The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#10801
Edmond Halley
1656 - 1742 (86 years)
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford.
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Gustav Kirchhoff
1824 - 1887 (63 years)
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term black-body radiation in 1860. Several different sets of concepts, concerning diverse subjects such as black-body radiation and spectroscopy, electrical circuits, and thermochemistry, are named "Kirchhoff's laws" after him. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after him and his colleague, Robert Bunsen.
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Lev Artsimovich
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Lev Andreyevich Artsimovich , also transliterated Arzimowitsch, was a Soviet physicist known for his contributions to the Tokamak— a device that produces controlled thermonuclear fusion power. Prior conceiving the idea on nuclear fusion, Artsimovich participated in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons, and was a recipient of many former Soviet honors and awards.
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William Crookes
1832 - 1919 (87 years)
Sir William Crookes was a British chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube which was made in 1875. This was a foundational discovery that eventually changed the whole of chemistry and physics.
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William Henry Bragg
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Sir William Henry Bragg was an English physicist, chemist, mathematician, and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son Lawrence Bragg – the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics: "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays". The mineral Braggite is named after him and his son. He was knighted in 1920.
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Walter Heitler
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Walter Heinrich Heitler was a German physicist who made contributions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. He brought chemistry under quantum mechanics through his theory of valence bonding.
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Robert Boyle
1627 - 1691 (64 years)
Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry. He was a devout and pi...
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Léon Rosenfeld
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Léon Rosenfeld was a Belgian physicist and Marxist. Rosenfeld was born into a secular Jewish family. He was a polyglot who knew eight or nine languages and was fluent in at least five of them. Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr. Rosenfeld published in 1930 the first systematic Hamiltonian approach to Lagrangian models that possess a local gauge symmetry, which predates by two decades the work by Paul Dirac and Peter Bergmann. Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics.
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Gabriel Lippmann
1845 - 1921 (76 years)
Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. His parents were French Jews.
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Pieter Zeeman
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Pieter Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect. Childhood and youth Pieter Zeeman was born in Zonnemaire, a small town on the island of Schouwen-Duiveland, Netherlands, the son of Rev Catharinus Forandinus Zeeman, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and his wife, Willemina Worst.
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K. S. Krishnan
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Sir Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan, was an Indian physicist. He was a co-discoverer of Raman scattering, for which his mentor C. V. Raman was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. Early life Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan generally referred to as K. S. Krishnan or KSK, was born in a Vaishnavite brahmin family on 4 December 1898 in Watrap, Tamil Nadu. His father was a farmer-scholar deeply versed in Tamil literature. He had his early education in Hindu Higher Secondary school, in Watrap, after which he attended the American College in Madurai and the Madras Christian College. After gai...
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Manne Siegbahn
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn FRS HFRSE was a Swedish physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy". Biography Siegbahn was born in Örebro, Sweden, the son of Georg Siegbahn and his wife, Emma Zetterberg.
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Joseph von Fraunhofer
1787 - 1826 (39 years)
Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer was a German physicist and optical lens manufacturer. He made optical glass, an achromatic telescope, and objective lenses. He also invented the spectroscope and developed diffraction grating. In 1814, he discovered and studied the dark absorption lines in the spectrum of the sun now known as Fraunhofer lines.
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Oliver Lodge
1851 - 1940 (89 years)
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of, and holder of key patents for, radio. He identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz's proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures , Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the "coherer". In 1898 he was awarded the "syntonic" patent by the United States Patent Office. Lodge was Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1920.
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John Dalton
1766 - 1844 (78 years)
John Dalton was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry. He also researched colour blindness, which he had; as a result, colour blindness is known as Daltonism in several languages.
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Josef Mattauch
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Josef Mattauch was a nuclear physicist and chemist. He was known for the development of the Mattauch-Herzog double-focusing mass spectrometer, for his work on the investigation of isotopic abundances using mass spectrometry, and the determination of atomic weights. Much of his career was spent at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry .
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Paul Scherrer
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Paul Hermann Scherrer was a Swiss physicist. Born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, he studied at Göttingen, Germany, before becoming a lecturer there. Later, Scherrer became head of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich.
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Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
1853 - 1926 (73 years)
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He exploited the Hampson–Linde cycle to investigate how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero and later to liquefy helium for the first time, in 1908. He also discovered superconductivity in 1911.
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Urbain Le Verrier
1811 - 1877 (66 years)
Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier FRS HFRSE was a French astronomer and mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics.
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Ludwig Prandtl
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Ludwig Prandtl was a German fluid dynamicist, physicist and aerospace scientist. He was a pioneer in the development of rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of aerodynamics, which have come to form the basis of the applied science of aeronautical engineering. In the 1920s, he developed the mathematical basis for the fundamental principles of subsonic aerodynamics in particular; and in general up to and including transonic velocities. His studies identified the boundary layer, thin-airfoils, and lifting-line theories. The Prandtl number was named a...
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Yoshio Nishina
1890 - 1951 (61 years)
Yoshio Nishina was a Japanese physicist who was called "the founding father of modern physics research in Japan". He led the efforts of Japan to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. Early life and career
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George Biddell Airy
1801 - 1892 (91 years)
Sir George Biddell Airy was an English mathematician and astronomer, and the seventh Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881. His many achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the Earth, a method of solution of two-dimensional problems in solid mechanics and, in his role as Astronomer Royal, establishing Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.
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John Flamsteed
1646 - 1719 (73 years)
John Flamsteed was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. His main achievements were the preparation of a 3,000-star catalogue, Catalogus Britannicus, and a star atlas called Atlas Coelestis, both published posthumously. He also made the first recorded observations of Uranus, although he mistakenly catalogued it as a star, and he laid the foundation stone for the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
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Friedrich Hund
1896 - 1997 (101 years)
Friedrich Hermann Hund was a German physicist from Karlsruhe known for his work on atoms and molecules. Scientific career Hund worked at the Universities of Rostock, Leipzig, Jena, Frankfurt am Main, and Göttingen.
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Isaak Pomeranchuk
1913 - 1966 (53 years)
Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk was a Soviet physicist of Polish origin in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. His career in physics spent mostly studying the particle physics , quantum field theory, electromagnetic and synchrotron radiation, condensed matter physics and the physics of liquid helium.
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Evgeny Lifshitz
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz was a leading Soviet physicist and brother of the physicist Ilya Lifshitz. Work Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family in Kharkiv, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire . Lifshitz is well known in the field of general relativity for coauthoring the BKL conjecture concerning the nature of a generic curvature singularity. , this is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in the subject of classical gravitation.
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Heinrich Hertz
1857 - 1894 (37 years)
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. The unit of frequency, cycle per second, was named the "hertz" in his honor.
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Johannes Diderik van der Waals
1837 - 1923 (86 years)
Johannes Diderik van der Waals was a Dutch theoretical physicist and thermodynamicist famous for his pioneering work on the equation of state for gases and liquids. Van der Waals started his career as a schoolteacher. He became the first physics professor of the University of Amsterdam when in 1877 the old Athenaeum was upgraded to Municipal University. Van der Waals won the 1910 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids.
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736 - 1813 (77 years)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange , also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer, later naturalized French. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
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Gerhard Hoffmann
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
Gerhard Hoffmann was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. Education Hoffmann studied at the University of Göttingen, the University of Leipzig, and the University of Bonn. He received his doctorate at Bonn, in 1906, under Walter Kaufmann. In 1908, he became Kaufmann's teaching assistant at the University of Königsberg, where he completed his Habilitation in pure and applied physics in 1911.
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Ernst Abbe
1840 - 1905 (65 years)
Ernst Karl Abbe was a German physicist, optical scientist, entrepreneur, and social reformer. Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, he developed numerous optical instruments. He was also a co-owner of Carl Zeiss AG, a German manufacturer of scientific microscopes, astronomical telescopes, planetariums, and other advanced optical systems.
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John Couch Adams
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and died in Cambridge. His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would send his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who confirmed the existence of the planet on 23 Septemb...
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Joseph Henry
1797 - 1878 (81 years)
Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. He also served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1868 to 1878.
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Giovanni Domenico Cassini
1625 - 1712 (87 years)
Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. Cassini is known for his work on astronomy and engineering. He discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn; the Cassini Division was named after him. Giovanni Domenico Cassini was also the first of his family to begin work on the project of creating a topographic map of France.
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François Arago
1786 - 1853 (67 years)
Dominique François Jean Arago , known simply as François Arago , was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician. Early life and work Arago was born at Estagel, a small village of 3,000 near Perpignan, in the of Pyrénées-Orientales, France, where his father held the position of Treasurer of the Mint. His parents were François Bonaventure Arago and Marie Arago .
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Anders Jonas Ångström
1814 - 1874 (60 years)
Anders Jonas Ångström was a Swedish physicist and one of the founders of the science of spectroscopy. Ångström is also well known for his studies of astrophysics, heat transfer, terrestrial magnetism, and the aurora borealis. In 1852, Ångström formulated in Optiska undersökningar , a law of absorption, later modified somewhat and known as Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation.
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Henry Moseley
1887 - 1915 (28 years)
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.
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Franz Xaver von Zach
1754 - 1832 (78 years)
Baron Franz Xaver von Zach was a Hungarian astronomer born at Pest, Hungary . Biography Zach studied physics at the Royal University of Pest, and served for some time in the Austrian army. He taught at the University of Lemberg and worked in its observatory. He lived in Paris in 1780–83, and in London from 1783 to 1786 as tutor in the house of the Saxon ambassador, Hans Moritz von Brühl. In Paris and London he entered the circles of astronomers like Joseph de Lalande, Pierre-Simon Laplace and William Herschel. In 1786 he was appointed by Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg director of the new observatory on Seeberg hill at Gotha, which was finished in 1791.
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Johann Heinrich Lambert
1728 - 1777 (49 years)
Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, generally identified as either Swiss or French, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics , philosophy, astronomy and map projections.
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August Ferdinand Möbius
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Early life and education Möbius was born in Schulpforta, Electorate of Saxony, and was descended on his mother's side from religious reformer Martin Luther. He was home-schooled until he was 13, when he attended the college in Schulpforta in 1803, and studied there, graduating in 1809. He then enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied astronomy under the mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. In 1813, he began to study astronomy under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory.
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Gunnar Nordström
1881 - 1923 (42 years)
Gunnar Nordström was a Finnish theoretical physicist best remembered for his theory of gravitation, which was an early competitor of general relativity. Nordström is often designated by modern writers as The Einstein of Finland due to his novel work in similar fields with similar methods to Einstein.
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Woldemar Voigt
1850 - 1919 (69 years)
Woldemar Voigt was a German physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen. Voigt eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department at Göttingen and was succeeded in 1914 by Peter Debye, who took charge of the theoretical department of the Physical Institute. In 1921, Debye was succeeded by Max Born.
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Giovanni Schiaparelli
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli was an Italian astronomer and science historian. Biography He studied at the University of Turin, graduating in 1854, and later did research at Berlin Observatory, under Encke. In 1859–1860 he worked in Pulkovo Observatory near St Petersburg, and then worked for over forty years at Brera Observatory in Milan. He was also a senator of the Kingdom of Italy, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino and the Regio Istituto Lombardo, and is particularly known for his studies of Mars.
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Milutin Milanković
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Milutin Milanković was a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer and popularizer of science. Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the "Canon of the Earth's Insolation", which characterizes the climates of all the planets of the Solar System. The second contribution is the explanation of Earth's long-term climate changes caused by changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as Milankovitch cycles. This partly explained the ice ages occurring in the geological past of the Ea...
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Léon Foucault
1819 - 1868 (49 years)
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for his demonstration of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1742 - 1799 (57 years)
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called , a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
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Aleksandr Leipunskii
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Aleksandr Il'ich Leipunskii was a Soviet physicist. He was born in the small village of Dragli, Russian Poland. In 1921, he entered the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1926. He then joined the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, where he studied atomic interactions with electrons and molecules. In 1930, he began research into nuclear physics. He helped organize the Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute in Kharkiv and became its director. In 1934, he was sent to England for a year as a visiting researcher at the Rutherford Laboratory. In September 1937 Leipunskii was arr...
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Walter Kaufmann
1871 - 1947 (76 years)
Walter Kaufmann was a German physicist. He is best known for the first experimental proof of the velocity dependence of mass, which was an important contribution to the development of modern physics, including special relativity.
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August Kundt
1839 - 1894 (55 years)
August Adolf Eduard Eberhard Kundt was a German physicist. Early life Kundt was born at Schwerin in Mecklenburg. He began his scientific studies at Leipzig, but afterwards went to Berlin University. At first he devoted himself to astronomy, but coming under the influence of H. G. Magnus, he turned his attention to physics, and graduated in 1864 with a thesis on the depolarization of light.
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Johann Gottfried Galle
1812 - 1910 (98 years)
Johann Gottfried Galle was a German astronomer from Radis, Germany, at the Berlin Observatory who, on 23 September 1846, with the assistance of student Heinrich Louis d'Arrest, was the first person to view the planet Neptune and know what he was looking at. Urbain Le Verrier had predicted the existence and position of Neptune, and sent the coordinates to Galle, asking him to verify. Galle found Neptune in the same night he received Le Verrier's letter, within 1° of the predicted position. The discovery of Neptune is widely regarded as a dramatic validation of celestial mechanics, and is one o...
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