a part of the famous group of astronomers from the Struve family, which also included his grandfather Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, father Otto Wilhelm von Struve, brother Ludwig Struve and nephew Otto Struve. Unlike other astronomers of the Struve family, Herman spent most of his career in Germany. Continuing the family tradition, Struve's research was focused on determining the positions of stellar objects. He w...
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Carl H. Hermann
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Carl Heinrich Hermann , or Carl Hermann , was a German physicist and crystallographer known for his research in crystallographic symmetry, nomenclature, and mathematical crystallography in N-dimensional spaces. Hermann was a pioneer in crystallographic databases and, along with Paul Peter Ewald, published the first volume of the influential Strukturbericht in 1931.
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Carroll L. Wilson
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Carroll L. Wilson was a Professor of Management at the Sloan School and the first Mitsui Professor in Problems of Contemporary Technology at MIT. His career encompassed a number of academic, government, and industrial positions ranging from Assistant to the President of MIT to first General Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission.
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John Henry Pepper
1821 - 1900 (79 years)
John Henry "Professor" Pepper was a British scientist and inventor who toured the English-speaking world with his scientific demonstrations. He entertained the public, royalty, and fellow scientists with a wide range of technological innovations. He is primarily remembered for developing the projection technique known as Pepper's ghost, building a large-scale version of the concept by Henry Dircks. He also oversaw the introduction of evening lectures at the Royal Polytechnic Institution and wrote several important science education books, one of which is regarded as a significant step towards the understanding of continental drift.
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Percival Lowell
1855 - 1916 (61 years)
Percival Lowell was an American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars, and furthered theories of a ninth planet within the Solar System. He founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death.
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David Mowbray Balme
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
David Mowbray Balme was a British expatriate professor and scholar who became the first principal of the University College of the Gold Coast which is now University of Ghana. The Balme Library was named after him.
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William Hale
1797 - 1870 (73 years)
William Hale , was a British inventor and rocket pioneer. Biography Hale was born in Colchester, England in 1797. He was self-taught although his grandfather, the educator William Cole, is believed to have tutored him. By 1827 he had obtained his first patent; he also won a first class Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in Paris for his paper on ship propulsion using an early form of jet propulsion.
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Franz Melde
1832 - 1901 (69 years)
Franz Emil Melde was a German physicist and professor. A graduate of the University of Marburg under Christian Ludwig Gerling, he later taught there, focusing primarily on acoustics, also making contributions to fields including fluid mechanics and meteorology. He began in 1860 as Gerling's assistant at the University's Mathematical and Physical Institute, succeeding him in 1864.
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Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster
1789 - 1860 (71 years)
Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster was an English astronomer, physician, naturalist and philosopher. An early animal rights activist, he promoted vegetarianism and founded the Animals' Friend Society with Lewis Gompertz. He published pamphlets on a wide variety of subjects, including morality, Pythagorean philosophy, bird migration, Sati, and "phrenology", a term that he coined in 1815.
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John Winthrop
1714 - 1779 (65 years)
John Winthrop was an American mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He was the 2nd Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Harvard College. Early life John Winthrop was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His great-great-grandfather, also named John Winthrop, was founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He graduated in 1732 from Harvard, where, from 1738 until his death, he served as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy.
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Helen Schaeffer Huff
1883 - 1913 (30 years)
Helen Schaeffer Huff was an American physicist. She received her PhD in physics from Bryn Mawr College in 1908, with a minor in pure and applied mathematics. Her dissertation was entitled A Study of the Electric Spark in a Magnetic Field.
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Jacques-André Mallet
1740 - 1790 (50 years)
Jacques-André Mallet ; also Mallet-Favre; 23 September 1740 – 31 January 1790 In 1772, Mallet established and co-financed the first Geneva Observatory, and served as its director until his death in 1790. His research primarily concerned occultations, especially lunar and solar eclipses, sunspots, planetary orbits, and the orbits of the moons of Jupiter.
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Erich Peter Wohlfarth
1924 - 1988 (64 years)
Erich Peter Wohlfarth was a theoretical physicist. He is known for his work in magnetism, in particular the Stoner–Wohlfarth model he developed together with his teacher E.C. Stoner. See also Metamagnetism
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James Robert Milne
1880 - 1961 (81 years)
James Robert Milne PRSSA FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish physicist. He served as president of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts from 1923 to 1925. Life He graduated with a BSc from the University of Edinburgh in 1899.
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Carleton C. Murdock
1884 - 1971 (87 years)
Carleton Chase Murdock was an American physicist, teaching and researching primarily at Cornell University. He served as Dean of University Faculty from 1945 to 1951. Within the field of physics, he was known for research in the field of crystal structures and X-ray diffractions. During academic year 1926-27, Murdock also conducted research at the Royal Institute’s Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London, England.
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František Záviška
1879 - 1945 (66 years)
František Záviška was a Czechslovak physicist. The major asset of his scientific work is integrated in nine studies on waveguides published between the years 1912 and 1939. They evaluated, on the basis of the Maxwell equations, the effect of radiation by electromagnetic waves in space using conductible and non-conductible cylinders, tubes and their combinations, organized in different ways. The results of Záviška's experiments were groundbreaking, but they were published in Czech journals only and never became known abroad.
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George W. Lilley
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
George W. Lilley was an American academic, professor of mathematics, and the first president of two American universities, today known as South Dakota State University and Washington State University.
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