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.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#11251
Leon Pape
1925 - 1984 (59 years)
Leon Pape was a medical physicist who received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Physics from the University of Southern California. He became certified in radiological physics by the American Board of Radiology and from 1955 to 1962 he worked as a radiological physicist at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. He served at the California State University Los Angeles as radiation safety officer and as professor of physics until 1971, and worked on the development of studies in biophysics, radiological health physics, and electron microscopy. He was elevated to departmental head of physics a...
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Christopher Wren
1589 - 1658 (69 years)
Christopher Wren B.D. was an Anglican cleric who was Dean of Windsor from 1635 until his death, and the father of the prominent architect Christopher Wren. Family Christopher Wren Senior was the son of Francis Wren, a citizen and mercer of London, who served steward to Mary Queen of Scots during her captivity in England.
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Fritz Borgnis
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Fritz E. Borgnis was a German applied physicist and electrical engineer, known for his contributions to microwave physics, guided waves and ultrasonic measurements for medical diagnostics. Background Borgnis was born on December 24, 1906, in Mannheim, Germany. After completing high school in Hamburg, he matriculated at the Technische Hochschule of Munich where he received a diploma in electrical engineering in 1929. He continued at the University of Munich and obtained a Dr. Ing. degree in the field of current flow by convection and diffusion. He continued his academic career at the University of Graz followed by two years at the ETH Zurich from 1948 until 1950.
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Georgy Mihailovich Kondratiev
1887 - 1958 (71 years)
Georgy Mihailovich Kondratiev Russian physicist, specialist in thermal measurements. Biography Graduated from Saint Petersburg State University in 1912 and from Saint Petersburg State Polytechnic University in 1923. In 1917-1918 attended High Course of Pedagogic.
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Hendrik van Gent
1900 - 1947 (47 years)
Hendrik van Gent was a Dutch astronomer. He moved to South Africa in 1928 in order to observe the southern sky at the Leiden Southern Station and the Union Observatory in Johannesburg. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1931. He studied variable stars and also discovered three comets, namely C/1941 K1, C/1944 K2 and C/1943 W1. The Minor Planet Center credits him with the discovery of 39 numbered minor planets during 1929–1935.
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Carl Zeiss
1816 - 1888 (72 years)
Carl Zeiss was a German scientific instrument maker, optician and businessman. In 1846 he founded his workshop, which is still in business as Carl Zeiss AG. Zeiss gathered a group of gifted practical and theoretical opticians and glass makers to reshape most aspects of optical instrument production. His collaboration with Ernst Abbe revolutionized optical theory and practical design of microscopes. Their quest to extend these advances brought Otto Schott into the enterprises to revolutionize optical glass manufacture. The firm of Carl Zeiss grew to one of the largest and most respected optica...
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Eli Whitney Blake Jr.
1836 - 1895 (59 years)
Eli Whitney Blake Jr. was an American scientist. His father and namesake was an inventor and partner of the Blake Brothers manufacturing firm. The origin of the name Eli Whitney comes from Blake senior's uncle Eli Whitney, who changed the face of the cotton industry with the invention of the cotton gin.
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Valentinus Otho
1550 - 1605 (55 years)
Valentinus Otho was a German mathematician and astronomer. Life In 1573 he came to Wittenberg, proposing to Johannes Praetorius an approximation of pi . In 1575 he supported Georg Joachim Rheticus in his trigonometric tables. The next year they went to Kaschau in Hungary where Rheticus died. Thus, Otho inherited the De revolutionibus manuscript of Nicolaus Copernicus that Rheticus had published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
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Anthony Shepherd
1721 - 1796 (75 years)
Anthony Shepherd was a British astronomer. He was the Plumian Professor at the University of Cambridge between 1760 and 1796. He published astronomical tables, and was a friend of Captain Cook, who named the Shepherd Islands after him.
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Alexander David Peacock
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Alexander David Peacock FRSE was a 20th-century British zoologist. Life He was born on 13 June 1886 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the son of James Peacock, a grocer, and his wife, Jane Briggs. He was educated at Newcastle Royal Grammar School then studied Natural Science at Armstrong College in Newcastle, graduating BSc in 1904. Continuing as a postgraduate he gained an MSc and DSc at Durham University. As a postgraduate he taught both at Jarrow School and lectured in Zoology at Armstrong College.
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James Gray
1876 - 1934 (58 years)
James Gordon Gray was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. Life Grey was born in Glasgow in 1876, the third of eight children of Annie Gordon and Andrew Gray. He was educated at Friars Grammar School, in Bangor, Caernarvonshire, Wales, where his father was employed by the university. He attended the University College of North Wales until 1899, when his father and family moved back to Glasgow.
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John Farrar
1779 - 1853 (74 years)
John Farrar was an American scholar. He first coined the concept of hurricanes as “a moving vortex and not the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere”, after the Great September Gale of 1815. Farrar remained Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University between 1807 and 1836. During this time, he introduced modern mathematics into the curriculum. He was also a regular contributor to the scientific journals.
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Arthur Prowse
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Lieutenant Colonel William Arthur Prowse was a British physicist and academic administrator. He was the founding Master of Van Mildert College, Durham. Prowse matriculated at Hatfield College, Durham and graduated with a degree in Physics from Durham University in 1927. He completed his doctorate at the same institution in 1931 – this time, per the conditions of the Pemberton Studentship, as a member of University College. Except for a brief period of secondment under Willis Jackson at Imperial College, London from 1947 to 1948, he spent his entire academic career in Durham. He served as Vic...
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Harinath Dey
1941 - 1971 (30 years)
Harinath Dey was a former lecturer of biochemistry at the University of Dhaka who was shot dead by the Pakistan armed forces on the Loharpool bridge in Sutrapur, Dhaka on the night of 27 March 1971.
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Wanda Leopold
1920 - 1977 (57 years)
Wanda Leopold was a Polish author, medical doctor, and social science activist known for her study of English writings beginning in West Africa, specifically Nigeria. A translator as well as a literary critic, she stressed the artistic qualities of creative writing. She was a scholar of Polish culture, literature, and language. Her book, "O literaturze Czarnej Afryki," was the first Polish introduction to African literature that was written in both English, and French. Some of her first critical essays were on Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Wole Soyinka.
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Judson B. Coit
1849 - 1921 (72 years)
Judson Boardman Coit was an American mathematician and astronomer who published in numerous journals, including The Astrophysical Journal and the of the British Astronomical Association. The largest part of his professional career was spent as a professor at Boston University, where he established the Department of Astronomy and developed a teaching and research observatory. The teaching observatory at Boston University is named in his memory.
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Elihu Thomson
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
Elihu Thomson was an English-born American engineer and inventor who was instrumental in the founding of major electrical companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Early life He was born in Manchester, England, on March 29, 1853, but his family moved to Philadelphia in the United States in 1858. Thomson attended Central High School in Philadelphia and graduated in 1870. Thomson took a teaching position at Central, and in 1876, at the age of twenty-three, held the chair of Chemistry. In 1880, he left Central to pursue research in the emerging field of electrical engineerin...
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Henry Moseley
1801 - 1872 (71 years)
Henry Moseley was an English churchman, mathematician, and scientist. Biography The son of Dr. William Willis Moseley, who kept a school at Newcastle-under-Lyme, and his wife Margaret , he was born on 9 July 1801. He was sent at an early age to the grammar school there, and when fifteen or sixteen to a school at Abbeville. Later he attended, for a short time, a naval school in Portsmouth.
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Andreas Rüdiger
1673 - 1731 (58 years)
Johannes Andreas Rüdiger was a German philosopher and physicist. Main works 1707 Philosophia synthetica1709, 1722 De sensu veri et falsi1711, 1717, 1718 Institutiones eruditionis 1716 Physica divina1717 Obiectiones contra Physicam divinam... cum notis Auctoris Physicae divinae1723, 1729 Philosophia pragmatica
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Sophia Getzowa
1872 - 1946 (74 years)
Sophia Getzowa was a Belarusian-born pathologist and scientist in Mandatory Palestine. She grew up in a Jewish shtetl in Belarus and during her medical studies at the University of Bern, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel. Together they worked in the Zionist movement. After a four-year romance, Weizmann broke off their engagement and Getzowa returned to her medical studies, graduating in 1904. She carried out widely cited research on the thyroid, identifying solid cell nests in 1907.
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Paul Volkmann
1856 - 1938 (82 years)
Paul Oskar Eduard Volkmann was a German physicist, philosopher, and historian of science. He worked at the University of Königsberg. Influenced by Emmanuel Kant, he believed that knowledge was based on interaction between subject and object and that all concepts are relative.
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Brian O'Brien
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Brian O'Brien was an optical physicist and "the founder of the Air Force Studies Board and its chairman for 12 years. O'Brien received numerous awards, including the Medal for Merit, the nation's highest civilian award, for his work on optics in World War II and the Frederic Ives Medal in 1951. Circa 1966 he "chaired an ad hoc committee under the USAF Science Advisory Board looking into the UFO problem". He also had steering power over National Academy of Sciences projects, Project Blue Book, and helped pave the way for the Condon Committee.
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Arturo Issel
1842 - 1922 (80 years)
Arturo Issel was an Italian geologist, palaeontologist, malacologist and archaeologist, born in Genoa. He is noted for first defining the Tyrrhenian Stage in 1914. Issel was also renowned at the time for his work on codifying information within anthropology and ethnology, for which he is still remembered.
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Enrica Calabresi
1891 - 1944 (53 years)
Enrica Calabresi was an Italian zoologist, herpetologist, and entomologist. Her family was part of the Jewish community which has played an important role in Ferrara, continuously since the Middle Ages.
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Al-Samawal al-Maghribi
1130 - 1180 (50 years)
Al-Samawʾal ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī , commonly known as Samau'al al-Maghribi, was a mathematician, astronomer and physician. Born to a Jewish family, he concealed his conversion to Islam for many years for fear of offending his father, then openly embraced Islam in 1163 after he had a dream telling him to do so. His father was a Rabbi from Morocco.
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Christian Wurstisen
1544 - 1588 (44 years)
Christian Wurstisen was a mathematician, theologian, historian from Basel. His name is also given as Wursteisen, Wurzticius, Ursticius, Urstisius, or Urstis. Life In 1565, he became professor of mathematics at the Basel University, and in 1585 professor of theology. The next year, the city magistrate appointed him to the academy as a town historian, a position he held until his death. He was buried in Münster.
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Ernst von Rebeur-Paschwitz
1861 - 1895 (34 years)
Ernst von Rebeur-Paschwitz was a German astronomer, geophysicist and seismologist. He is best known for the first recording of teleseism with the use of his sensitive self-registering horizontal pendulums in 1889. He proposed to create an international network of seismological stations. His ideas led to the founding of the International Seismological Association.
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Petrus de Dacia
1300 - 1400 (100 years)
Petrus de Dacia, also called Philomena and Peder Nattergal , was a Danish scholar who lived in the 13th century. He worked mainly in Paris and Italy, writing in Latin. He published a calendar of new moon dates for the years 1292-1367. In 1292, he published a book on mathematics that contained a new method for the calculation of cubic roots. He also described a mechanical instrument to predict solar and lunar eclipses as seen from Paris.
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Georgii Frederiks
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Georgii Nikolaevich Frederiks was a Russian and Soviet geologist who specialized in paleontology, tectonics and stratigraphy. He described many fossil taxa before becoming a victim of the Great Terror.
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Felix Frankl
1905 - 1961 (56 years)
Felix Issidorowitsch Frankl was an Austrian mathematician, who went to live in the Soviet Union where he had an academic career as a university professor. He studied topology at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Vienna under Hans Hahn, gaining his doctorate in 1927.
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Zhao Jiuzhang
1907 - 1968 (61 years)
Zhao Jiuzhang , also known as Jeou Jang Jaw, was a Chinese meteorologist and physicist. He was a pioneer of Chinese space technology and is considered as a founding father of China's satellite program.
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Martin Brendel
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Otto Rudolf Martin Brendel was a German astronomer. Born in Berlin-Niederschönhausen, he obtained the first successful photograph of the aurora borealis at Bossekop in northern Norway in 1892. He died in Freiburg.
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John of Saxony
1323 - 1355 (32 years)
John of Saxony was a medieval astronomer. Although his exact birthplace is unknown it is believed he was born in Germany, most likely Magdeburg. His scholarly work is believed to date from the end of the 13th century into the mid 14th century. He spent most of his active career, from about 1327 to 1355, at the University of Paris.
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Grace Langford
1871 - Present (155 years)
Grace Langford was an American physicist known for her work in physics education and research on the infrared reflection of phosphates. She taught at Wellesley College and at Barnard College. Early life and education Langford was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the seventh and youngest child of John Langford and Celestina Eldridge Langford. She graduated from Plymouth High School in 1889. She attended Wellesley College, where she was an instructor and undergraduate student simultaneously, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned her B.S. in physics in 1900, as the only woman in her graduating class.
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Guido Horn d'Arturo
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Guido Horn d'Arturo was an Italian astronomer born in Trieste, then part of the Austrian Empire. He obtained Italian citizenship after serving as a volunteer in the Italian army during the First World War. To avoid being persecuted as an irredentist by the Austrian authorities, he officially added to his surname Horn that of "d'Arturo" which he used in the war.
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Arthur Rucker
1845 - 1915 (70 years)
Sir Arthur William Rucker was a British physicist. Education and career Rucker gained his BA at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1871, and was a Fellow there from 1871 to 1876. He was Professor of Physics, and the first Cavendish Professor at Yorkshire College, Leeds from 1874 to 1885. Rucker was then a Professor of Physics at the Royal College of Science from 1886 to 1901, when he left to become Principal of the University of London.
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Christian of Prachatice
1368 - 1439 (71 years)
Christian of Prachatice was a medieval Bohemian astronomer, mathematician and former Catholic priest who converted to the Hussite movement. He was the author of several books about medicine and herbs, and contributed to the field of astronomy with many papers and data recordings.
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William Christie
1845 - 1922 (77 years)
Sir William Henry Mahoney Christie was a British astronomer. He was born in Woolwich, London, the son of Samuel Hunter Christie and educated at King's College School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was fourth wrangler in 1868 and was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1869.
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Ramtanu Lahiri
1813 - 1898 (85 years)
Ramtanu Lahiri was a Young Bengal leader, a teacher and a social reformer. Peary Chand Mitra wrote about him, "There are few persons in whom the milk of kindness flows so abundantly. He was never wanting in appreciation of what was right, and in his sympathy with the advanced principles." Sivanath Sastri's Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj, published in 1903, was not only his biography but also an overview of Bengali society of the era, "a remarkable social document on the period of the Bengal Renaissance."
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Maximilien Toepler
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Maximilien August Topler was a German physicist known for his work on electrostatics, sparks and Schlieren photography. His father was the physicist August Toepler. Toepler's law states that the resistance of an electric arc at any time is inversely proportional to the charge which has flowed through the arc:where I is the current in the arc discharge at time t, and D.
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Frank T. M. White
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
Frank Thomas Matthews White was an Australian mining and metallurgical engineer and mineral science educator. His career included appointments in Australia, Fiji, Malaya, and Canada. An examination of White's career reveals steady progression from an initial technical focus on the goldfields of Western Australia, to the challenge of new mining enterprises in Fiji, to post-war rehabilitation of tin mining in Malaya, ultimately to encompass a broad appreciation of the complexities of the minerals industry as a whole, its human factors, and societal context. He applied these insights in developi...
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Auguste Charlois
1864 - 1910 (46 years)
Auguste Honoré Charlois was a French astronomer who discovered 99 asteroids while working at the Nice Observatory in southeastern France. Asteroid Discovery His first discovery was the asteroid 267 Tirza in 1887. He photographed 433 Eros on the very night of its discovery by Gustav Witt, but was not able to act quickly enough before Witt announced his find.
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Johannes von Gmunden
1380 - 1442 (62 years)
Johannes von Gmünd is also the name of a 14th-century architect, see Basel Münster. Johannes von Gmunden was a German/Austrian astronomer, mathematician, humanist and early instrument maker. Biography Johannes von Gmunden received the degree of a Master of Arts at the University of Vienna in 1406. From 1408, he was a lecturer at Vienna, lecturing on Aristotle's Physics and Meteora , Peter of Spain and Algorismus de minutiis . He fell seriously ill in 1412.
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Albert Lancaster
1849 - 1909 (60 years)
Albert Benoît Marie Lancaster was a Belgian astronomer and meteorologist. He was a contemporary of and assistant to Jean-Charles Houzeau. Life He was born on 24 May 1849 in Mons and died on 4 February 1908 in Uccle.
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Alan Tower Waterman
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Alan Tower Waterman was an American physicist. Biography Born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, he grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. His father was a professor of physics at Smith College. Alan also became a physicist, doing his undergraduate and doctoral work at Princeton University from which he obtained his Ph.D. in 1916.
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Sophus Henrichsen
1845 - 1928 (83 years)
Sophus Septimus Henrichsen was a Norwegian physicist and scientist. He worked at the University of Kristiania . He wrote several textbooks of high school physics and organized the journal Nyt Tidsskrift for Fysik og Kemi in 1896.
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Harriet Williams Bigelow
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Harriet Williams Bigelow was an American instructor and astronomer. Born in Fayetteville, New York, Harriet was the daughter of pastor Dana Williams Bigelow and Katherine Huntington. Her family moved to Pitcher, New York, then in 1878 to Utica, New York where her father became pastor at the Memorial Presbyterian Church. Harriet attended the local public schools, graduating from Utica Free Academy in 1889. She matriculated to Smith College, a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she studied astronomy.
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Friedrich Tietjen
1832 - 1895 (63 years)
Friedrich Tietjen was a German astronomer. He was director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut from 1874 until his death in 1895. The Minor Planet Center credits him with the discovery of one minor planet, the 120-kilometer sized asteroid 86 Semele.
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Oskar Lenz
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Oskar Lenz was a German-Austrian geologist and mineralogist born in Leipzig. Life In 1870, he earned his doctorate in mineralogy and geology at the University of Leipzig. In 1872, he joined as a volunteer at the Imperial Geological Reichsanstalt in Vienna. Later that same year he obtained Austrian citizenship.
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Jean Jacques Raimond Jr.
1903 - 1961 (58 years)
Jean Jacques Raimond Jr. was a Dutch astronomer. Raimond was the son of Jean Jacques Raimond Sr., furniture maker in The Hague, and Tetje van der Werf. He studied astronomy at the universities of Leiden and Groningen. He obtained his PhD at the latter as a student of Jacobus Kapteyn, defending the dissertation The Coefficient of Differential Galactic Absorption.
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