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,
#11201
Seth Neddermeyer
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Seth Henry Neddermeyer was an American physicist who co-discovered the muon, and later championed the implosion-type nuclear weapon while working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
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Sidney Dancoff
1913 - 1951 (38 years)
Sidney Michael Dancoff was an American theoretical physicist best known for the Tamm–Dancoff approximation method and for nearly developing a renormalization method for solving quantum electrodynamics .
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Gersh Budker
1918 - 1977 (59 years)
Gersh Itskovich Budker , also named Andrey Mikhailovich Budker , was a Soviet physicist, specialized in nuclear physics and accelerator physics. Biography He was elected a Corresponding Member of the Siberian Division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences on 28 March 1958 and was promoted to an Academician of the Division of Nuclear Physics on 26 June 1964.
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Marian Smoluchowski
1872 - 1917 (45 years)
Marian Smoluchowski was a Polish physicist who worked in the territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a pioneer of statistical physics and made significant contributions to the theory of Brownian motion and stochastic processes. He is known for the Smoluchowski equation, Einstein–Smoluchowski relation and Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet.
Go to Profile#11205
James L. Tuck
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
James Leslie Tuck was a British physicist. Tuck was born in Manchester, England, and educated at the Victoria University of Manchester. Because of his involvement with the Manhattan Project, he was unable to submit his thesis on time and never received his doctoral degree.
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Victor Lenzen
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Victor Fritz Lenzen was an American physicist most noted for his logical rigour and commitment to teaching. His father was a building contractor. He went to Lick-Wilmerding High School, San Francisco where he developed an early interests in marine engineering, studying the armaments and the outfittings of all the capital ships in the world. He liked to take long walks around the nearby Hunter's Point.
Go to Profile#11207
Solomon Pekar
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Solomon Isaakovich Pekar was a Soviet theoretical physicist, born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was a full Member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and is known for his fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics, especially for introducing and advancing the concept of polaron as a charge carrier in solids.
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Roswell Clifton Gibbs
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Roswell Clifton Gibbs was Chairman of the Department of Physics at Cornell University from 1934 to 1946. A graduate of Cornell, he became an assistant professor of Physics there in 1912, and a professor in 1918. His research primarily concerned spectroscopy, and he was the author or co-author of over forty research papers. As Chairman of the Department of Physics, he hired distinguished physicists including Stanley Livingston, Robert Bacher and Hans Bethe, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work at Cornell. After World War II, Gibbs was Chairman of the Mathematical and Physical...
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Vikram Sarabhai
1919 - 1971 (52 years)
Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai Jain was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped to develop nuclear power in India. He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1972.
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Alexander Vyssotsky
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Vyssotsky was a Russian-American astronomer. Born in Moscow, in 1923 he moved to the United States, where he eventually became professor at the University of Virginia and vice-president of the American Astronomical Society.
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Cornelis Zwikker
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Cornelis Zwikker was a Dutch scientist. Zwikker was born in Zaandam as the son of Klaartje Dil and the shopkeeper Klaas Cornelisz Zwikker. He married Johanna Dorothea Theinert in 1924 in Zaandam. In 1918 he had started studying chemistry and later physics at the University of Amsterdam, where in 1925 he obtained his PhD with the thesis "Physical properties of wolfram at high temperatures" under supervision of the Noble-laureate Pieter Zeeman. From 1923 he worked as scientific researcher at Philips in Eindhoven, but in 1929 he was appointed professor in theoretical and applied physics at the Delft University of Technology.
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E. Harris Harbison
1907 - 1964 (57 years)
Elmore Harris Harbison was an American historian and scholar on the topic of Christianity and history. He was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University and a trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary.
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Myron Mathisson
1897 - 1940 (43 years)
Myron Mathisson was a theoretical physicist of Polish and Jewish descent. He is known for his work in general relativity, for developing a new method to analyze the properties of fundamental solutions of linear hyperbolic partial differential equations, and proved, in a special case, the Hadamard conjecture on the class of equations that satisfy the Huygens principle.
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John Harry Williams
1908 - 1966 (58 years)
John Harry Williams was a Canadian-American physicist. Born in the asbestos mining town of Asbestos, Quebec, he had three brothers: Elewyn, Lloyd, and Arthur. John was an active child and participated in sports, developing a lifelong interest in the outdoors. His father, a mining engineer, died during the First World War, leaving his wife Josephine Stockwell to raise the family alone. She moved the family to Kelowna, British Columbia, where John attended public high school. He matriculated to the University of British Columbia on a full scholarship, where he graduated with a BS degree in 1928.
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Julius Sumner Miller
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Julius Sumner Miller was an American physicist and television personality. He is best known for his work on children's television programs in North America and Australia. Off-screen Julius Sumner Miller was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, as the youngest of nine children. His father was Latvian and his Lithuanian mother spoke 12 languages.
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Alysia D. Marino
Alysia Diane Marino is an American experimental particle physicist. She is the Jesse L. Mitchell Endowed Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2022, Marino was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "major contributions to understanding the physics of neutrino production and interactions, and for leadership in data analysis in the T2K and NA61/SHINE collaborations."
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Alfred Robb
1873 - 1936 (63 years)
Alfred Arthur Robb FRS was a Northern Irish physicist. Biography Robb studied at Queen's College, Belfast and at St John's College, Cambridge . He then proceeded to University of Göttingen, where, guided by Woldemar Voigt, he wrote his dissertation on the Zeeman effect. He also worked under J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory. The Croix de Guerre was awarded to him for WWI service in the Red Cross, and in 1921 he became a fellow of the Royal Society.
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Charles Glover Barkla
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
Charles Glover Barkla FRS FRSE was a British physicist, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1917 for his work in X-ray spectroscopy and related areas in the study of X-rays . Life Barkla was born in Widnes, England, to John Martin Barkla, a secretary for the Atlas Chemical Company, and Sarah Glover, daughter of a watchmaker.
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Hugh Everett III
1930 - 1982 (52 years)
Hugh Everett III was an American physicist who, in his 1957 PhD thesis, proposed what is now known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In danger of losing his draft deferment, Everett took a research job with the Pentagon the year before completing the oral exam for his PhD and did not continue research in theoretical physics after his graduation. Afterward, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers for operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He died at the age of 51 in 1982. He is the father of musician Mark...
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Alfred Kastler
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Alfred Kastler was a French physicist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Biography Kastler was born in Guebwiller and later attended the Lycée Bartholdi in Colmar, Alsace, and École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1921. After his studies, in 1926 he began teaching physics at the Lycée of Mulhouse, and then taught at the University of Bordeaux, where he was a university professor until 1941. Georges Bruhat asked him to come back to the École Normale Supérieure, where he finally obtained a chair in 1952.
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William Smythe
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
William Ralph Smythe was a physicist at California Institute of Technology. Early life A native of Canon City, Colorado, he graduated from Colorado College and spent some time in Dartmouth College before his studies were interrupted by World War I. He eventually completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1921 under Nobel laureate Albert Michelson and Henry Gale.
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Yusuke Hagihara
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
was a Japanese astronomer noted for his contributions to celestial mechanics. Life and work Hagihara graduated from Tokyo Imperial University with a degree in astronomy in 1921 and became an assistant professor of astronomy there two years later. In 1923 the Japanese government sent him abroad as a traveling scholar. Hagihara went to Cambridge University in England to study differential equations under the mathematician Henry Frederick Baker and relativity alongside Paul Dirac under the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. He was a visiting scholar in France, Germany, and the United St...
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Harvey C. Rentschler
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Harvey Clayton Rentschler was an American physicist, inventor, and uranium metallurgist. Rentschler graduated in 1903 with a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and in 1908 with a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University. From 1908 to 1917 he was a professor of physics at the University of Missouri. In 1917 he began work for the Westinghouse Electric Company as a researcher at the Westinghouse Lamp Plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey and continued working there until his retirement in 1945. He became the research director at the Lamp Plant. In 1922 Rentschler, with John W. Marden, d...
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Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe was an Irish physicist, astrophysicist and chemist. He was a university professor and distinguished himself in the study and popularization of electromagnetism, as well as the beginnings of astrophysics. He also experimented with improving radio and television.
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Jon Mathews
1932 - 1979 (47 years)
Jon Mathews was a physicist, yachtsman, scholar, and adventurer. After a 23-year career as a physics professor, he was lost at sea and presumed drowned during a circumnavigation attempt with his wife Jean in 1979.
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Eugene Rabe
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Eugene Karl Rabe was a German-American astronomer. He was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Hermann and Luise. From 1937–1948 he was a member of the staff at the Heidelberg, Germany branch of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut. After World War II it was arranged for him to come to the United States. He then became professor of astronomy at the University of Cincinnati, while working at the Cincinnati Observatory. His work included orbital motions of the Trojan asteroids, and particularly the orbit of 433 Eros. In 1951, he used twenty years worth of observations of Eros to determine the gravitational perturbations of the planets.
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C. E. Wynn-Williams
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams , was a Welsh physicist, noted for his research on electronic instrumentation for use in nuclear physics. His work on the scale-of-two counter contributed to the development of the modern computer.
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Iosif Shklovsky
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky was a Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist. He is remembered for work in theoretical astrophysics and other topics, as well as for his 1962 book on extraterrestrial life, the revised and expanded version of which was co-authored by American astronomer Carl Sagan in 1966 as Intelligent Life in the Universe.
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Sergei Tyablikov
1921 - 1968 (47 years)
Sergei Vladimirovich Tyablikov was a Soviet theoretical physicist known for his significant contributions to statistical mechanics, solid-state physics, and for the development of the double-time Green function's formalism.
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Alexander Nikuradse
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Alexander Nikuradse , also known by his pseudonym Al. Sanders, was a Georgian-German physicist and Nazi political scientist. Born in Samtredia, Georgia, Russian Empire, he was sent by the Georgian government to complete his studies in Berlin. Nikuradse remained in Berlin and became a German citizen after the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia. Being in staunch opposition to Soviet rule in Georgia, he was actively involved in Georgian émigré activities, and had close Nazi connections. Since their common days as Soviet exiles in Munich in the early 1920s, he had been on friendly terms with Alfred Rosenberg whose views on the Caucasus were largely shaped under Nikuradse's influence.
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Frederick Albert Saunders
1875 - 1963 (88 years)
Frederick Albert Saunders was a Canadian-born American physicist and academic remembered for his work in sub-infrared spectroscopy and acoustics. Early life Frederick Albert Saunders was born on August 18, 1875, in London, Ontario, a son of William Saunders and Sarah Agnes Saunders, née Robinson, both of whom were born in England and emigrated to Canada at an early age. His father was renowned in the fields of orchard pests and fruit hybridization, was a founding member of the Entomological Society of Ontario and published books including Insects Injurious to Fruits and numerous scientific papers.
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Frances Woodworth Wright
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Woodworth Wright was an American astronomer based at Harvard University. During World War II, she taught celestial navigation to military officers and engineers. Early life Frances Woodworth Wright was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of George William Wright and Nellie Woodworth Wright. As a child in 1907, Wright wrote a short essay titled "My Favorite Poem", for the popular national children's magazine St. Nicholas. She earned a bachelor's degree at Brown University in 1920. She was granted a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1958, as a student of Fred Whipp...
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Robert Methven Petrie
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Robert Methven Petrie was a Canadian astronomer. He was born in Scotland but emigrated to Canada at the age of five. He grew up in Victoria, British Columbia and studied physics and mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He began working summer jobs at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory and became fascinated with astronomy.
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R. E. Siday
1912 - 1956 (44 years)
Raymond Eldred Siday was an English mathematician specialising in quantum mechanics. He obtained his BSc in Special Physics and later worked at the University of Edinburgh. He began collaborating with Werner Ehrenberg in 1933.
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Helmut Volz
1911 - 1978 (67 years)
Helmut Volz was a German experimental nuclear physicist who worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II. In the latter years of World War II, he became a professor at Erlangen University. He declined to take a position offered to him in the United States after the war, and he continued his teaching and research at Erlangen.
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Frances Lowater
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Frances Lowater was a British-American physicist and astronomer. Life and career Lowater studied in England for her undergraduate degrees, at University College, Nottingham, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She then moved to the United States, where she attended Bryn Mawr College and earned her Ph.D. in 1906. While studying for her Ph.D., she took a position as a physics demonstrator, and remained in that position until 1910. She spent a year at Westfield College and four years at Rockford College, then moved to Wellesley College, where she spent the rest of her career; with the exception of a...
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Edward Victor Appleton
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Sir Edward Victor Appleton was an English physicist, Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in radiophysics. He studied, and was also employed as a lab technician, at Bradford College from 1909 to 1911. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1947 for his seminal work proving the existence of the ionosphere during experiments carried out in 1924.
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Edgar Lipworth
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Edgar Lipworth was an American physicist, specializing "in research in molecular and atomic beams, nuclear physics, lasers and the symmetry of physical laws under time reversal." Born and educated in England, Edgar Lipworth worked from 1944 to 1946 as a civilian research assistant on radar for the Air Ministry. After graduating with a BA from the University of Manchester in 1947, he became a graduate student in physics at Manhattan's Columbia University. There he obtained his PhD with advisor Willis Lamb with a dissertation on measurement of the Lamb shift in singly ionized helium. From 1953 to 1954 Lipworth held a fellowship with RCA.
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Eni Njoku
1917 - 1974 (57 years)
Eni Njoku was a Nigerian botanist and educator. He was vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka . He served in the Nigerian House of Representatives as federal minister of Mines and Power, and was chairman of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria. He was an emissary at OAU-sponsored peace talks.
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Edwin Francis Carpenter
1898 - 1963 (65 years)
Edwin Francis Carpenter was an American astronomer. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and received his A.B. and A.M. from Harvard University. In 1925 he was awarded a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley. He became an instructor at the University of Arizona, and by 1936 he was heading up the Astronomy Department. In 1938 he became directory of Steward Observatory, remaining in that post until 1963. He also served as Vice-president and chairman for the Astronomical Divisions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Eduard Shpolsky
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Eduard Vladimirovich Shpolsky, also Shpolsk'ii, Shpolskii was a Russian and Soviet physicist and educator, co-founder and lifelong editor of Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk journal . Shpolsky primary scientific contribution belongs to the field of molecular spectroscopy, particularly luminescence and absorption spectra of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. In 1952 Shpolsky and his junior researchers A. A. Ilyina and L. A. Klimov discovered Shpolsky effect in organic compounds, a property that allows highly selective spectroscopic identification of substances that normally do not possess clearly defined spectral lines or bands.
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Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
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Thomas Russell Wilkins
1891 - 1940 (49 years)
Thomas Russell Wilkins was a Canadian physicist. Wilkins received in 1912 his bachelor's degree in physics from McMaster University . He began graduate study in physics at the University of Chicago and taught at Brandon College, where he was head of the department of mathematics and physics from 1918 to 1925. In 1921 he received his PhD from the University of Chicago with his thesis Multiple valency in the ionization by alpha rays. In 1924 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1924 in Toronto.
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Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
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Harold Knox-Shaw
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Harold Knox-Shaw was an English astronomer. He was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. He was the oldest of four siblings. During his youth he earned scholarships to Wellington College in Berkshire and to Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1907 ranked as Sixth Wrangler. A year following his graduation he became an assistant at the Khedivial Astronomical Observatory in Helwan, Egypt. He was elected Fellow of the Society in 1908. In 1910 he became the first to photograph Halley's comet from this site.
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Arthur W. Conway
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Arthur William Conway FRS was a distinguished Irish mathematician and mathematical physicist who wrote one of the first books on relativity and co-edited two volumes of William Rowan Hamilton's collected works. He also served as President of University College Dublin between 1940 and 1947.
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Vibert Douglas
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Allie Vibert Douglas, , who usually went by her middle name, was a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. Life Douglas was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 15 December 1894. Because both of Douglas' parents died the year she was born, she first lived in London, England with her brother George Vibert Douglas, and her grandmother. Douglas' grandfather was Rev. George Douglas, a prominent Methodist minister and educator. In 1904 both Douglas and her brother returned to Montreal where they attended Westmount High School. Growing up, Douglas was interested in science but felt that her gender was a handicap.
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Jagadish Chandra Bose
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath with interests in biology, physics, botany and writing science fiction. He was a pioneer in the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the Moon was named in his honour. He founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.
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Pavel Cherenkov
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was a Soviet physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934. Biography Cherenkov was born in 1904 to Alexey Cherenkov and Mariya Cherenkova in the small village of Novaya Chigla. This town is in present-day Voronezh Oblast, Russia.
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Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber. Education and early life Wilson was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian to Annie Clark Harper and John Wilson, a sheep farmer. After his father died in 1873, he moved with his family to Manchester. With financial support from his step-brother he studied biology at Owens College, now the University of Manchester, with the intent of becoming a doctor. In 1887, he graduated from the College with a BSc. He won a scholarship to attend Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he became interested in physics and chemistry.
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