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.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#10651
Sisir Kumar Mitra
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Sisir Kumar Mitra MBE, FNI, FASB, FIAS, FRS was an Indian physicist. Early life and education Mitra was born in his father's hometown of Konnagar, a suburb of Kolkata located in the Hooghly District in the Bengal Presidency . He was the third son of Joykrishna Mitra, who was a schoolteacher at the time of Mitra's birth, and Saratkumari, a medical student whose family came from Midnapore. While Mitra's paternal family were orthodox Hindus, his mother's family were adherents of the progressive Brahmo Samaj, and were noted in Midnapore for their advanced outlook. In 1878, Joykrishna Mitra had ...
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Geminus
Geminus of Rhodes , was a Greek astronomer and mathematician, who flourished in the 1st century BC. An astronomy work of his, the Introduction to the Phenomena, still survives; it was intended as an introductory astronomy book for students. He also wrote a work on mathematics, of which only fragments quoted by later authors survive.
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John Evershed
1864 - 1956 (92 years)
John Evershed CIE FRS FRAS was an English astronomer. He was the first to observe radial motionss in sunspots, a phenomenon now known as the Evershed effect. Biography Evershed was born in Gomshall, Surrey to John and Sophia Evershed. He made the discovery which bears his name while at Kodaikanal Observatory in 1909. After retirement in 1923 he set up a private observatory at Ewhurst, Surrey and built a large spectroheliograph of special design and another with high-dispersion liquid prism. He continued to study the wave-lengths of H and K lines in prominences, giving values of the solar rotation at high levels in different latitudes and at different phases of the solar cycle.
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William de Wiveleslie Abney
1843 - 1920 (77 years)
Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney was an English astronomer, chemist, and photographer. Life and career Abney was born in Derby, England, the son of Rev. Edward Henry Abney , vicar of St Alkmund's Church, Derby, and his wife, Catharine Strutt. His father was owner of the Firs Estate. William was educated at Rossall School, the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and joined the Royal Engineers in 1861, with which he served in India for several years. Thereafter, and to further his knowledge in photography, he became a chemical assistant at the Chatham School of Military Engineering.
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Su-Shu Huang
1915 - 1977 (62 years)
Su-Shu Huang was a Chinese-born American astrophysicist. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Huang began his career with the study of the continuous absorption coefficientss of two-electron systems, but eventually his research focus turned to the study of stellar atmospheres, radiative transfer, and binary and multiple star systems. In subsequent years, Huang began to cover the topic of life on extrasolar planets and the prerequisites thereof, coining the term "habitable zone" to refer to the region around a star where planets could support liquid water at their surfaces at a 1959 confer...
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Edwin Brant Frost
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Edwin Brant Frost II was an American astronomer. Biography He was born in Brattleboro, Vermont. His father, Carlton Pennington Frost, was dean of Dartmouth Medical School. Frost graduated from Dartmouth in 1886. He continued his education as a post-graduate student in chemistry and in 1887 became an instructor in physics while only 21 years old. In 1890 Frost went abroad to Europe and ended up researching stellar spectroscopy under Hermann Vogel in Potsdam. He returned to Dartmouth in 1892 as an assistant professor of astronomy.
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Al-Khazini
1077 - 1155 (78 years)
Abū al-Fath Abd al-Rahman Mansūr al-Khāzini or simply al-Khāzini was an Iranian astronomer of Greek origin from Seljuk Empire. His astronomical tables written under the patronage of Sultan Sanjar is considered to be one of the major works in mathematical astronomy of the medieval period. He provided the positions of fixed stars, and for oblique ascensions and time-equations for the latitude of Marv in which he was based. He also wrote extensively on various calendrical systems and on the various manipulations of the calendars. He was the author of an encyclopedia on scales and water-balances...
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Ali Qushji
1403 - 1474 (71 years)
Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammed , known as Ali Qushji was a Turkic-müslims theologian, jurist, astronomer, mathematician and physicist, who settled in the Ottoman Empire some time before 1472. As a disciple of Ulugh Beg, he is best known for the development of astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy, and for providing empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy. In addition to his contributions to Ulugh Beg's famous work Zij-i-Sultani and to the founding of Sahn-ı Seman Medrese, one of the first cent...
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Ivan Mikhailovich Simonov
1794 - 1855 (61 years)
Ivan Mikhailovich Simonov was a Russian astronomer and a geodesist. Biography He completed his studies and became a professor of physics at Kazan State University in 1816 where he was a close friend of Nikolai Lobachevsky. He was a corresponding member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences from 1829 and later went on to become the rector of Kazan State University in 1846.
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Georg Adolf Erman
1806 - 1877 (71 years)
Georg Adolf Erman was a German physicist. Erman was born in Berlin as the son of Paul Erman. He studied natural science at the universities of Berlin and Königsberg, spent from 1828 to 1830 in a journey round the world, an account of which he published in Reise um die Erde durch Nordasien und die beiden Ozeane . The magnetic observations he made during his travels were utilized by Carl Friedrich Gauss in his theory of terrestrial magnetism. He was appointed professor of physics at Berlin in 1839, and died there in 1877.
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Gunnar Malmquist
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Karl Gunnar Malmquist was a Swedish astronomer. Biography Gunnar Malmquist was born in Ystad, where he completed his secondary school education before matriculating at the Lund University in 1911. He received his Ph.D. in 1921, was an amanuensis at the Lund Observatory 1915-1920 and a docent from 1920. He continued to work at the observatory in Lund until 1929, was observator at the Stockholm Observatory and taught at the Stockholm University College 1930-1939, and was Professor of Astronomy at the Uppsala University from 1939 until his retirement in 1959.
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Zvonimir Richtmann
1901 - 1941 (40 years)
Zvonimir Richtmann was a Croatian-Jewish physicist, philosopher, politician and publicist who was killed during World War II by Ustaše. Biography Richtmann was born on 22 November 1901 in Zagreb, where he achieved his education. He studied at the Vienna University of Technology from where he graduated in 1925, and at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb which he finished and graduated from in 1932. After graduation, Richtmann taught as a professor at the engineering high school in Zagreb. Richtmann held many public lectures and has published articles about physics.
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Vojislav Mišković
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Vojislav Mišković was a Yugoslac astronomer, head of the Belgrade Observatory in 1926–1950 and 1951–1954.
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Ludwig Hopf
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Ludwig Hopf was a German-Jewish theoretical physicist who made contributions to mathematics, special relativity, hydrodynamics, and aerodynamics. Early in his career he was the assistant to and a collaborator and co-author with Albert Einstein.
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Mikhail Leontovich
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Leontovich was a Soviet physicist, member of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, specializing in plasma and radiophysics. He was awarded:Three Orders of LeninFive Orders of the Red Banner of LabourLenin Prize
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H. G. van de Sande Bakhuyzen
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Hendricus Gerardus van de Sande Bakhuyzen was a Dutch astronomer. His surname, van de Sande Bakhuyzen, is sometimes erroneously given as Backhuyzen or Bakhuysen. His first name is sometimes given as Hendrik Gerard.
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Atanasije Stojković
1775 - 1832 (57 years)
Atanasije Stojković was a Serbian, Austrian and Russian writer, pedagogue, scholar, physicist, mathematician and astronomer. He is considered the founder of Russian meteoritics. Stojković was the president of the Imperial University of Kharkov from 1807 to 1809 and from 1811 to 1813.
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William L. McMillan
1936 - 1984 (48 years)
William L. McMillan was an American physicist noted for his research of condensed matter physics. McMillan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, professor of physics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences McMillan received the 1978 Fritz London Memorial Prize for his work in superconductors. The National Academies Press called him "the ablest condensed matter physicist of his generation". The University of Illinois established an award in his name: The William L. McMillan Award.
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Enrique Gaviola
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Ramón Enrique Gaviola was an Argentinian astrophysicist. Student of Richard Gans at the Universidad de La Plata went in 1922 to Germany where he continued his studies in physics. He studied with Max Planck, Max Born and Albert Einstein, graduating from the University of Berlin in 1926.
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Ormond Stone
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Ormond Stone , was an American astronomer, mathematician and educator. He was the director of Cincinnati Observatory and subsequently the first director of the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, where he trained a significant number of scientists. He served as the editor of the Annals of Mathematics and towards the end of his life made donations which led to the founding of the Fairfax Public Library System.
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David Fabricius
1564 - 1617 (53 years)
David Fabricius was a German pastor who made two major discoveries in the early days of telescopic astronomy, jointly with his eldest son, Johannes Fabricius . David Fabricius was born at Esens, studied at the University of Helmstedt starting in 1583 and served as pastor for small towns near his birthplace in Frisia , at Resterhafe near Dornum in 1584 and at Osteel in 1603. As was common for Protestant ministers of the day, he dabbled in science: his particular interest was astronomy. Fabricius corresponded with astronomer Johannes Kepler.
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Sameera Moussa
1917 - 1952 (35 years)
Sameera Moussa or Samira Musa Aly was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner "Atoms for Peace." She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.
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Daniel Hay Guest
#10674
Benjamin Markarian
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Benjamin "Benik" Egishevitch Markarian was an Armenian astrophysicist. Markarian's Chain is a group of galaxies which was named after him when he discovered that its members move with a common motion. He is also the namesake of a catalog of compact, optically bright galaxies known as Markarian galaxies.
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David Gill
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Sir David Gill was a Scottish astronomer who is known for measuring astronomical distances, for astrophotography and geodesy. He spent much of his career in South Africa. Life and work David Gill was born at 48 Skene Terrace in Aberdeen the son of David Gill, watchmaker and his wife Margaret Mitchell. He was educated first at Bellevue Academy in Aberdeen then at Dollar Academy. He spent two years at Aberdeen University, where he was taught by James Clerk Maxwell, and then joined his father's clock-making business. His most important influence at university was probably from Prof David Thomson.
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Bruno Finzi
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Bruno Finzi was an Italian mathematician, engineer and physicist. Biography Born at Gardone Val Trompia, Finzi received in 1920 his Laurea as an engineer and in 1921 as a mathematician at the University of Pavia. In 1922 he became an assistant of Umberto Cisotti at the Polytecnico di Milano. In 1931 he became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Milan, but returned in 1947 to the Polytecnico di Milano as the successor to Cisotti and became there director of the Mathematical Institute. From 1949 he was the head of the newly founded Institute of Aeronautics and in 1967 he bec...
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Charles-Eugène Delaunay
1816 - 1872 (56 years)
Charles-Eugène Delaunay was a French astronomer and mathematician. His lunar motion studies were important in advancing both the theory of planetary motion and mathematics. Life Born in Lusigny-sur-Barse, France, to Jacques‐Hubert Delaunay and Catherine Choiselat, Delaunay studied under Jean-Baptiste Biot at the Sorbonne. He worked on the mechanics of the Moon as a special case of the three-body problem. He published two volumes on the topic, each of 900 pages in length, in 1860 and 1867. The work hints at chaos in the system, and clearly demonstrates the problem of so-called "small denominators" in perturbation theory.
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Peter Herbert Jensen
1913 - 1955 (42 years)
Peter Herbert Jensen was a German experimental nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranverein. After the war, he was a department director in the high-voltage section of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, and a supernumerary professor at the University of Mainz.
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Tom W. Bonner
1910 - 1961 (51 years)
Tom Wilkerson Bonner was an American experimental physicist who developed important instruments and techniques for neutron physics and nuclear physics . Biography Bonner earned his bachelor's degree in physics from SMU in 1931 and his PhD from Rice University in 1934. In 1934–1936, he was a National Research Council fellow at Caltech. At Rice University, he became an instructor in 1936, a professor in 1945, and chair of the physics department in 1947. In the academic year 1938–1939, he was a Guggenheim fellow. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he did radar research at the MIT Radiation Lab.
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Thomas Cowling
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Thomas George Cowling FRS was an English astronomer. Early life and education Cowling was born in Hackney, London, the second of four sons of George Cowling and Edith Eliza Cowling . He was educated at Sir George Monoux Grammar School in Walthamstow and read mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results.
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Fernando Sanford
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Fernando Sanford was an American physicist and university professor. He was one of the 22 "pioneer professors" for Stanford University. Sanford was born on a farm near Franklin Grove in Lee County, Illinois, on February 12, 1854. He was the son of Faxton and Maria Mariah Sanford. He attended Carthage College, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1879. He taught school until the mid-1880s, then studied physics in Germany under Hermann von Helmholtz for two years.
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Clement D. Child
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Clement D. Child was an American physicist and educator. He is noted particularly for "Child's law" , which is an equation that describes the electric current that flows between the plates of a vacuum tube. Vacuum tubes were the main components in electronics from about 1905 to 1960, when transistors and integrated circuits mostly supplanted them. Child's Law is still a staple of textbooks treating charged particle motion in vacuum and in solids.
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Lionel Wilberforce
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Lionel Robert Wilberforce was a British physicist. He is best known for the invention of the Wilberforce pendulum, which exhibits a curious motion in which periods of purely rotational oscillation gradually alternate with periods of purely up and down oscillation.
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Zoltán Lajos Bay
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Zoltán Lajos Bay was a Hungarian physicist, professor, and engineer who developed technologies, including tungsten lamps and microwave devices. He was the leader of the second group to observe radar echoes from the Moon . From 1930, he worked at the University of Szeged as a professor of theoretical physics.
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James Dunlop
1793 - 1848 (55 years)
James Dunlop FRSE was a Scottish astronomer, noted for his work in Australia. He was employed by Sir Thomas Brisbane to work as astronomer's assistant at his private observatory, once located at Paramatta , New South Wales, about west of Sydney during the 1820s and 1830s. Dunlop was mostly a visual observer, doing stellar astrometry work for Brisbane, and after its completion, then independently discovered and catalogued many new telescopic southern double stars and deep-sky objects. He later became the Superintendent of Paramatta Observatory when it was finally sold to the New South Wales ...
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Johannes Bosscha
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Johannes Bosscha Jr. was a Dutch physicist. Bosscha came from a family long known for their academic achievements. His great-grandfather and grandfather were classical scholars. His father, Johannes Bosscha Sr. , was a professor of history and literature and also was minister of church-state relationships in two governments . From 1844–1848 Johannes Jr. attended a Latin school in Amsterdam, after which he enrolled at Leiden University. In 1854 he obtained his doctoral degree with a thesis on galvanometry. After a brief sojourn in Berlin he returned to the physics department in Leiden.
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Edward Leamington Nichols
1854 - 1937 (83 years)
Edward Leamington Nichols was an American scientist. He was a physicist and astronomer, professor of physics at Cornell University. Biography He was born of American parentage at Leamington, England, and received his education at Cornell University, graduating in 1875. After Studying at Leipzig, Berlin, and Göttingen he was appointed fellow in physics at Johns Hopkins. He then spent some time in the Thomas Edison laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and subsequently became professor of physics and chemistry in the Central University of Kentucky , professor of physics and astronomy at the Un...
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James Ferguson
1710 - 1776 (66 years)
James Ferguson was a Scottish astronomer. He is known as the inventor and improver of astronomical and other scientific apparatus, as a striking instance of self education and as an itinerant lecturer.
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Cargill Gilston Knott
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Cargill Gilston Knott FRS, FRSE LLD was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was a pioneer in seismological research. He spent his early career in Japan. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and President of the Scottish Meteorological Society.
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Marc-Auguste Pictet
1752 - 1825 (73 years)
Marc-Auguste Pictet was a Swiss scientific journalist and experimental natural philosopher. Pictet's main contribution to learning was his editing of the scientific section of the Bibliothèque Britannique , a publication devoted to the diffusion on the Continent of knowledge and arts produced in Great Britain. His own scientific research focused on the fields of physical science, especially calorimetry, but also astronomy, geology, meteorology and technology, especially chronometry and the manufacture of fine earthenware.
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Christopher Clavius
1538 - 1612 (74 years)
Christopher Clavius, SJ was a Jesuit German mathematician, head of mathematicians at the , and astronomer who was a member of the Vatican commission that accepted the proposed calendar invented by Aloysius Lilius, that is known as the Gregorian calendar. Clavius would later write defences and an explanation of the reformed calendar, including an emphatic acknowledgement of Lilius' work. In his last years he was probably the most respected astronomer in Europe and his textbooks were used for astronomical education for over fifty years in and even out of Europe.
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Evan James Williams
1903 - 1945 (42 years)
Evan James Williams FRS was a Welsh experimental physicist who worked in a number of fields with some of the most notable physicists of his day, including Patrick Blackett, Lawrence Bragg, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr.
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Joseph O. Hirschfelder
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and in the creation of the nuclear bomb. Biography Hirschfelder was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a Jewish couple, Arthur Douglas and May Rosalie . He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1929 and at Yale University from 1929 to 1931. Hirschfelder received doctorates in physics and chemistry from Princeton University under the direction of Eugene Wigner, Henry Eyring and Hugh Stott Taylor. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with John von Neumann for a year after his PhD at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Aryeh Kaplan
1934 - 1983 (49 years)
Aryeh Moshe Eliyahu Kaplan was an American Orthodox rabbi, author, and translator best known for his Living Torah edition of the Torah and extensive Kabbalistic commentaries. He became well-known as a prolific writer and was lauded as an original thinker. His wide-ranging literary output, inclusive of introductory pamphlets on Jewish beliefs, and philosophy written at the request of NCSY are often regarded as significant factors in the growth of the baal teshuva movement.
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Otto Scherzer
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Otto Scherzer was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to electron microscopy. Education Scherzer studied physics at the Munich Technical University and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich from 1927 to 1931. At LMU his thesis advisor was Arnold Sommerfeld, and he was granted his doctorate in 1931. His thesis was on the quantum theory of Bremsstrahlung. From 1932 to 1933, Scherzer was an assistant to Carl Ramsauer at the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, an electric combine with headquarters in Berlin and Frankfurt-on-Main. There, he did research on electron optics.
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Otto Lehmann
1855 - 1922 (67 years)
Otto Lehmann was a German physicist and "father" of liquid crystal. Life Otto was the son of Franz Xavier Lehmann, a mathematics teacher in the Baden-Wurtemberg school system, with a strong interest in microscopes. Otto learned to experiment and keep records of this findings. Between 1872 and 1877, Lehmann studied natural sciences at the University of Strassburg and obtained the Ph.D. under crystallographer Paul Groth. Otto used polarizers in a microscope so that he might watch for birefringence appearing in the process of crystallization.
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Frederick Guthrie
1833 - 1886 (53 years)
Frederick Guthrie FRS FRSE was a British physicist, chemist, and academic author. He was the son of Alexander Guthrie, a London tradesman, and the younger brother of mathematician Francis Guthrie. Along with William Fletcher Barrett he founded the Physical Society of London in 1874 and was president of the society from 1884 until 1886. He believed that science should be based on experimentation rather than discussion.
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Johan Peter Holtsmark
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Johan Peter Holtsmark was a Norwegian physicist, who studied spectral line broadening and electron scattering. In 1929, while at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Holtsmark established acoustics research laboratories, focusing on architectural acoustics and sound insulation. Holtsmark was also a consultant for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation throughout the 1930s.
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Vitold Tserasky
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Vitold Karlovich Tserasky also spelled Witold Cerasky was a Russian astronomer and inventor of astronomical tools and techniques. The asteroid 807 Ceraskia and the Lunar crater Tseraskiy are named after him.
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Jules Violle
1841 - 1923 (82 years)
Jules Louis Gabriel Violle was a French physicist and inventor. He is notable for having determined the solar constant at Mont Blanc in 1875, and, in 1881, for proposing a standard for luminous intensity, called the Violle, equal to the light emitted by 1 cm² of platinum at its melting point. It was notable as the first unit of light intensity that did not depend on the properties of a particular lamp. This was much larger than traditional measures such as candlepower, so the standard SI unit candela was originally defined in 1946 as 1/60 Violle.
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