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,
#10901
Ernst Lecher
1856 - 1926 (70 years)
Ernst Lecher was an Austrian physicist who, from 1909, was head of the First Institute of Physics in Vienna. He is remembered for developing an apparatus— "Lecher lines"—to measure the wavelength and frequency of electromagnetic waves. He gave his name to the Ernst-Lecher-Institut, a radar research establishment set up in the 1940s in Reichenau, south of Vienna, which is now a part of the German research institute Max Planck Institute.
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Samuil Kaplan
1921 - 1978 (57 years)
Samuil Aronovich Kaplan was a Soviet astrophysicist. Biography Samuil Kaplan was born in Roslavl. He took part in World War II, in particular, he participated in Defense of Leningrad. In 1945 he graduated from Leningrad Herzen University as a math teacher. In 1948 he defended his candidate of science thesis on the topic "Energy sources and the evolution of white dwarfs" In 1948–1961, he worked at Lviv University . Since 1961, he worked at the Radiophysical Research Institute in Gorky, since 1966 he has been a professor at Gorky University, until his tragic death in a railway accident in 197...
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Frank Washington Very
1852 - 1927 (75 years)
Frank Washington Very was a U.S. astronomer, astrophysicist, and meteorologist. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he taught physics after his graduation.
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Wilhelm Anderson
1880 - 1940 (60 years)
Wilhelm Robert Karl Anderson was a Russian-Estonian astrophysicist of Baltic German descent who studied the physical structure of the stars. Life Wilhelm Anderson was born in Minsk into a Baltic German family. His younger brothers were the well known mathematician Oskar Anderson and the folklorist Walter Anderson . Anderson spent some of his youth in Kazan, where his father Nikolai Anderson was a university professor for Finno-Ugric languages.
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Henry DeWolf Smyth
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Henry DeWolf "Harry" Smyth was an American physicist, diplomat, and bureaucrat. He played a number of key roles in the early development of nuclear energy, as a participant in the Manhattan Project, a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission , and U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency .
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Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of 395 minor planets. Scientific career From 1912 to 1957, Reinmuth was working as an astronomer at the Heidelberg Observatory an astronomical observatory on the Königstuhl hill above Heidelberg in southern Germany. He was a member at the minor planet studies group at Astronomisches Rechen-Institut between 1947 and 1950, and later became "Oberobservator" or chief-observer at Heidelberg Observatory until his retirement in 1957. Reinmuth obtained more than 12,500 precise astrometric measurements of minor planets' positions...
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Clabon Allen
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Clabon Walter Allen FRAS, was an Australian astronomer, director of the University of London Observatory and author of Astrophysical Quantities. Allen was born at Subiaco, Perth the third child of James Bernard Allen , a South Australian-born lecturer in physics at Perth Technical School, and his wife Alice Hooper, née Aitken, a New Zealand-born trained nurse. Cla was educated at the High School, Perth, Western Australia and the University of Western Australia . Allen was appointed to a research fellowship at the newly established Commonwealth Solar Observatory in 1926 at Mount Stromlo, Aus...
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Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Kozyrev was a Soviet Russian astronomer and astrophysicist. Biography He was born in St. Petersburg, and by 1928 he had graduated from the Leningrad State University. In 1931 he began working at the Pulkovo Observatory, located to the south of Leningrad. He was considered to be one of the most promising astrophysicists in Russia. Kozyrev was a victim of the Stalinist purges of the Pulkovo Observatory. Started by the accusations of a disgruntled graduate student, most of the observatory staff died as a result. Kozyrev was arrested in November 1936 and sentenced to 10 years for counterrevolutionary activity.
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Georg Matthias Bose
1710 - 1761 (51 years)
Georg Matthias Bose , also known as Mathias Bose, was an electrical experimenter in the early days of the development of electrostatics. He is credited with being the first to develop a way of temporarily storing static charges by using an insulated conductor . His demonstrations and experiments raised the interests of the German scientific community and the public in the development of electrical research.
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Aleksander Jabłoński
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Aleksander Jabłoński was a Polish physicist and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research was in molecular spectroscopy and photophysics. Life and career He was born on 26 February 1898 in Woskresenówka near Kharkiv in Imperial Russia. He attended Gymnasium high school in Kharkiv as well as a music school where he learned to play the violin under supervision of Konstanty Gorski. In 1916, he started to study physics at the University of Kharkiv.
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Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille
1713 - 1762 (49 years)
Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille , formerly sometimes spelled de la Caille, was a French astronomer and geodesist who named 14 out of the 88 constellations. From 1750 to 1754, he studied the sky at the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa. Lacaille observed over 10,000 stars using just a half-inch refracting telescope.
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Henri Abraham
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Henri Abraham was a French physicist who made important contributions to the science of radio waves. He performed some of the first measurements of the propagation velocity of radio waves, helped develop France's first triode vacuum tube, and with Eugene Bloch invented the astable multivibrator. He was murdered at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
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Rudolf Tomaschek
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Rudolf Karl Anton Tomaschek was a German experimental physicist. His scientific efforts included work on phosphorescence, fluorescence, and gravitation. Tomaschek was a supporter of deutsche Physik, which resulted in his suspension from his university posts after World War II. From 1948 to 1954, he worked in England for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company . In 1954, when AIOC became BP, he went to Germany and was president of the Permanent Tidal Commission.
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Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim
1801 - 1869 (68 years)
Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim was a German physicist, geographer, and crystallographer. Life and education Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim was born in 1801 in Brunswick. His family was Jewish. He attended the Gymnasium there and in Wolfenbüttel. Afterwards he went to Berlin to attend the Alma Mater Berolinensis to study physics. In 1823 he completed a dissertation titled Dissertatio de Theoria Gasorum et Vaporum Meditationes . Inspired by the research of his teacher Christian Samuel Weiss , he became interested in crystallography. In 1827 he moved to the University of Breslau, where he was assistant professor of physics, geography, and mathematics from 1827 to 1850.
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Annibale de Gasparis
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Annibale de Gasparis was an Italian astronomer, known for discovering asteroids and his contributions to theoretical astronomy. Biography De Gasparis was born in 1819 in Bugnara to Angelo de Gasparis and Eleonora Angelantoni originally from Tocco da Casauria. Son of a doctor, he studied in the seminars of Sulmona and Chieti, becoming passionate of classic novels and learning mathematics as a self-taught person. In 1838 he arrived in Naples to study engineering at the School of Bridges and Roads, today's Engineering faculty of Naples University, and the following year he was accepted as a student at the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte by the director Ernesto Capocci.
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David M. Dennison
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
David Mathias Dennison was an American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the physics of molecular structure. Education In 1917, Dennison entered Swarthmore College, where he graduated in 1921. He then went to the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, for graduate studies in physics with Walter F. Colby and Oskar Klein. Klein, already associated with the Kaluza–Klein theory , joined the faculty at Michigan in 1922, after a six-year stay at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, under Niels Bohr, at the University of Copenhagen. It was through Klein that D...
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Hans Benndorf
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Hans Benndorf was an Austrian physicist. He made several contributions in the field of seismology and in his research of atmospheric electricity. Life and career Benndorf was born on 13 December 1870 in Zürich. He was the son of archaeologist Otto Benndorf and the grandson of physiologist Rudolf Wagner .
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Wilhelm Schickard
1592 - 1635 (43 years)
Wilhelm Schickard was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in 1623 and 1624.
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Frans Michel Penning
1894 - 1953 (59 years)
Frans Michel Penning was a Dutch experimental physicist. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1923, and studied low pressure gas discharges at the Philips Laboratory in Eindhoven, developing new electron tubes during World War II. Many detailed observations of gas ionization were done with colleagues, finding notable results for helium and magnetic fields. He made precise measurements of Townsend discharge coefficients and cathode voltage fall. Penning made important contributions to the advancement of high resolution mass spectrometry.
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Thorvald N. Thiele
1838 - 1910 (72 years)
Thorvald Nicolai Thiele was a Danish astronomer and director of the Copenhagen Observatory. He was also an actuary and mathematician, most notable for his work in statistics, interpolation and the three-body problem.
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F. J. M. Stratton
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick John Marrian Stratton PRAS was a British astrophysicist, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1928 to 1947 and a decorated British Army officer.
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Walter Guyton Cady
1874 - 1974 (100 years)
Walter Guyton Cady was a noted American physicist and electrical engineer. He was a pioneer in piezoelectricity, and in 1921 developed the first quartz crystal oscillator. Cady was born in Providence, Rhode Island, graduated from Brown University in 1895, and studied 1897-1900 at the University of Berlin, receiving his Ph.D. in Physics in 1900. He was a magnetic observer from 1900 to 1902 with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and from 1902 to 1946 he was a professor of physics at Wesleyan University, where his principal interests included electrical discharges in gases, piezoelec...
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Meton of Athens
500 BC - 460 BC (40 years)
Meton of Athens was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, geometer, and engineer who lived in Athens in the 5th century BC. He is best known for calculations involving the eponymous 19-year Metonic cycle, which he introduced in 432 BC into the lunisolar Attic calendar. Euphronios says that Colonus was Meton's deme.
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John Henry Manley
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
John Henry Manley was an American physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a group leader during the Manhattan Project. Biography He was born in 1907 in Harvard, Illinois. He graduated with a BS from the University of Illinois in 1929 and received his PhD in physics from the University of Michigan in 1934. He was a lecturer at Columbia University and later a professor at the University of Illinois from 1937 to 1942. He married Kathleen , and had two daughters Kim and Kathleen.
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John Keill
1671 - 1721 (50 years)
John Keill FRS was a Scottish mathematician, natural philosopher, and cryptographer who was an important defender of Isaac Newton. Biography Keill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 December 1671. His father was Robert Keill, an Edinburgh lawyer. His mother was Sarah Cockburn. His brother, James Keill, became a noted physician.
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David Gregory
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
David Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, and later Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, and a proponent of Isaac Newton's Principia.
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Albert Potter Wills
1873 - 1937 (64 years)
Albert Potter Wills was an American physicist who researched magnetic materials and was the PhD advisor of the Nobel Prize winner Isidor Isaac Rabi. During his career he investigated magnetic susceptibilities, magnetic shielding, magnetostriction, conduction of electricity through mercury vapor, and hydrodynamics. He also wrote a textbook on vector analysis.
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Joseph Petzval
1807 - 1891 (84 years)
Joseph Petzval was a mathematician, inventor, and physicist best known for his work in optics. He was born in the town of Szepesbéla in the Kingdom of Hungary . Petzval studied and later lectured at the Institutum Geometricum in Buda . He headed the Institute of Practical Geometry and Hydrology/Architecture between 1841 and 1848. Later in life, he accepted an appointment to a chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna. Petzval became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1873.
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Thomas Andrews
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
Thomas Andrews FRS FRSE was an Irish chemist and physicist who did important work on phase transitions between gases and liquids. He was a longtime professor of chemistry at Queen's University of Belfast.
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Félix Tisserand
1845 - 1896 (51 years)
François Félix Tisserand was a French astronomer. Life Tisserand was born at Nuits-Saint-Georges, Côte-d'Or. In 1863 he entered the École Normale Supérieure, and on leaving he went for a month as professor at the lycée at Metz. Urbain Le Verrier offered him a post in the Paris Observatory, which he entered as astronome adjoint in September 1866. In 1868 he took his doctor's degree with a thesis on Delaunay's Method, which he showed to be of much wider scope than had been contemplated by its inventor. Shortly afterwards he went out to Kra Isthmus with Édouard Stephan and Georges Rayet to observe the 1868 solar eclipse.
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Felix Auerbach
1856 - 1933 (77 years)
Felix Auerbach was a German physicist. Life Auerbach was born in Breslau on 12 November 1856. His father, Leopold Auerbach, was a respected physician and professor of medicine at the University of Breslau. His mother was Arabella Auerbach, née Hess. From her, he acquired the talent and love for music that accompanied him throughout his life. Felix was the eldest of six siblings. The chemist, Friedrich Auerbach , and Wroclaw pianist, Max Auerbach were his younger brothers.
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William D. Coolidge
1873 - 1975 (102 years)
William David Coolidge was an American physicist and engineer, who made major contributions to X-ray machines. He was the director of the General Electric Research Laboratory and a vice-president of the corporation. He was also famous for the development of "ductile tungsten", which is important for the incandescent light bulb.
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Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt
1807 - 1851 (44 years)
Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt was a German astronomer, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent who was a professor of astronomy at the University of Göttingen. He is also known as Benjamin Goldschmidt, C. W. B. Goldschmidt, Carl Goldschmidt, and Karl Goldschmidt.
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Frank Schlesinger
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
Frank Schlesinger was an American astronomer. His work concentrated on using photographic plates rather than direct visual studies for astronomical research. Biography Schlesinger was born in New York City and attended public schools there. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1890. He then worked as a surveyor, becoming a special student in astronomy at Columbia in 1894. In 1896, he received a fellowship which enabled him to study full-time, and he received a PhD in 1898. After his graduation, he spent the summer at Yerkes Observatory as a volunteer assisting director George Ellery Hale.
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Ștefania Mărăcineanu
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Ștefania Mărăcineanu was a Romanian physicist. She worked with Marie Curie studying the element named for Curie's homeland Polonium. She made proposals that would lead to Irène Joliot-Curie's Nobel Prize. Mărăcineanu believed that Joliot-Curie had taken her work on Induced radioactivity to gain the prize.
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Arthur Robert Hinks
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Arthur Robert Hinks, CBE, FRS was a British astronomer and geographer. As an astronomer, he is best known for his work in determining the distance from the Sun to the Earth from 1900 to 1909: for this achievement, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His later professional career was in surveying and cartography, an extension of his astronomical interests.
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Karl F. Sundman
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Karl Frithiof Sundman was a Finnish mathematician who used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in two papers published in 1907 and 1909. His results gained fame when they were reproduced in Acta Mathematica in 1912. He also published a paper on regularization methods in mechanics in 1912.
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Adolfo Bartoli
1851 - 1896 (45 years)
Adolfo Bartoli was an Italian physicist, who is best known for introducing the concept of radiation pressure from thermodynamical considerations. Born in Florence, Bartoli studied physics and mathematics at the University of Pisa until 1874. He was professor of physics at the Technical Institute of Arezzo from 1876, at the University of Sassari from 1878, at the Technical Institute of Firenze from 1879, at the University of Catania from 1886 to 1893, and at the University of Pavia from 1893.
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Carlo Perrier
1887 - 1948 (61 years)
Carlo Perrier was an Italian mineralogist and chemist who did extensive research on the element technetium. With the discovery of technetium in 1937, he and Emilio Segrè accounted for the last gap in the periodic table. Technetium was the first element produced artificially .
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Armin Joseph Deutsch
1918 - 1969 (51 years)
Armin Joseph Deutsch , was an American astronomer and science fiction writer. Life and career Deutsch was born in Chicago and earned a BS from the University of Arizona in 1940 and, after wartime service as an instructor at the Army Air Force at Chanute Field in Illinois, a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1946 with a dissertation on the spectra of A-type variable stars.
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Klavdiâ Barkhatova
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Klavdiya Aleksandrovna Barkhatova was a Soviet astronomer. She became notable for he studies into stellar astronomy and eventually became a highly respected specialist in the field, producing a large body of scientific works. Kourovka Astronomical Observatory in Kourovka, Sverdlovsk Oblast is named in her honor.
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Basilis C. Xanthopoulos
1951 - 1990 (39 years)
Basilis C. Xanthopoulos was a Greek theoretical physicist, well known in the field of general relativity for his contributions to the study of colliding plane waves. Early years Basilis Xanthopoulos was born in Drama. He excelled in high school showing advanced analytic abilities in physics and mathematics. He was awarded the 1st prize in the national mathematics competition, organised by the Greek mathematical society in 1969 and at the same year he was admitted with the highest grade among all students in Greece to the Department of Mathematics of the University of Thessaloniki. Four year...
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Heinrich Louis d'Arrest
1822 - 1875 (53 years)
Heinrich Louis d'Arrest was a German astronomer, born in Berlin. His name is sometimes given as Heinrich Ludwig d'Arrest. Biography While still a student at the University of Berlin, d'Arrest was party to Johann Gottfried Galle's search for Neptune. On 23 September 1846, he suggested that a recently drawn chart of the sky, in the region of Urbain Le Verrier's predicted location, could be compared with the current sky to seek the displacement characteristic of a planet, as opposed to a stationary star. Neptune was discovered that very night.
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Rupert Wildt
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Rupert Wildt was an American astronomer. He was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in that country during World War I and its aftermath. In 1927 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin. He joined the University of Göttingen, specializing in the properties of atmospheres.
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Charles Soret
1854 - 1904 (50 years)
Charles Soret was a Swiss physicist and chemist. He is known for his work on thermodiffusion . Life Charles Soret was the son of Jacques-Louis Soret, professor of physical medicine at University of Geneva, and Clémentine Odier. In 1872, Charles graduated from an art college in Geneva and, two years later, he added a degree in mathematics. In addition, he also attended lectures in physics and other sciences. He continued studies in mathematics at the Sorbonne, where he received his MA in 1876. He believed that a good physicist is first of all a good mathematician; therefore, only afterward...
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John Robison
1739 - 1805 (66 years)
John Robison FRSE was a British physicist and mathematician. He was a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. A member of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society when it received its royal warrant, he was appointed as the first general secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh . Robison invented the siren and also worked with James Watt on an early steam car. Following the French Revolution, Robison became disenchanted with elements of the Enlightenment. He authored Proofs of a Conspiracy in 1797—a polemic accusing Freemasonry of being infiltrated by Weishaupt's Order of the Illuminati.
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Eugen von Lommel
1837 - 1899 (62 years)
Eugen Cornelius Joseph von Lommel was a German physicist. He is notable for the Lommel polynomial, the Lommel function, the Lommel–Weber function, and the Lommel differential equation. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of the Nobel Prize winner Johannes Stark.
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Berossus
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Berossus or Berosus was a Hellenistic-era Babylonian writer, a priest of Bel Marduk and astronomer who wrote in the Koine Greek language, and who was active at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Versions of two excerpts of his writings survive, at several removes from the original.
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Erhard Weigel
1625 - 1699 (74 years)
Erhard Weigel was a German mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. Biography Weigel earned his M.A. and his habilitation from the University of Leipzig. From 1653 until his death he was professor of mathematics at Jena University. He was the teacher of Leibniz in summer 1663, and other notable students. He also worked to make science more widely accessible to the public, and what would today be considered a populariser of science.
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Porfiry Bakhmetiev
1860 - 1913 (53 years)
Porfiry Ivanovich Bakhmetiev was a Russian and Bulgarian physicist and experimental biologist. The son of a peasant, after graduating from his local school in Syzran, Samara Oblast, Russia, in 1883, he graduated from the University of Zurich in Switzerland writing a thesis on wandering electrical currents. Bakhmetiev was a Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the founder of the Physical and Mathematical Society in Sofia in 1898.
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