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,
#1101
Akira Hasegawa
#16895
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
is a Japanese theoretical physicist and engineer who has worked in the U.S. and Japan. He is known for his work in the derivation of the Hasegawa–Mima equation, which describes fundamental plasma turbulence and the consequent generation of zonal flow that controls plasma diffusion. Hasegawa also made the discovery of optical solitonss in glass fibers, a concept that is essential for high speed optical communications.
Go to Profile#1102
Albert Messiah
#16648
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Albert Messiah was a French physicist. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique. He spent the Second World War in the Free France forces: he embarked on 22 June 1940 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz for England and participated in the Battle of Dakar with Charles de Gaulle in September 1940. He joined the Free French Forces in Chad, and the 2nd Armored Division in September 1944, and participated in the assault of Hitler's Eagle's nest at Berchtesgaden in 1945.
Go to Profile#1103
David Hestenes
#13382
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Orlin Hestenes is a theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education.
Go to Profile#1104
Marc Mézard
#23331
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Marc Mézard is a French physicist and academic administrator. He was, from 2012 to 2022, the director of the École normale supérieure . He is the co-author of two books. Early life Marc Mézard was born on 29 August 1957. He graduated from the École normale supérieure in 1976 and earned the agrégation in Physics. He earned a PhD in Physics from University of Paris 6 in 1980.
Go to Profile#1105
Giancarlo Ghirardi
#19268
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Giancarlo Ghirardi was an Italian physicist and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Trieste. He is well known for the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber theory , which he proposed in 1985 together with Alberto Rimini and Tullio Weber, and for his contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics. He independently rederived, in a referee report to Foundations of Physics, the no-cloning theorem, before the works by Wootters and Zurek and by Dieks in 1982, but after the actual first derivation by Park in 1970.
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J. Michael Kosterlitz
#11207
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Michael Kosterlitz is a Scottish-American physicist. He is a professor of physics at Brown University and the son of biochemist Hans Kosterlitz. He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics along with David Thouless and Duncan Haldane for work on condensed matter physics.
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Martin Green
#28512
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martin Andrew Green is an Australian engineer and professor at the University of New South Wales who works on solar energy. He was awarded the 2021 Japan Prize for his achievements in the "Development of High-Efficiency Silicon Photovoltaic Devices". He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Progress in Photovoltaics.
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Christopher Stubbs
#30991
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christopher Stubbs is an experimental physicist currently on the faculty at Harvard University in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy. He is the current Dean of Science at Harvard University and a former Chair of Harvard's Department of Physics.
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David H. Levy
#11208
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David Howard Levy is a Canadian amateur astronomer, science writer and discoverer of comets and minor planets, who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1993, which collided with the planet Jupiter in 1994.
Go to Profile#1110
Lars Bergström
#43417
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lars Bergström is a Swedish professor of theoretical physics specializing in astroparticle physics at Stockholm University, AlbaNova campus. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and since 2004 serves as the secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
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Don Lincoln
#35374
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Don Lincoln is an American physicist, author, host of the YouTube channel Fermilab, and science communicator. He conducts research in particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and was an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, although he is no longer affiliated with the university. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a co-discoverer of the top quark. He has co-authored hundreds of research papers, and more recently, was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
Go to Profile#1112
John C. Collins
#34554
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Clements Collins is a British-born American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. He attended the University of Cambridge where he obtained a B.A. in mathematics 1971 and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1975. He worked as a postdoc and assistant professor from 1975 to 1980 at Princeton University. Collins was part of the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1990. From 1990 to the present, he has been a faculty member in the department of physics at Pennsylvania State University where he currently holds the position of distinguished professor.
Go to Profile#1113
Herbert S. Green
#17036
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Herbert Sydney Green was a British–Australian physicist. Green was a doctoral student of the Nobel Laureate Max Born at Edinburgh, with whom he was involved in the development of the modern kinetic theory. Green is the letter "G" in the BBGKY hierarchy. He is often credited for the development of parastatistics, one of several alternatives to the better known particle statistics models.
Go to Profile#1114
Benjamin Simons
#22100
Overall Influence
Benjamin David Simons is a British theoretical physicist, working in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics and in biophysics. Simons holds the Herchel Smith Chair in Physics at the University of Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, and he is also a Group Leader in the Gurdon Institute. In 2013 he became head of the Theory of Condensed Matter group in the Cavendish.
Go to Profile#1115
Maw-Kuen Wu
#11853
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Maw-Kuen Wu is a Taiwanese physicist specializing in superconductivity, low-temperature physics, and high-pressure physics. He was a professor of physics at University of Alabama , Columbia University, and National Tsing Hua University, the Director of the Institute of Physics at Academia Sinica, the president of the National Dong Hwa University, and is currently a distinguished research fellow of the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica.
Go to Profile#1116
Paul M. Sutter
#45818
Overall Influence
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist, science educator and science communicator. Early life Sutter received his Bachelor of Science in physics from California Polytechnic State University in 2005 and received his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2011.
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Shadia Habbal
#13220
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Shadia Rifa'i Habbal is a Syrian-American astronomer and physicist specialized in Space physics. A professor of Solar physics, her research is centered on Solar wind and Solar eclipse. Life and education She was born as Shadia Na'im Rifa'i in the city of Homs where she finished secondary education, she enrolled in the University of Damascus where she received her bachelor in physics and math. She received a master in physics from the American University of Beirut before receiving her PhD from the University of Cincinnati.
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John R. Platt
#17630
Overall Influence
1918 - 1992 (74 years)
For other people named John Platt, see John Platt. John Rader Platt was an American physicist and biophysicist, professor at the University of Chicago, noted for his pioneering work on strong inference in the 1960s and his analysis of social science in the 1970s.
Go to Profile#1119
Eugene Merle Shoemaker
#14756
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Eugene Merle Shoemaker was an American geologist. He co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy. This comet hit Jupiter in July 1994: the impact was televised around the world. Shoemaker also studied terrestrial craters, such as Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, and along with Edward Chao provided the first conclusive evidence of its origin as an impact crater. He was also the first director of the United States Geological Survey's Astrogeology Research Program.
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Narinder Singh Kapany
#2850
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Narinder Singh Kapany was an Indian-American physicist best known for his work on fiber optics. Kapany is a pioneer in the field of fiber optics, and known for coining and popularising the term. Fortune named him one of seven 'Unsung Heroes of the 20th century' for his Nobel Prize-deserving invention. He was awarded India's second highest civilian award the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in 2021. He served as an Indian Ordnance Factories Service officer. He was also offered the post of Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister of India, by the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Go to Profile#1121
Louis Witten
#15727
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Louis Witten is an American theoretical physicist and the father of the physicist Edward Witten. Witten's research has centered on classical gravitation, including the discovery of certain exact electrovacuum solutions to the Einstein field equation. He edited a book which contains papers by contributors such as ADM , Choquet-Bruhat, Ehlers and Kundt, Goldberg, and Pirani which are used by researchers after the passage of more than 40 years. His most recent paper was published in 2020.
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Jessica Mink
#30297
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jessica Mink is an American software developer and a data archivist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She was part of the team that discovered the rings around the planet Uranus.
Go to Profile#1123
Yoseph Imry
#14975
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Yoseph Imry was an Israeli physicist. He was best known for taking part in the foundation of mesoscopic physics, a relatively new branch of condensed matter physics. It is concerned with how the behavior of systems whose size is in between micro- and macroscopic, crosses over between these two regimes. These systems can be handled and addressed by more or less usual macroscopic methods, but their behavior may still show quantum effects.
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Alexander J. Dessler
#29057
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Alexander J. Dessler was an American space scientist known for conceiving the term heliosphere and for founding the first Space Science Department in the United States. Early life and education Dessler was born on October 21, 1928, in San Francisco, California, and received a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1952 and a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University in 1956. His PhD thesis was "The amplitude dependence of the velocity of second sound" under William M. Fairbank.
Go to Profile#1125
Andrzej Udalski
#18627
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Andrzej Jarosław Udalski is a Polish astronomer and astrophysicist, and director of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw. He is also head of the Department of Observational Astrophysics at Astronomical Observatory, the head and project manager of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, and editor of the quarterly journal Acta Astronomica.
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Michael Tinkham
#35331
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Michael Tinkham was an American physicist. He was Rumford Professor of Physics and Gordon McKay Research Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University. He is best known for his work on superconductivity.
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Lawrence H. Aller
#36299
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Lawrence Hugh Aller was an American astronomer. He was born in Tacoma, Washington. He never finished high school and worked for a time as a gold miner. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1936 and went to graduate school at Harvard in 1937. There he obtained his master's degree in 1938 and his PhD in 1943. From 1943 to 1945 he worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. He was an assistant professor at Indiana University from 1945 to 1948 and then an associate professor and professor at the University of Michigan until 1962.
Go to Profile#1128
Herbert S. Gutowsky
#27819
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Herbert Sander Gutowsky was an American chemist who was a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Gutowsky was the first to apply nuclear magnetic resonance methods to the field of chemistry. He used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to determine the structure of molecules. His pioneering work developed experimental control of NMR as a scientific instrument, connected experimental observations with theoretical models, and made NMR one of the most effective analytical tools for analysis of molecular structure and dynamics in liquids, solids, and gases, us...
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Jeremy Mould
#39645
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jeremy Richard Mould is an Australian astronomer currently at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology. Mould was previously Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University and the American National Optical Astronomy Observatory. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow, at the University of Melbourne.
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Patrizia A. Caraveo
#25468
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Patrizia Caraveo is an Italian astrophysicist. Biography Patrizia Caraveo graduated in Physics at the physics department of the University of Milan in 1977. After a period abroad, in 2002 she began working at the Institute of Cosmic Physics in Milan as Director of Research, and is currently Director of the institute. She has worked on several international space missions dedicated to particle physics, starting with the European mission Cos-B. She is currently involved in the European INTEGRAL mission, the NASA Swift mission, the Italian AGILE mission and the NASA Fermi mission, all of which a...
Go to Profile#1131
Giovanni Bignami
#21226
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Giovanni Fabrizio Bignami was an Italian physicist. From March 2007 until August 2008, he was Chairman of the Italian Space Agency. Between 2010 and 2014, he was the first Italian to chair the Committee on Space Research , and from 2011 until 2015, he was President of INAF. He was also the chairman of the SKA project. He was married to fellow Italian astrophysicist Patrizia A. Caraveo.
Go to Profile#1132
Detlef Lohse
#36889
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Detlef Lohse is a German physicist and professor in the University of Twente's Department of Physics of Fluids in the Netherlands. Biography Lohse studied at the University of Kiel and University of Bonn, graduating in Bonn in 1989 with a degree in Physics, and completed his PhD at the University of Marburg in 1992. He served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Chicago with Leo Kadanoff from 1993 to 1995, and was finally made chair of Physics of Fluids at the University of Twente in 1998. Lohse has been an external member of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany.
Go to Profile#1133
Mary Tsingou
#7228
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Mary Tsingou is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek descent. She was one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is best known for having coded the celebrated computer experiment with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became an inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing and was a turning point in soliton theory.
Go to Profile#1134
Francesco Iachello
#38413
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Francesco Iachello is an Italian nuclear engineer and theoretical physicist, who works mainly on nuclear and molecular physics. He and his collaborator Akito Arima are the creators of the "interacting boson model".
Go to Profile#1135
Geoffrey A. Landis
#11229
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Geoffrey Alan Landis is an American aerospace engineer and author, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power and photovoltaics. He holds nine patents, primarily in the field of improvements to solar cells and photovoltaic devices and has given presentations and commentary on the possibilities for interstellar travel and construction of bases on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
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Conyers Herring
#24783
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
William Conyers Herring was an American physicist. He was a professor of applied physics at Stanford University and the Wolf Prize in Physics recipient in 1984/5. Academic career Conyers Herring completed his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1937, submitting a dissertation entitled On Energy Coincidences in the Theory of Brillouin Zones under the direction of Eugene Wigner. In 1946, he joined the technical staff of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he remained until 1978. Then, he joined the faculty at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#1137
Guido Tonelli
#28945
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Guido Tonelli is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa and a CERN visiting scientist.
Go to Profile#1138
Kurt Wiesenfeld
#6698
Overall Influence
Kurt Wiesenfeld is an American physicist working primarily on non-linear dynamics. His works primarily concern stochastic resonance, spontaneous synchronization of coupled oscillators, and non-linear laser dynamics. Since 1987, he has been professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1139
Arnold Wolfendale
#24469
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Sir Arnold Whittaker Wolfendale FRS was a British astronomer who served as the fourteenth Astronomer Royal from 1991 to 1995. He was Professor of Physics at Durham University from 1965 until 1992 and served as president of the European Physical Society . He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1981 to 1983.
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David J. Stevenson
#26768
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David John Stevenson is a professor of planetary science at Caltech. Originally from New Zealand, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in physics, where he proposed a model for the interior of Jupiter. He is well known for applying fluid mechanics and magnetohydrodynamics to understand the internal structure and evolution of planets and moons.
Go to Profile#1141
Edward Creutz
#15823
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Edward Creutz was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war he became a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was Vice President of Research at General Atomics from 1955 to 1970. He published over 65 papers on botany, physics, mathematics, metallurgy and science policy, and held 18 patents relating to nuclear energy.
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Andrew Sessler
#21091
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Andrew Marienhoff Sessler was an American physicist, academic , former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , humanitarian and former president of the American Physical Society. Biography Sessler was born in New York City in 1928. He was educated at Harvard University and Columbia University with dissertation Hyperfine structure of 3He. From 1954 to 1959, he was a member of the faculty at Ohio State University before moving to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he served as Lab Director in 1973-80.
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George Coyne
#10536
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
George Vincent Coyne, S.J. was an American Jesuit priest and astronomer who directed the Vatican Observatory and headed its research group at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 2006. From January 2012 until his death, he taught at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. His career was dedicated to the reconciliation of theology and science, while his stance on scripture was absolute: "One thing the Bible is not," he said in 1994, "is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science."
Go to Profile#1144
André Petermann
#30876
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Andreas Emil Petermann , known as André Petermann, was a Swiss theoretical physicist known for introducing the renormalization group, suggesting a quark-like model, and work related to the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the muon.
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Erwin Hahn
#14001
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Erwin Louis Hahn was an American physicist, best known for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance . In 1950 he discovered the spin echo. Education He grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. in Physics from Juniata College and his M.S. and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He served as an enlisted sailor in the United States Navy and was an instructor on radar and sonar.
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Itzhak Bars
#22090
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Itzhak Bars is a theoretical physicist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Education After receiving his B.S. from Robert College in physics in 1967, Bars obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Feza Gürsey at Yale University in 1971.
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Aurélien Barrau
#29829
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Aurélien Barrau is a French physicist and philosopher, specialized in astroparticle physics, black holes and cosmology. He is the director of the Grenoble Center for Theoretical Physics, works in the CNRS Laboratory for Subatomic Physics and Cosmology , and is a professor at the Joseph Fourier University .
Go to Profile#1148
Scott Tremaine
#33257
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Scott Duncan Tremaine is a Canadian-born astrophysicist. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada and the National Academy of Sciences. Tremaine is widely regarded as one of the world's leading astrophysicists for his contributions to the theory of Solar System and galactic dynamics. Tremaine is the namesake of asteroid 3806 Tremaine. He is credited with coining the name "Kuiper belt".
Go to Profile#1149
Hilbrand J. Groenewold
#9876
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Hilbrand Johannes "Hip" Groenewold was a Dutch theoretical physicist who pioneered the largely operator-free formulation of quantum mechanics in phase space known as phase-space quantization. Biography Groenewold was born on 29 June 1910 in Muntendam in the province of Groningen. He graduated from the University of Groningen, with a major in physics and minors in mathematics and mechanics in 1934. After a visit to Cambridge to interact with John von Neumann on the links between classical and quantum mechanics, and a checkered career working with Frits Zernike in Groningen, then Leiden, the ...
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Asım Orhan Barut
#18402
Overall Influence
1926 - 1994 (68 years)
Asım Orhan Barut was a Turkish-American theoretical physicist. Education He received both his undergraduate diploma and his Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1949 and 1952, respectively. He pursued his postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago during 1953–1954.
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