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,
#11051
Ibn al-Shatir
1304 - 1375 (71 years)
ʿAbu al-Ḥasan Alāʾ al‐Dīn bin Alī bin Ibrāhīm bin Muhammad bin al-Matam al-Ansari known as Ibn al-Shatir or Ibn ash-Shatir was an Arab astronomer, mathematician and engineer. He worked as muwaqqit in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and constructed a sundial for its minaret in 1371/72.
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Nathaniel Bowditch
1773 - 1838 (65 years)
Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation. He is often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation; his book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel. In 2001, an elementary and middle school in Salem was named in his honor.
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Friedrich Hasenöhrl
1874 - 1915 (41 years)
Friedrich Hasenöhrl was an Austrian physicist. Life Friedrich Hasenöhrl was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary in 1874. His father was a lawyer and his mother belonged to a prominent aristocratic family. After his elementary education, he studied natural science and mathematics at the University of Vienna under Joseph Stefan and Ludwig Boltzmann . In 1896, he attained a doctorate under Franz-Serafin Exner with a thesis titled "Über den Temperaturkoeffizienten der Dielektrizitätskonstante in Flüssigkeiten und die Mosotti-Clausius'sche Formel".
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Herbert Hall Turner
1861 - 1930 (69 years)
Herbert Hall Turner was a British astronomer and seismologist. Biography Herbert Hall Turner was educated at the Leeds Modern School, Clifton College, Bristol and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1884 he accepted the post of Chief Assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and stayed there for nine years. In 1893 he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford University, a post he held for 37 years until his sudden death in 1930.
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C. H. D. Buys Ballot
1817 - 1890 (73 years)
Christophorus Henricus Diedericus Buys Ballot was a Dutch chemist and meteorologist after whom Buys Ballot's law and the Buys Ballot table are named. He was first chairman of the International Meteorological Organization, the organization that would become the World Meteorological Organization.
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Wilhelm von Bezold
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm von Bezold was a German physicist and meteorologist born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria. He is best known for discovering the Bezold effect and the Bezold–Brücke shift. Bezold studied mathematics and physics at the University of Munich and the University of Göttingen. He taught meteorology in Munich from 1861, becoming a professor in 1866. In 1868 he began teaching at the Technical University of Munich. In 1875, he was named a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
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Raymond Smith Dugan
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Raymond Smith Dugan was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. His parents were Jeremiah Welby and Mary Evelyn Smith and he was born in Montague in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. His undergraduate and Masters was from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1899 and 1902. Dugan then received his Ph.D. dissertation in 1905 at the Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Königstuhl at the University of Heidelberg.
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Giovanni Giorgi
1871 - 1950 (79 years)
Giovanni Giorgi was an Italian physicist and electrical engineer who proposed the Giorgi system of measurement, the precursor to the International System of Units . Early life Giovanni Giorgi was born in Lucca on November 27, 1871.
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Robert William Boyle
1883 - 1955 (72 years)
Robert William Boyle was a physicist and one of the most important early pioneers in the development of sonar. Boyle was born in 1883 at Carbonear in the Dominion of Newfoundland. Boyle left Newfoundland for Montreal, Quebec in Canada where he trained at McGill University under Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford, in the then fledgling field of radioactivity. He earned McGill's first Doctor of Philosophy in physics in 1909. He then moved to England to continue his work by following Rutherford to the University of Manchester.
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Rudolf Wolf
1816 - 1893 (77 years)
Johann Rudolf Wolf was a Swiss astronomer and mathematician best known for his research on sunspots. Wolf was born in Fällanden, near Zurich. He studied at the universities of Zurich, Vienna, and Berlin. Encke was one of his teachers. Wolf became professor of astronomy at the University of Bern in 1844 and director of the Bern Observatory in 1847. In 1855 he accepted a chair of astronomy at both the University of Zurich and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
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C. V. Boys
1855 - 1944 (89 years)
Sir Charles Vernon Boys, FRS was a British physicist, known for his careful and innovative experimental work in the fields of thermodynamics and high-speed photography, and as a popular science communicator through his books, inventions, and his public lectures for children.
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Willem 's Gravesande
1688 - 1742 (54 years)
Willem Jacob 's Gravesande was a Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher, chiefly remembered for developing experimental demonstrations of the laws of classical mechanics and the first experimental measurement of kinetic energy. As professor of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy at Leiden University, he helped to propagate Isaac Newton's ideas in Continental Europe.
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Seleucus of Seleucia
190 BC - 150 BC (40 years)
Seleucus of Seleucia was a Hellenistic astronomer and philosopher. Coming from Seleucia on the Tigris, Mesopotamia, the capital of the Seleucid Empire, or, alternatively, Seleukia on the Erythraean Sea, he is best known as a proponent of heliocentrism and for his theory of the causes of tides.
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Karl Meissner
1891 - 1959 (68 years)
Karl Wilhelm Meissner was a German-American physicist specializing in hyperfine spectroscopy. He spent the greater part of his career in the United States at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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Ernst Emil Alexander Back
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Ernst Emil Alexander Back was a German physicist, born in Freiburg. He attended school in Strasbourg until 1900, and from 1902 until 1906 studied law in Strasbourg, Munich, and Berlin. He then worked in the legal profession in Alsace-Lorraine until 1909, afterwards taking leave to study physics in Tübingen. He retired from the legal profession in 1912, and earned his Ph.D. in 1913. His thesis, titled Zur Prestonschen Regel, was on the subject of what would later be called the Paschen-Back effect, and was named after Back and Friedrich Paschen.
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Julius Scheiner
1858 - 1913 (55 years)
Julius Scheiner was a German astronomer, born in Cologne and educated at Bonn. He became assistant at the astrophysical observatory in Potsdam in 1887 and its observer in chief in 1898, three years after his appointment to the chair of astrophysics in the University of Berlin. Scheiner paid special attention to celestial photography and wrote Die Spektralanalyse der Gestirne ; Lehrbuch der Photographie der Gestirne ; Strahlung und Temperatur der Sonne ; Der Bau des Weltalls ; third edition . In 1899 he began the publication of the Photographische Himmelskarte; Zone +31° bis +40° Deklinatio...
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Carl Wilhelm Wirtz
1876 - 1939 (63 years)
Carl Wilhelm Wirtz was an astronomer who spent his time between the Kiel Observatory in Germany and the Observatory of Strasbourg, France. He is known for statistically showing the existence of a redshift-distance correlation for spiral galaxies.
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Felix Ehrenhaft
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Felix Ehrenhaft was an Austriann physicist who contributed to atomic physics, to the measurement of electrical charges and to the optical properties of metal colloids. He was known for his maverick and controversial style. His iconoclasm was greatly admired by philosopher Paul Feyerabend. He won the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1917.
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Henri Victor Regnault
1810 - 1878 (68 years)
Henri Victor Regnault was a French chemist and physicist best known for his careful measurements of the thermal properties of gases. He was an early thermodynamicist and was mentor to William Thomson in the late 1840s. He never used his first given name, and was known throughout his lifetime as Victor Regnault.
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Hedwig Kohn
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Hedwig Kohn was a physicist who was one of only three women to obtain habilitation in physics in Germany before World War II. Born in Breslau in the German Empire , she was forced to leave Germany during the Nazi regime because she was Jewish. She continued her academic career in the United States, where she settled for the rest of her life.
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Ernest Fox Nichols
1869 - 1924 (55 years)
Ernest Fox Nichols was an American educator and physicist. He served as the 10th President of Dartmouth College. Early life Nichols was born in Leavenworth County, Kansas, and received his undergraduate degree from Kansas State University in 1888. After working for a year in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State, he matriculated to graduate school at Cornell University, where he received degrees in 1893 and 1897. He also studied at the University of Berlin and Cambridge University.
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François Gonnessiat
1856 - 1934 (78 years)
François Gonnessiat was a French astronomer, observer of comets and discoverer of two minor planets. He worked at the Observatory of Lyon. In 1889 he won the Lalande Prize for astronomy from the French Academy of Sciences; 1901 became director of the Quito Observatory for the purpose of making geodetic measurements. He became a well known and respected member of the academic scene of the city, where a street is named after him. From 1908 to 1931, he was director of the Algiers Observatory where one of his colleagues was Benjamin Jekhovsky. He was also director of the Quito Astronomical Obser...
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Peter Andreas Hansen
1795 - 1874 (79 years)
Peter Andreas Hansen was a Danish-born German astronomer. Biography The son of a goldsmith, Hansen learned the trade of a watchmaker at Flensburg, and exercised it at Berlin and Tønder, 1818–1820. He had, however, long been a student of science; and Dr Dircks, a physician practising at Tønder, prevailed with his father to send him in 1820 to Copenhagen, where he won the patronage of H.C. Schumacher and attracted the personal notice of King Frederick VI. The Danish survey was then in progress, and he acted as Schumacher's assistant in work connected with it, chiefly at the new observatory of A...
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Giovanni Battista Venturi
1746 - 1822 (76 years)
Giovanni Battista Venturi was an Italian physicist, savant, man of letters, diplomat and historian of science. He was the discoverer of the Venturi effect, which was described in 1797 in his Recherches Experimentales sur le Principe de la Communication Laterale du Mouvement dans les Fluides appliqué a l'Explication de Differens Phenomènes Hydrauliques, translated into English by William Nicholson as "Experimental Inquiries Concerning the Principle of the Lateral Communication of a Motion in Fluids," and published in 1836 in Thomas Tredgold's Tracts on Hydraulics. Because of this discovery, he...
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James Craig Watson
1838 - 1880 (42 years)
James Craig Watson was a Canadian-American astronomer, discoverer of comets and minor planets, director of the University of Michigan's Detroit Observatory in Ann Arbor, and awarded with the Lalande Prize in 1869.
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Semen Altshuler
1911 - 1983 (72 years)
Semyon Alexandrovich Altshuler was a Soviet physicist known for his work in resonance spectroscopy and in particular for theoretical prediction of acoustic paramagnetic resonance in 1952. Early years Altshuler was born in 1911 in Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire. He finished school in Nizhny Novgorod and later moved to Kazan, where he spent most of his life. In 1928, he entered the physics faculty of the Kazan University aiming to study theoretical physics. He graduated in 1932 and obtained a post-graduate scholarship, but had to change university due to the scholarship rules. He moved to Moscow to study with Igor Tamm whom he admired for his books on electricity and magnetism.
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Alfred Bucherer
1863 - 1927 (64 years)
Alfred Heinrich Bucherer was a German physicist, who is known for his experiments on relativistic mass. He also was the first who used the phrase "theory of relativity" for Einstein's theory of special relativity.
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Marguerite Perey
1909 - 1975 (66 years)
Marguerite Catherine Perey was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie. In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. In 1962, she was the first woman to be elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie. Perey died of cancer in 1975.
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Ivar Waller
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Ivar Waller was a Swedish professor of theoretical physics at Uppsala University. He developed the theory of X-ray scattering by lattice vibrations of a crystal, building upon the prior work of Peter Debye. The Debye–Waller factor, which he introduced in his doctoral thesis in 1925, is the definitive treatment of the effect of thermal vibrations in X-ray crystallography. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1945, and the Nobel Committee for Physics 1945-1972.
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Jun Ishiwara
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Jun Ishiwara or Atsushi Ishihara was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for his works on the electronic theory of metals, the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Being the only Japanese scientist who made an original contribution to the old quantum theory, in 1915, independently of other scientists, he formulated quantization rules for systems with several degrees of freedom.
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Frederic de Hoffmann
1924 - 1989 (65 years)
Frederic de Hoffmann was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He came to the United States of America in 1941 and graduated from Harvard University in 1945 . Before graduating, de Hoffmann was sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1944 where he assisted Edward Teller in the development of the Hydrogen bomb. Frederic de Hoffmann was an advocate of peaceful atomic energy.
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Pierre Charles Le Monnier
1715 - 1799 (84 years)
Pierre Charles Le Monnier was a French astronomer. His name is sometimes given as Lemonnier. Biography Le Monnier was born in Paris, where his father Pierre , also an astronomer, was professor of philosophy at the college d'Harcourt.
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Knut Ångström
1857 - 1910 (53 years)
Knut Johan Ångström was a Swedish physicist. He was the son of physicist Anders Jonas Ångström and studied in Uppsala from 1877 to 1884, when he received his licentiat-degree, before going for a short time to the University of Strassburg to study with August Kundt. Coming back to Uppsala, he completed his doctoral degree and was appointed lecturer in physics at the new university college in Stockholm in 1885. After a few years working there, he returned to Uppsala in 1891 and received the professorship of Physics in 1896.
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Frank Watson Dyson
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Sir Frank Watson Dyson, KBE, FRS, FRSE was an English astronomer and the ninth Astronomer Royal who is remembered today largely for introducing time signals from Greenwich, England, and for the role he played in proving Einstein's theory of general relativity.
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Carl Auer von Welsbach
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Carl Auer von Welsbach , who received the Austrian noble title of Freiherr Auer von Welsbach in 1901, was an Austrian scientist and inventor, who separated didymium into the elements neodymium and praseodymium in 1885. He was also one of three scientists to independently discover the element lutetium , separating it from ytterbium in 1907, setting off the longest priority dispute in the history of chemistry.
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Richard van der Riet Woolley
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley OBE FRS was an English astronomer who became the eleventh Astronomer Royal. His mother's maiden name was Van der Riet. Biography Woolley was born in Weymouth, Dorset and attended Allhallows College, then in Honiton, for about 18 months, but then moved with his parents to the Union of South Africa upon their retirement. There he attended and received his degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Cape Town. Woolley returned to the United Kingdom and studied for a further MA degree in Mathematics and, later, a PhD at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
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Adolf Kratzer
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
B. Adolf Kratzer was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to atomic physics and molecular physics, and was an authority on molecular band spectroscopy. He was born in Günzburg and died in Münster.
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Wendell H. Furry
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Wendell Hinkle Furry was a professor of physics at Harvard University who made contributions to theoretical and particle physics. The Furry theorem is named after him. Early life Furry was born in Prairieton, Indiana on February 18. 1907. He earned an A.B. degree from DePauw University in 1928 and an A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1930 and 1932, respectively.
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Tatyana Afanasyeva
1876 - 1964 (88 years)
Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva was a Russian-Dutch mathematician and physicist who made contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. On 21 December 1904, she married Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest . They had two daughters and two sons; one daughter, Tatyana Ehrenfest, also became a mathematician.
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Robert Luther
1822 - 1900 (78 years)
Karl Theodor Robert Luther , normally published as Robert Luther, was a German astronomer. While working at the Bilk Observatory in Düsseldorf, Germany, he searched for asteroids and discovered 24 of them between 1852 and 1890. Seven times Lalande Prize winner.
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Sherburne Wesley Burnham
1838 - 1921 (83 years)
Sherburne Wesley Burnham was an American astronomer. For more than 50 years Burnham spent all his free time observing the heavens, mainly concerning himself with binary stars. Biography Sherburne Wesley Burnham was born in Thetford, Vermont. His parents were Roswell O. Burnham and Marinda Burnham.
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Clifford Berry
1918 - 1963 (45 years)
Clifford Edward Berry helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff–Berry computer . Biography Clifford Berry was born April 19, 1918, in Gladbrook, Iowa, to Fred and Grace Berry. His father owned an appliance repair shop, where he was able to learn about radios. He graduated from Marengo High School in Marengo, Iowa, in 1934 as the class valedictorian at age 16. He went on to study at Iowa State College , eventually earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1939 and followed by his master's degree in physics in 1941.
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Menelaus of Alexandria
70 - 140 (70 years)
Menelaus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and astronomer, the first to recognize geodesics on a curved surface as natural analogs of straight lines. Life and works Although very little is known about Menelaus's life, it is supposed that he lived in Rome, where he probably moved after having spent his youth in Alexandria. He was called Menelaus of Alexandria by both Pappus of Alexandria and Proclus, and a conversation of his with Lucius, held in Rome, is recorded by Plutarch.
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Christopher Hansteen
1784 - 1873 (89 years)
Christopher Hansteen was a Norwegian geophysicist, astronomer and physicist, best known for his mapping of Earth's magnetic field. Early life and career Hansteen was born in Christiania as the son of Johannes Mathias Hansteen and his wife Anne Cathrine Treschow . He was the younger brother of writer Conradine Birgitte Dunker, and through her the uncle of Bernhard Dunker and Vilhelmine Ullmann, and granduncle of Mathilde Schjøtt, Ragna Nielsen and Viggo Ullmann. His mother was a first cousin of Niels Treschow.
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Arseny Sokolov
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Arseny Alexandrovich Sokolov was a Russian theoretical physicist known for the development of synchrotron radiation theory. Biography Arseny Sokolov graduated from Tomsk State University in 1931. He obtained the degree of Kandidat nauk from TSU under supervision of Piotr Tartakovsky . The degree of Doktor nauk was obtained by him from Leningrad Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute .
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Wang Zhuxi
1911 - 1983 (72 years)
Wang Zhuxi , who had the given name Zhiqi and the sobriquet Zhuxi, was a Chinese physicist, philologist, and writer. Biography Wang was born in Gong'an County, Hubei Province. He graduated from the Department of Physics of Tsinghua University in 1933, and continued his postgraduate study in the university's graduate school. With government support, he went to study in the United Kingdom, where he obtained his doctorate degree from Cambridge University under the supervision of Ralph Fowler in 1938.
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William Wallace Campbell
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
William Wallace Campbell was an American astronomer, and director of Lick Observatory from 1901 to 1930. He specialized in spectroscopy. He was the tenth president of the University of California from 1923 to 1930.
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Donald Cooksey
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Donald Cooksey , was an American physicist who was associate director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. Biography Cooksey was the son of George Cooksey from Birmingham, England and Linda Dows from New York. After High School at the Thacher School in California, Donald Cooksey followed his brother Charlton Cooksey and attended Yale and where he too became a physicist specializing in designing and building scientific instruments, especially detectors for measuring sub-atomic particles such as neutrons. When Ernest O. Lawrence was at Yale during the 1920s, Cooksey and Lawrence became friends.
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Christoph Scheiner
1575 - 1650 (75 years)
Christoph Scheiner SJ was a Jesuit priest, physicist and astronomer in Ingolstadt. Biography Augsburg/Dillingen: 1591–1605 Scheiner was born in Markt Wald near Mindelheim in Swabia, earlier margravate Burgau, possession of the House of Habsburg. He attended the Jesuit St. Salvator Grammar School in Augsburg from May 1591 until 24 October 1595. He graduated as a "rhetor" and entered the Jesuit Order in Landsberg am Lech on 26 October 1595. At the local seminary, he served his biennial novitiate under the tutelage of Novice Master Father Rupert Reindl SJ. From 1597 to 1598, he finished his lower studies of rhetoric in Augsburg.
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William Duane
1872 - 1935 (63 years)
William Duane was an American physicist who conducted research on radioactivity and X-rays and their usage in the treatment of cancer. He developed the Duane-Hunt Law and Duane's hypothesis. He worked with Pierre and Marie Curie in their University of Paris laboratory for six years and developed a method for generating quantities of radon-222 "seeds" from radium for usage in early forms of brachytherapy.
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