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,
#10651
Gleb Wataghin
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Gleb Vassielievich Wataghin was a Ukrainian-Italian theoretical and experimental physicist and a great scientific leader who gave a great impulse to the teaching and research on physics in two continents: in the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and in the University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
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Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke
1835 - 1897 (62 years)
Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke was a German astronomer. Winnecke worked at Pulkovo Observatory near Saint Petersburg from 1858 to 1865, but returned to Germany and served as professor of astronomy in Strasbourg from 1872 to 1881.
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Michael Maestlin
1550 - 1631 (81 years)
Michael Maestlin was a German astronomer and mathematician, known for being the mentor of Johannes Kepler. He was a student of Philipp Apian and was known as the teacher who most influenced Kepler. Maestlin was considered to be one of the most significant astronomers between the time of Copernicus and Kepler.
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Heinrich Friedrich Weber
1843 - 1912 (69 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Weber was a physicist born in the town of Magdala, near Weimar. Biography Around 1861 he entered the University of Jena, where Ernst Abbe became the first of two physicists who decisively influenced his career . Weber soon discovered, however, that he lacked sufficient mathematical talent, and so he abandoned mathematics entirely .
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Charles Wheatstone
1802 - 1875 (73 years)
Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS FRSE , was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope , and the Playfair cipher . However, Wheatstone is best known for his contributions in the development of the Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Hunter Christie, which is used to measure an unknown electrical resistance, and as a major figure in the development of telegraphy.
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Alexandru Proca
1897 - 1955 (58 years)
Alexandru Proca was a Romanian physicist who studied and worked in France. He developed the vector meson theory of nuclear forces and the relativistic quantum field equations that bear his name for the massive, vector spin-1 mesons.
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Emil Warburg
1846 - 1931 (85 years)
Emil Gabriel Warburg was a German physicist who during his career was professor of physics at the Universities of Strassburg, Freiburg and Berlin. He was president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft 1899–1905. His name is notably associated with the Warburg element of electrochemistry.
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Tullio Levi-Civita
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Tullio Levi-Civita, was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics , analytic mechanics and hydrodynamics.
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Max Valier
1895 - 1930 (35 years)
Max Valier was an Austrian rocketry pioneer. He was a leading figure in the world's first large-scale rocket program, Opel-RAK, and helped found the German Verein für Raumschiffahrt that would bring together many of the minds that would later make spaceflight a reality in the 20th century.
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Egon Bretscher
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Egon Bretscher was a Swiss-born British chemist and nuclear physicist and Head of the Nuclear Physics Division from 1948 to 1966 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, also known as Harwell Laboratory, in Harwell, United Kingdom. He was one of the pioneers in nuclear fission research and one of the first to foresee that plutonium could be used as an energy source. His work on nuclear physics led to his involvement in the British atomic bomb research project Tube Alloys and his membership of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he worked in Enrico Fermi's Advanced Development Division in the F-3 Super Experimentation group.
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Alexander Kompaneyets
1914 - 1974 (60 years)
Alexander Solomonovich Kompaneyets was born on January 4, 1914, in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire and died on August 19, 1974, in Palanga, Lithuania. He was a prominent physicist, author of a number of textbooks, and collaborator on the Soviet atomic bomb project who lived mainly in Moscow.
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Aimé Cotton
1869 - 1951 (82 years)
Aimé Auguste Cotton was a French physicist known for his studies of the interaction of light with chiral molecules. In the absorption bands of these molecules, he discovered large values of optical rotatory dispersion , or variation of optical rotation as a function of wavelength , as well as circular dichroism or differences of absorption between left and right circularly polarized light.
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Evangelista Torricelli
1608 - 1647 (39 years)
Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him.
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Wojciech Rubinowicz
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Wojciech Sylwester Piotr Rubinowicz was a Polish theoretical physicist who made contributions in quantum mechanics, mathematical physics, and the theory of radiation. He is known for the Maggie-Rubinowicz representation of Gustav Kirchhoff’s diffraction formula.
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David Brewster
1781 - 1868 (87 years)
Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA Scot FSSA MICE was a Scottish scientist, inventor, author, and academic administrator. In science he is principally remembered for his experimental work in physical optics, mostly concerned with the study of the polarization of light and including the discovery of Brewster's angle. He studied the birefringence of crystals under compression and discovered photoelasticity, thereby creating the field of optical mineralogy. For this work, William Whewell dubbed him the "father of modern experimental optics" and "the Johannes Kepler of optics."
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Josef Stefan
1835 - 1893 (58 years)
Josef Stefan was a Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire. Life and work Stefan was born in the village of St. Peter on the outskirts of KlagenfurtAleksander1805-18721815-1863.
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Nilakantha Somayaji
1444 - 1544 (100 years)
Keļallur Nilakantha Somayaji , also referred to as Keļallur Comatiri, was a major mathematician and astronomer of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of his most influential works was the comprehensive astronomical treatise Tantrasamgraha completed in 1501. He had also composed an elaborate commentary on Aryabhatiya called the Aryabhatiya Bhasya. In this Bhasya, Nilakantha had discussed infinite series expansions of trigonometric functions and problems of algebra and spherical geometry. Grahapariksakrama is a manual on making observations in astronomy based on instruments of the time.
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Richard Becker
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Richard Becker was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, superconductivity, and quantum electrodynamics. Early life Becker was born in Hamburg. His studies in zoology started in 1906 at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1909 under August Weismann. After hearing lectures by Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Becker turned his professional interest to physics. He also studied physics under Max Born at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, and Max Planck and Albert Einstein at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Walter Rogowski
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Walter Rogowski was a German physicist who bridged the gap between theoretical physics and applied technology in numerous areas of electronics. The Rogowski coil was named after him. Biography In 1900, Rogowski began his studies at the RWTH Aachen, under Arnold Sommerfeld, who occupied the Chair for Applied Mechanics. He acquired his Vordiplom in 1902 and went on to study at the Danzig Technische Hochschule , where he was also a scientific assistant. He completed his studies at Danzig in 1904, but stayed on until 1908, when he went to be a scientific assistant at the Physikalisch Technische...
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Francis Wheeler Loomis
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
Francis Wheeler Loomis , born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was an American scientist most widely known for his contributions in the field of physics. Loomis received his undergraduate degree and, in 1917, his PhD from Harvard University. His thesis was on thermodynamic measurements of mercury.
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Martin Knudsen
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Martin Hans Christian Knudsen was a Danish physicist who taught and conducted research at the Technical University of Denmark. He is primarily known for his study of molecular gas flow and the development of the Knudsen cell, which is a primary component of molecular beam epitaxy systems.
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Alexis Clairaut
1713 - 1765 (52 years)
Alexis Claude Clairaut was a French mathematician, astronomer, and geophysicist. He was a prominent Newtonian whose work helped to establish the validity of the principles and results that Sir Isaac Newton had outlined in the Principia of 1687. Clairaut was one of the key figures in the expedition to Lapland that helped to confirm Newton's theory for the figure of the Earth. In that context, Clairaut worked out a mathematical result now known as "Clairaut's theorem". He also tackled the gravitational three-body problem, being the first to obtain a satisfactory result for the apsidal precession of the Moon's orbit.
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Johannes Franz Hartmann
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Johannes Franz Hartmann was a German physicist and astronomer. In 1904, while studying the spectroscopy of Delta Orionis he noticed that most of the spectrum had a shift, except the calcium lines, which he interpreted as indicating the presence of interstellar medium.
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Pyotr Lebedev
1866 - 1912 (46 years)
Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev was a Russian physicist. His name was also transliterated as Peter Lebedew and Peter Lebedev. Lebedev was the creator of first scientific school in Russia. Career Lebedev made his doctoral degree in Strasbourg under the supervision of August Kundt in 1887–1891. In 1891, he started working in Moscow State University in the group of Alexander Stoletov. There he made his famous experimental studies of electromagnetic waves.
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John Louis Emil Dreyer
1852 - 1926 (74 years)
John Louis Emil Dreyer was a Danish astronomer who spent most of his career working in Ireland. He spent the last decade of his life in Oxford, England. Life Dreyer was born in Copenhagen. His father, Lieutenant General John Christopher Dreyer, was the Danish Minister for War and the Navy. When he was 14 he became interested in astronomy and regularly visited Hans Schjellerup at the Copenhagen observatory. He was educated in Copenhagen, taking an MA in 1872. While the same university later awarded him a PhD, in 1874. But in 1874, at the age of 22, he went to Parsonstown, Ireland. There he wo...
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Henry Draper
1837 - 1882 (45 years)
Henry Draper was an American doctor and amateur astronomer. He is best known today as a pioneer of astrophotography. Life and work Henry Draper's father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, botanist, and professor at New York University; he was also the first to photograph the moon through a telescope . Draper's mother was Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the personal physician to the Emperor of Brazil. His niece, Antonia Maury was also an astronomer.
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Emil Lenz
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz , usually cited as Emil Lenz or Heinrich Lenz in some countries, was a Russian physicist of Baltic German descent who is most noted for formulating Lenz's law in electrodynamics in 1834.
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Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
1201 - 1274 (73 years)
Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi , also known as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi or simply as Tusi, was a Persian polymath, architect, philosopher, physician, scientist, and theologian. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was a well published author, writing on subjects of math, engineering, prose, and mysticism. Additionally, al-Tusi made several scientific advancements. In astronomy, al-Tusi created very accurate tables of planetary motion, an updated planetary model, and critiques of Ptolemaic astronomy. He also made strides in logic, mathematics but especially trigonometry, biology, and chemistry. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi left behind a great legacy as well.
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Herbert Dingle
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Herbert Dingle was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953. He is best known for his opposition to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity and the protracted controversy that this provoked.
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Arthur R. von Hippel
1898 - 2003 (105 years)
Arthur Robert von Hippel was a German American materials scientist and physicist. Von Hippel was a pioneer in the study of dielectrics, ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials, and semiconductors and was a codeveloper of radar during World War II.
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Harold Spencer Jones
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Sir Harold Spencer Jones KBE FRS FRSE PRAS was an English astronomer. He became renowned as an authority on positional astronomy and served as the tenth Astronomer Royal for 23 years. Although born "Jones", his surname became "Spencer Jones".
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Șerban Țițeica
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Șerban Țițeica was a Romanian quantum physicist. He is regarded as the founder of the Romanian school of theoretical physics. The third and last child of mathematician Gheorghe Țițeica, he was born in Bucharest, where he attended Mihai Viteazul National College. He then went to the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1929 with a degree in Physics and Chemistry and another in Mathematics. He studied at Leipzig University from 1930 to 1934 under Werner Heisenberg, earning a doctorate in 1935, with thesis "On the behaviour of electrical resistance of metals in magnetic field".
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Philipp von Jolly
1809 - 1884 (75 years)
Johann Philipp Gustav von Jolly was a German physicist and mathematician. Born in Mannheim as the son of merchant Louis Jolly and Marie Eleonore Jolly, he studied science in Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin. After his studies, he was appointed professor of mathematics in Heidelberg in 1839 and physics in 1846. He moved to Munich in 1854, where he took the position once held by Georg Simon Ohm. In 1854, he was knighted .
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Charles Augustus Young
1834 - 1908 (74 years)
Charles Augustus Young one of the foremost solar spectroscopist astronomers in the United States. He observed solar eclipses and worked on spectroscopy of the Sun. He observed a solar flare with a spectroscope on 3 August 1872, and also noted that it coincided with a magnetic storm on Earth.
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William Herschel
1738 - 1822 (84 years)
Frederick William Herschel was a German-British astronomer and composer. He frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline Herschel. Born in the Electorate of Hanover, William Herschel followed his father into the military band of Hanover, before emigrating to Great Britain in 1757 at the age of nineteen.
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Karl Weissenberg
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Karl Weissenberg was an Austrian physicist, notable for his contributions to rheology and crystallography. Biography The Weissenberg effect was named after him, as was the Weissenberg number. He invented a Goniometer to study X-ray diffraction of crystals for which he received the Duddell Medal of the Institute of Physics in 1946, The European Society of Rheology offers a Weissenberg award in his honour. and the Weissenberg rheogoniometer, a type of rheometer.
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Wilhelm Hallwachs
1859 - 1922 (63 years)
Wilhelm Ludwig Franz Hallwachs was a German physicist. Life and career Early years Hallwachs was born in 1859 in Darmstadt to Ludwig and Emilie Hallwachs. His father was a high ranking public official with the Ministry of the Interior and Justice of the Grand Duchy of Hesse, then part of the German Confederation.
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Nello Carrara
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Nello Carrara was an Italian physicist and founder of the Electromagnetic Wave Research Institute. He researched X-rays and was a pioneer of radar, but is best known for coining the term "microwave".
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Ibn al-Shatir
1304 - 1375 (71 years)
ʿAbu al-Ḥasan Alāʾ al‐Dīn bin Alī bin Ibrāhīm bin Muhammad bin al-Matam al-Ansari known as Ibn al-Shatir or Ibn ash-Shatir was an Arab astronomer, mathematician and engineer. He worked as muwaqqit in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and constructed a sundial for its minaret in 1371/72.
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Nathaniel Bowditch
1773 - 1838 (65 years)
Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation. He is often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation; his book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel. In 2001, an elementary and middle school in Salem was named in his honor.
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Friedrich Hasenöhrl
1874 - 1915 (41 years)
Friedrich Hasenöhrl was an Austrian physicist. Life Friedrich Hasenöhrl was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary in 1874. His father was a lawyer and his mother belonged to a prominent aristocratic family. After his elementary education, he studied natural science and mathematics at the University of Vienna under Joseph Stefan and Ludwig Boltzmann . In 1896, he attained a doctorate under Franz-Serafin Exner with a thesis titled "Über den Temperaturkoeffizienten der Dielektrizitätskonstante in Flüssigkeiten und die Mosotti-Clausius'sche Formel".
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Herbert Hall Turner
1861 - 1930 (69 years)
Herbert Hall Turner was a British astronomer and seismologist. Biography Herbert Hall Turner was educated at the Leeds Modern School, Clifton College, Bristol and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1884 he accepted the post of Chief Assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and stayed there for nine years. In 1893 he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford University, a post he held for 37 years until his sudden death in 1930.
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C. H. D. Buys Ballot
1817 - 1890 (73 years)
Christophorus Henricus Diedericus Buys Ballot was a Dutch chemist and meteorologist after whom Buys Ballot's law and the Buys Ballot table are named. He was first chairman of the International Meteorological Organization, the organization that would become the World Meteorological Organization.
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Wilhelm von Bezold
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm von Bezold was a German physicist and meteorologist born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria. He is best known for discovering the Bezold effect and the Bezold–Brücke shift. Bezold studied mathematics and physics at the University of Munich and the University of Göttingen. He taught meteorology in Munich from 1861, becoming a professor in 1866. In 1868 he began teaching at the Technical University of Munich. In 1875, he was named a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
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Raymond Smith Dugan
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Raymond Smith Dugan was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. His parents were Jeremiah Welby and Mary Evelyn Smith and he was born in Montague in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. His undergraduate and Masters was from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1899 and 1902. Dugan then received his Ph.D. dissertation in 1905 at the Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Königstuhl at the University of Heidelberg.
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Giovanni Giorgi
1871 - 1950 (79 years)
Giovanni Giorgi was an Italian physicist and electrical engineer who proposed the Giorgi system of measurement, the precursor to the International System of Units . Early life Giovanni Giorgi was born in Lucca on November 27, 1871.
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Robert William Boyle
1883 - 1955 (72 years)
Robert William Boyle was a physicist and one of the most important early pioneers in the development of sonar. Boyle was born in 1883 at Carbonear in the Dominion of Newfoundland. Boyle left Newfoundland for Montreal, Quebec in Canada where he trained at McGill University under Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford, in the then fledgling field of radioactivity. He earned McGill's first Doctor of Philosophy in physics in 1909. He then moved to England to continue his work by following Rutherford to the University of Manchester.
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Rudolf Wolf
1816 - 1893 (77 years)
Johann Rudolf Wolf was a Swiss astronomer and mathematician best known for his research on sunspots. Wolf was born in Fällanden, near Zurich. He studied at the universities of Zurich, Vienna, and Berlin. Encke was one of his teachers. Wolf became professor of astronomy at the University of Bern in 1844 and director of the Bern Observatory in 1847. In 1855 he accepted a chair of astronomy at both the University of Zurich and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
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C. V. Boys
1855 - 1944 (89 years)
Sir Charles Vernon Boys, FRS was a British physicist, known for his careful and innovative experimental work in the fields of thermodynamics and high-speed photography, and as a popular science communicator through his books, inventions, and his public lectures for children.
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Willem 's Gravesande
1688 - 1742 (54 years)
Willem Jacob 's Gravesande was a Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher, chiefly remembered for developing experimental demonstrations of the laws of classical mechanics and the first experimental measurement of kinetic energy. As professor of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy at Leiden University, he helped to propagate Isaac Newton's ideas in Continental Europe.
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