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
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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Gunnar Malmquist
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Karl Gunnar Malmquist was a Swedish astronomer. Biography Gunnar Malmquist was born in Ystad, where he completed his secondary school education before matriculating at the Lund University in 1911. He received his Ph.D. in 1921, was an amanuensis at the Lund Observatory 1915-1920 and a docent from 1920. He continued to work at the observatory in Lund until 1929, was observator at the Stockholm Observatory and taught at the Stockholm University College 1930-1939, and was Professor of Astronomy at the Uppsala University from 1939 until his retirement in 1959.
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Zvonimir Richtmann
1901 - 1941 (40 years)
Zvonimir Richtmann was a Croatian-Jewish physicist, philosopher, politician and publicist who was killed during World War II by Ustaše. Biography Richtmann was born on 22 November 1901 in Zagreb, where he achieved his education. He studied at the Vienna University of Technology from where he graduated in 1925, and at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb which he finished and graduated from in 1932. After graduation, Richtmann taught as a professor at the engineering high school in Zagreb. Richtmann held many public lectures and has published articles about physics.
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Vojislav Mišković
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Vojislav Mišković was a Yugoslac astronomer, head of the Belgrade Observatory in 1926–1950 and 1951–1954.
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Ludwig Hopf
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Ludwig Hopf was a German-Jewish theoretical physicist who made contributions to mathematics, special relativity, hydrodynamics, and aerodynamics. Early in his career he was the assistant to and a collaborator and co-author with Albert Einstein.
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Mikhail Leontovich
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Leontovich was a Soviet physicist, member of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, specializing in plasma and radiophysics. He was awarded:Three Orders of LeninFive Orders of the Red Banner of LabourLenin Prize
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H. G. van de Sande Bakhuyzen
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Hendricus Gerardus van de Sande Bakhuyzen was a Dutch astronomer. His surname, van de Sande Bakhuyzen, is sometimes erroneously given as Backhuyzen or Bakhuysen. His first name is sometimes given as Hendrik Gerard.
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Atanasije Stojković
1775 - 1832 (57 years)
Atanasije Stojković was a Serbian, Austrian and Russian writer, pedagogue, scholar, physicist, mathematician and astronomer. He is considered the founder of Russian meteoritics. Stojković was the president of the Imperial University of Kharkov from 1807 to 1809 and from 1811 to 1813.
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William L. McMillan
1936 - 1984 (48 years)
William L. McMillan was an American physicist noted for his research of condensed matter physics. McMillan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, professor of physics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences McMillan received the 1978 Fritz London Memorial Prize for his work in superconductors. The National Academies Press called him "the ablest condensed matter physicist of his generation". The University of Illinois established an award in his name: The William L. McMillan Award.
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Enrique Gaviola
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Ramón Enrique Gaviola was an Argentinian astrophysicist. Student of Richard Gans at the Universidad de La Plata went in 1922 to Germany where he continued his studies in physics. He studied with Max Planck, Max Born and Albert Einstein, graduating from the University of Berlin in 1926.
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Ormond Stone
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Ormond Stone , was an American astronomer, mathematician and educator. He was the director of Cincinnati Observatory and subsequently the first director of the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, where he trained a significant number of scientists. He served as the editor of the Annals of Mathematics and towards the end of his life made donations which led to the founding of the Fairfax Public Library System.
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David Fabricius
1564 - 1617 (53 years)
David Fabricius was a German pastor who made two major discoveries in the early days of telescopic astronomy, jointly with his eldest son, Johannes Fabricius . David Fabricius was born at Esens, studied at the University of Helmstedt starting in 1583 and served as pastor for small towns near his birthplace in Frisia , at Resterhafe near Dornum in 1584 and at Osteel in 1603. As was common for Protestant ministers of the day, he dabbled in science: his particular interest was astronomy. Fabricius corresponded with astronomer Johannes Kepler.
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Sameera Moussa
1917 - 1952 (35 years)
Sameera Moussa or Samira Musa Aly was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner "Atoms for Peace." She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.
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Daniel Hay Guest
#11097
Benjamin Markarian
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Benjamin "Benik" Egishevitch Markarian was an Armenian astrophysicist. Markarian's Chain is a group of galaxies which was named after him when he discovered that its members move with a common motion. He is also the namesake of a catalog of compact, optically bright galaxies known as Markarian galaxies.
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David Gill
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Sir David Gill was a Scottish astronomer who is known for measuring astronomical distances, for astrophotography and geodesy. He spent much of his career in South Africa. Life and work David Gill was born at 48 Skene Terrace in Aberdeen the son of David Gill, watchmaker and his wife Margaret Mitchell. He was educated first at Bellevue Academy in Aberdeen then at Dollar Academy. He spent two years at Aberdeen University, where he was taught by James Clerk Maxwell, and then joined his father's clock-making business. His most important influence at university was probably from Prof David Thomson.
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Bruno Finzi
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Bruno Finzi was an Italian mathematician, engineer and physicist. Biography Born at Gardone Val Trompia, Finzi received in 1920 his Laurea as an engineer and in 1921 as a mathematician at the University of Pavia. In 1922 he became an assistant of Umberto Cisotti at the Polytecnico di Milano. In 1931 he became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Milan, but returned in 1947 to the Polytecnico di Milano as the successor to Cisotti and became there director of the Mathematical Institute. From 1949 he was the head of the newly founded Institute of Aeronautics and in 1967 he bec...
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Charles-Eugène Delaunay
1816 - 1872 (56 years)
Charles-Eugène Delaunay was a French astronomer and mathematician. His lunar motion studies were important in advancing both the theory of planetary motion and mathematics. Life Born in Lusigny-sur-Barse, France, to Jacques‐Hubert Delaunay and Catherine Choiselat, Delaunay studied under Jean-Baptiste Biot at the Sorbonne. He worked on the mechanics of the Moon as a special case of the three-body problem. He published two volumes on the topic, each of 900 pages in length, in 1860 and 1867. The work hints at chaos in the system, and clearly demonstrates the problem of so-called "small denominators" in perturbation theory.
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