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).
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#10751
Gottfried Kirch
1639 - 1710 (71 years)
Gottfried Kirch was a German astronomer and the first "Astronomer Royal" in Berlin and, as such, director of the nascent Berlin Observatory. Life and work The son of Michael Kirch, a shoemaker in Guben, initially he worked as a schoolmaster in Langgrün and Neundorf near Lobenstein. He also worked as a calendar-maker in Saxonia and Franconia. He began to learn astronomy with Erhard Weigel in Jena, and with Hevelius in Danzig. In Danzig in 1667, Kirch published calendars and built several telescopes and instruments. In 1679 he invented a screw micrometer for astronomical measurements. He became...
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Jean Becquerel
1878 - 1953 (75 years)
Jean Antoine Edmond Marie Becquerel was a French physicist, the son of Antoine-Henri Becquerel. He worked on a range of experimental physics topics including magnetic effects on the optical properties of materials, and the effects of low-temperature on magnetic susceptibility. He was among the early teachers of relativity and quantum physics in France.
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Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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Hugh Newall
1857 - 1944 (87 years)
Hugh Frank Newall, FRS FRAS was a British astrophysicist. He was Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge. He was the son of Robert Stirling Newall FRS and his wife Mary, daughter of Hugh Lee Pattinson, FRS.
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Georg von Peuerbach
1423 - 1461 (38 years)
Georg von Peuerbach was an Austrian astronomer, poet, mathematician and instrument maker, best known for his streamlined presentation of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Theoricae Novae Planetarum. Peuerbach was instrumental in making astronomy, mathematics and literature simple and accessible for Europeans during the Renaissance and beyond.
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Sergey Vavilov
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov was a Soviet physicist, the President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from July 1945 until his death. His elder brother Nikolai Vavilov was a famous Russian geneticist.
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Thomas Fincke
1561 - 1656 (95 years)
Thomas Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, and a professor at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years. Biography Thomas Jacobsen Fincke was born in Flensburg in Schleswig. Fincke was the son of Councillor Jacob Fincke and Anna Thorsmede. He completed his primary schooling at Flensburg. From 1577, he studied mathematics, rhetoric and other philosophical studies for five years at the University of Strasbourg.
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Albert Beaumont Wood
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Albert Beaumont Wood DSc , better known as A B Wood, was a British physicist, known for his pioneering work in the field of underwater acoustics and sonar. Wood is known for his work on developing sonar in the UK from the First World War until after the Second World War.
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Eugeniusz Rybka
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Eugeniusz Rybka , was a Polish astronomer, professor of the Lviv University , Wrocław University and director of the Kraków Astronomical Observatory . Also he was deputy director of the International Astronomical Union .
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Aristarkh Belopolsky
1854 - 1934 (80 years)
Aristarkh Apollonovich Belopolsky was a Russian Empire and later Soviet astronomer. He was born in Moscow but his father's ancestors are from a Serbian town called Belo Polje. Life Belopolsky got his degree at Moscow University in 1876, and in 1878, he became the assistant to Fyodor Aleksandrovich Bredikhin at Moscow Observatory. In 1888, he joined the staff of Pulkovo Observatory.
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Paul Erman
1764 - 1851 (87 years)
Paul Erman was a German physicist from Berlin, Brandenburg and a Huguenot of the fourth generation. His work was mainly concerned with electricity and magnetism, though he also made some contributions to optics and physiology.
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John Trowbridge
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
John Trowbridge was an American physicist, noted for his research into electricity and magnetism, and for his innovations in scientific education. Early life Born into a long-established New England family, John Trowbridge could trace his roots in Massachusetts and Connecticut back to the early seventeenth century. His father, John Howe Trowbridge, was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, but did not pursue a professional career, having inherited a sufficient fortune to finance a life of ease. Evidently this state of affairs did not last, however, and the younger Trowbridge would later recount that he was obliged to support himself in youth by monetising his talents as a painter.
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Su Song
1020 - 1101 (81 years)
Su Song , courtesy name Zirong , was a Chinese polymathic scientist and statesman. Excelling in a variety of fields, he was accomplished in mathematics, astronomy, cartography, geography, horology, pharmacology, mineralogy, metallurgy, zoology, botany, mechanical engineering, hydraulic engineering, civil engineering, invention, art, poetry, philosophy, antiquities, and statesmanship during the Song dynasty .
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Taavet Rootsmäe
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Taavet Rootsmäe was an Estonian astronomer. In 1913 he graduated from Tartu University. Since 1919 he taught at Tartu University . From 1919 to 1948 he was the first head of University of Tartu Old Observatory.
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Robert Grant
1814 - 1892 (78 years)
Robert Grant, FRS was a Scottish astronomer. Career He was born on 17 June 1814 at Grantown-on-Spey, Morayshire, where his father was engaged in trade. An illness of six years interrupted his education, and he taught himself, on his recovery at age 19, in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and mathematics. After some brief study at King's College, Aberdeen, he entered in 1841 his brother's counting-house in London, and there set about collecting materials for a history of astronomy.
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Oenopides
490 BC - 420 BC (70 years)
Oenopides of Chios was an ancient Greek geometer, astronomer and mathematician, who lived around 450 BCE. Biography Only limited information are known about the early life of Oenopides except his birthplace which was the island of Chios around 490 BCE. It is believed that Oenopides spent time in Athens but there is only circumstantial evidence to support this. Plato mentions him in Erastae: A Dialogue On Philosophy which places him in Athens. The English translator of the same book reveals one other aspect in Oenopides life which was his travel in Egypt in which he enriched his knowledge in ...
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Paolo Frisi
1728 - 1784 (56 years)
Paolo Frisi was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. Biography Frisi was born in Melegnano in 1728; his sibling Antonio Francesco, born in 1735, went on to be a historian. Frisi was educated at the local Barnabite monastery and afterwards in that of Padua. When twenty-one years of age he composed a treatise on the figure of the earth, and the reputation which he soon acquired led to his appointment by the King of Sardinia to the professorship of philosophy in the College of Casale. His friendship with Radicati, a man of liberal opinions, occasioned Frisi's removal by his clerical superi...
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Reinhold Furth
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Prof Reinhold Heinrich Furth was a German-speaking physicist born in Prague, noted for his 1951 BAAS lecture Physics and Social Equilibrium. He is also remembered for his 1934 theory that stars are composed of Antiparticles.
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Vinko Dvořák
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Vinko Dvořák was a Czech-Croatian physicist, professor and academician. He studied mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague, and after graduating he became an assistant to professor Ernst Mach. After obtaining his doctorate in Prague in 1873/1874 he came to Zagreb and founded the Physics Cabinet at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1875.
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Arkady Timiryasev
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Arkady Klimentievich Timiryazev was a Russian Marxist physicist and philosopher. Biography Arkady was the son of the prominent agronomist and biologist Kliment Timiryazev. He was closely associated with Maxim Gorky. Although he was deemed a professor of physics at Moscow State University, he was derided as the "monument's son" by people who questioned his competence. He was an ardent defender of the classical physics propounded by Isaac Newton and was particularly noted for his vitriolic denunciations of Albert Einstein. He used his Bolshevik ideology to attack other Soviet physicists such as Abram Ioffe and Sergei Vavilov.
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Wilhelm Altar
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Wilhelm Altar , known to family and colleagues as William Altar, was an Austrian-born theoretical physicist whose significant contributions led to the development of the magneto-ionic theory. Altar contributed to the mathematical and conceptual underpinnings that were verified by Appleton's research, in collaboration with Dr. Altar. Altar was not credited with his contributions until 1982, decades after Appleton received the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Giordano Riccati
1709 - 1790 (81 years)
Giordano Riccati or Jordan Riccati was an Italian mathematician and physicist. Biography Giordano Riccati was born in 1709 in Castelfranco Veneto, a small town about 30 km north of Padua. He was the brother of Vincenzo Riccati, and the fifth son of the theoretical mechanician Jacopo Riccati. He began his studies at the College of St. Francis Xavier in Bologna, under the guidance of Francesco Saverio Quadrio and Luigi Marchenti, a pupil of the French mathematician Pierre Varignon. In 1727, he returned to Castelfranco, where his father taught him geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statics and dynamics.
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Henry Chamberlain Russell
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Henry Chamberlain Russell was an Australian astronomer and meteorologist. Early life Russell was born at West Maitland, New South Wales, the fourth son of the Hon. Bourn Russell and his wife Jane, née Mackreth. Russell was educated at West Maitland Grammar school and the University of Sydney, .
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Seth Ward
1617 - 1689 (72 years)
Seth Ward was an English mathematician, astronomer, and bishop. Early life He was born in Hertfordshire, and educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1636 and M.A. in 1640, becoming a Fellow in that year. In 1643 he was chosen university mathematical lecturer, but he was deprived of his fellowship next year for opposing the Solemn League and Covenant .
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Alexander Dallas Bache
1806 - 1867 (61 years)
Alexander Dallas Bache was an American physicist, scientist, and surveyor who erected coastal fortifications and conducted a detailed survey to map the mideastern United States coastline. Originally an army engineer, he later became Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, and built it into the foremost scientific institution in the country before the Civil War.
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Campanus of Novara
1210 - 1296 (86 years)
Campanus of Novara was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and physician who is best known for his work on Euclid's Elements. In his writings he refers to himself as Campanus Nouariensis; contemporary documents refer to him as Magister Campanus; and the full style of his name is Magister Campanus Nouariensis. He is also referred to as Campano da Novara, Giovanni Campano or similar. Later authors sometimes applied the forename Johannes Campanus or Iohannes Campanus.
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William Wilson
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
William Wilson FRS FHAS was a leading figure in academic circles. He was born at Goodyhills, in the Abbey Holme district of Cumberland in 1875. He was educated at the village school at Holme St Cuthbert, Cumberland, before attending the Aspatria Agricultural College, Aspatria, Cumberland.
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David Thomson
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Prof David Thomson was a 19th-century Scottish physicist. He was known as Davie Thomson or later Auld Dauvit. Life He was born on 27 November 1817 the son of David Thomson a merchant in Leghorn in Italy. He was educated in Italy and Switzerland then sent to Glasgow University in 1832. In 1836 he won a place at Trinity College, Cambridge where he gained a BA in 1839 .
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Nikolay Moiseyev
1902 - 1955 (53 years)
Nikolay Dmitriyevich Moiseyev was a Soviet astronomer and expert in celestial mechanics. In 1938, he became the chairman of the department of celestial mechanics at Moscow State University and worked on this position until his death. His main works were devoted to mathematical methods of celestial calculations and theory of comet formation.
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Hermann Ebert
1861 - 1913 (52 years)
Hermann Ebert was a German physicist. From 1881 he studied astronomy and physics in Leipzig, where he was a student of Heinrich Bruns and Gustav Wiedemann. After graduation, he relocated to the University of Erlangen as an assistant to Eilhard Wiedemann, the son of his former instructor. In 1894 he was chosen as an associate professor of theoretical physics in Leipzig, and later the same year, he became a professor of experimental physics at the University of Kiel. From 1898 onward, he was a professor of experimental physics at the Technical University in Munich.
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Wilhelm Klinkerfues
1827 - 1884 (57 years)
Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Klinkerfues was a German astronomer and meteorologist. He discovered six comets and published weather reports of varying accuracy based on his meteorological measurements. Early life Klinkerfues was born in Hofgeismar, the son of army doctor Johann Reinhard Klinkerfues and his wife Sabine . After the early death of his parents, he was brought up by relatives, and after attending high school qualified as a surveyor in Kassel. In this capacity he subsequently worked on the new Frankfurt - Kassel railway.
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Włodzimierz Zonn
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Wlodzimierz Zonn was a Polish astronomer. He studied at the University of Stefan Batory at Wilno, where he later worked as a professor. From 1950, Zonn was director of Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw. For many years , he was President of the Polish Astronomical Society.
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Naum Idelson
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
Naum Ilyich Idelson was a Soviet theoretical astronomer and expert in history of physics and mathematics. The crater Idelson on the Moon is named after him. Further reading
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Demetrius Hondros
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Demetrius Hondros was a Greek physicist. He was born in April 1882 in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Hondros studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, and was granted his Ph.D. in 1909. In 1922, he was cited as being professor of physics at the University of Athens.
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Edmond Bauer
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Edmond Bauer was a French physicist who was a student of Marie Curie and Paul Langevin who made studies on radiation in his early career. He was from a Jewish family and suffered during World War II during the period of Nazi control.
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Peter Carl Ludwig Schwarz
1822 - 1894 (72 years)
Peter Carl Ludwig Schwarz , was a Baltic German astronomer of Imperial Russia, explorer, and professor of astronomy at the University of Dorpat honored with the Konstantin Medal of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Schwarz also was a recipient of the Demidov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg in 1865 for his work in geodesy.
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Heinrich Geißler
1814 - 1879 (65 years)
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Geißler was a skilled glassblower and physicist, famous for his invention of the Geissler tube, made of glass and used as a low pressure gas-discharge tube. Geissler descended from a long line of craftsmen in the Thüringer Wald and in Bohemia. He found work in different German universities, eventually including the University of Bonn. There he was asked by physicist Julius Plücker to design an apparatus for evacuating a glass tube. Plücker owed his forthcoming success in the electric discharge experiments in large measure to his instrument maker, the skilled glassblower and mechanic Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Geissler.
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John Pringle Nichol
1804 - 1859 (55 years)
John Pringle Nichol FRSE FRAS was a Scottish educator, phrenologist, astronomer and economist who did much to popularise astronomy in a manner that appealed to nineteenth century tastes. Early life Born at Huntly Hill, near Brechin, Angus, Nichol was the son of a gentleman farmer and was educated at the local grammar school and then studied mathematics and natural philosophy at King's College, University of Aberdeen. He then changed to study divinity. He was licensed as a preacher and became a highly effective communicator, but the impact of phrenological thinking led him to abandon the Chur...
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Peder Horrebow
1679 - 1764 (85 years)
Peder [Nielsen] Horrebow was a Danish astronomer. Born in Løgstør, Jutland to a poor family of fishermen, Horrebow entered the University of Copenhagen in 1703. He worked his way through grammar school and university by virtue of his technical knowledge: he repaired mechanical and musical instruments and cut seals. He received his MA from the university in 1716, and his MD in 1725. From 1703 to 1707, he served as an assistant to Ole Rømer and lived in Rømer's home. He worked as a household tutor from 1707 to 1711 to a Danish baron, and entered the governmental bureaucracy as an excise w...
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Joseph David Everett
1831 - 1904 (73 years)
Prof Joseph David Everett DCL FRSE was an English physicist, professor of natural philosophy at Queen's College, Belfast. Life Born at Rushmere, near Ipswich, Suffolk, on 11 September 1831, he was the eldest son of Joseph David Everett, a landowner and farmer of Rushmere, by his wife Elizabeth, eldest daughter of John Garwood, a corn merchant in London; Robert Lacey Everett was a brother. He was educated at Mr. Buck's private school at Ipswich. On leaving school he attended classes in mathematics at the Ipswich Mechanics' Institution under Stephen Jackson, proprietor of the Ipswich Journal,...
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Philip Fox
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Philip Fox was an American astronomer and an officer in the U.S. Army. He was the first director of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the first planetarium in the western hemisphere. Biography Fox was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas, by Simeon and Esther Fox. He attended Kansas State University, where he earned a B.S. in mathematics in 1897. The next year he enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Philippines with the 20th Kansas during the Spanish–American War. When he was mustered out in 1899, Fox had achieved a rank of second lieutenant but he was disabled and was expected to die within a year.
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Jakob Karl Ernst Halm
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
Jakob Karl Ernst Halm was a pioneer of stellar dynamics and the first person to suggest the existence of a mass–luminosity relation for stars. Early life Halm was born at Bingen am Rhein, Kingdom of Prussia on 30 November 1866.
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Bernard Waldman
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Bernard Waldman was an American physicist who flew on the Hiroshima atomic bombing mission as a cameraman during World War II. A graduate of New York University, joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in 1938. During World War II, he served in the United States Navy as an engineering officer. He headed a group that conducted blast measurements for the Trinity nuclear test, and served on Tinian with Project Alberta.
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Victor Albert Bailey
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
Victor Albert Bailey was a British-Australian physicist. The eldest of four surviving children of William Henry Bailey, a British Army engineer, and his wife Suzana , an expatriate Romanian linguist, Bailey is notable for his work in ionospheric physics and population dynamics.
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Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
Prof. Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao was an Indian physicist in the field of Spectroscopy. Rangadhama Rao is best known for his work on spectroscopy, his role in the development of Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance , and his long association with the physics laboratories of Andhra University. In his later years, he became known for his position as the Principal of all the colleges of Andhra University before their divisions into separate colleges, viz., AU College of Arts and Commerce, AU College of Engineering, AU College of Law, AU College of Pharmacy and AU College of Science and Technology.
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Richard Makinson
1913 - 1979 (66 years)
Richard Elliss Bodenham Makinson , also R.E.B. or Dick Makinson, was an Australian physicist known for his contributions to solid-state physics and amorphous semiconductors. Makinson was born in Burwood a suburb in the Inner West of Sydney. He first enrolled at North Sydney Boys High School and later completed secondary education at Sydney Church of England Grammar School. He graduated with first-class honours in physics from the University of Sydney in 1935. Later he traveled to England where he was awarded a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1939.
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Thomas Parnell
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Thomas Parnell was the first Professor of Physics at the University of Queensland. He started the famous pitch drop experiment there. Education Thomas Parnell was born in West Haddon, Northamptonshire, England and died in Indooroopilly in Brisbane, Australia. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, after winning a scholarship and received his B.A. in 1903. He received his M.A. from Cambridge in 1908.
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Daniel Barbier
1907 - 1965 (58 years)
Daniel Barbier was a French astronomer born in Lyon. Between 1930 and 1965 he published nearly 100 scientific papers on astronomy. Among his works were studies of stellar atmospheres and lunar occultations and eclipses. He performed studies of the upper atmosphere, Aurora Borealis, the zodiacal light and the night airglow.
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Donald J. Hughes
1915 - 1960 (45 years)
Donald J. Hughes was an American nuclear physicist, chiefly notable as one of the signers off the Franck Report in June, 1945, recommending that the United States not use the atomic bomb as a weapon to prompt the surrender of Japan in World War II.
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Sergei Vernov
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Sergei Nikolaevich Vernov was a Russian-Soviet physicist who pioneered the study of primary cosmic rays. He examined cosmic rays initially with high altitude balloons, then with ground observatories and then in space and found patterns in the distribution of ions in latitudinal belts and radiation belts at varying altitudes. Although he was the first to identify these radiation belts, they are better known in the Anglophone scientific world through the work of James van Allen and termed as Van Allen Radiation Belts.
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