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,
#11251
George Uhlenbeck
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
George Eugene Uhlenbeck was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist. Background and education George Uhlenbeck was the son of Eugenius and Anne Beeger Uhlenbeck. He attended the Hogere Burgerschool in The Hague, from which he graduated in 1918.
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Harlow Shapley
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Harlow Shapley was an American scientist, head of the Harvard College Observatory , and political activist during the latter New Deal and Fair Deal. Shapley used Cepheid variable stars to estimate the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sun's position within it. In 1953 he proposed his "liquid water belt" theory, now known as the concept of a habitable zone.
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William V. Houston
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
William Vermillion Houston was an American physicist who made contributions to spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, and solid-state physics as well as being a teacher and administrator. He became the second president of Rice University in 1946.
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Arthur Lindo Patterson
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Arthur Lindo Patterson was a pioneering British X-ray crystallographer. Patterson was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1902. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Montreal, Canada and later to London, England. In 1920 Patterson moved to Canada for college at McGill University, Montreal. Firstly he concentrated on Mathematics and but then changed his major to Physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's in 1924. His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.
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Yakov Zeldovich
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich , also known as YaB, was a leading Soviet physicist of Belarusian origin, who is known for his prolific contributions in physical cosmology, physics of thermonuclear reactions, combustion, and hydrodynamical phenomena.
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Frank Philip Bowden
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Frank Philip Bowden CBE FRS was an Australian physicist. Early life He was born in Hobart, Tasmania, the son of telegraph engineer Frank Prosser Bowden. Bowden received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Tasmania in Australia in 1925, a Master of Science degree there in 1927 and a Doctor of Science degree in 1933, by which time he was working at the University of Cambridge in England. He gained his PhD from Cambridge in 1929.
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Kenneth Stewart Cole
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Kenneth Stewart Cole was an American biophysicist described by his peers as "a pioneer in the application of physical science to biology". Cole was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1967. Biography He was born on July 10, 1900, in Ithaca, New York, to Charles Nelson Cole, an instructor in Latin at Cornell University and Mabel Stewart. Kenneth had a younger brother, , with whom he remained very close throughout his life despite a large difference in age; they were joint authors of four papers published between 1936 and 1942.
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Ralph H. Fowler
1889 - 1944 (55 years)
Sir Ralph Howard Fowler was a British physicist and astronomer and physical chemist. Education Fowler was born at Roydon, Essex, on 17 January 1889 to Howard Fowler, from Burnham, Somerset, and Frances Eva, daughter of George Dewhurst, a cotton merchant from Manchester. He was initially educated at home, going on to attend Evans' preparatory school at Horris Hill and Winchester College. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge and studied mathematics, becoming a wrangler in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos.
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Norman Feather
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Norman Feather FRS FRSE PRSE , was an English nuclear physicist. Feather and Egon Bretscher were working at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge in 1940, when they proposed that the 239 isotope of element 94 would be better able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. This research, a breakthrough, was part of the Tube Alloys project, the secret British project during World War II to develop nuclear weapons.
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Edward Condon
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Edward Uhler Condon was an American nuclear physicist, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, and a participant during World War II in the development of radar and, very briefly, of nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. The Franck–Condon principle and the Slater–Condon rules are co-named after him.
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William Houlder Zachariasen
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
William Houlder Zachariasen , more often known as W. H. Zachariasen, was a Norwegian-American physicist, specializing in X-ray crystallography and famous for his work on the structure of glass. Background Zachariasen was born in Langesund at Bamble in Telemark, Norway. He entered the University of Oslo in 1923, where he studied in the Mineralogical Institute. Zachariasen published his first article in 1925 when he was 19 years old, after having presented the contents of the article to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in the preceding year. Over a span of 55 years he published over 200 scientific papers, many of which he was the sole author.
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Richard C. Tolman
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Richard Chace Tolman was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who made many contributions to statistical mechanics. He also made important contributions to theoretical cosmology in the years soon after Einstein's discovery of general relativity. He was a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology .
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Erwin Schrödinger
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger , sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
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John Hasbrouck Van Vleck
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electronic magnetism in solids.
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Engelbert Broda
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Engelbert Broda was an Austrian chemist and physicist suspected by some to have been a KGB spy code-named Eric, who could have been a main Soviet source of information on British and American nuclear research.
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Banesh Hoffmann
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Banesh Hoffmann was a British mathematician and physicist known for his association with Albert Einstein. Life Banesh Hoffmann was born in Richmond, Surrey, on 6 September 1906. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to earn his doctorate at Princeton University.
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Benjamin W. Lee
1935 - 1977 (42 years)
Benjamin Whisoh Lee , or Ben Lee, was a Koreann- American theoretical physicist. His work in theoretical particle physics exerted great influence on the development of the standard model in the late 20th century, especially on the renormalization of the electro-weak model and gauge theory.
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Victor Conrad
1876 - 1962 (86 years)
Victor Conrad was an Austrian-American physicist, seismologist, and meteorologist. He was the first director of the Austrian seismological service and a reputed academician of international accomplishment. He was politically victimized twice, in 1919 for his ethnicity and in 1934 as a socialist. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, continuing his academic career in New York, California, and Cambridge. Conrad's scientific work is documented in more than 240 papers concerning meteorology, climatology and seismology. In 1944, he published "Methods in Climatology" . Later editions, starting in 1950, listed Leo W.
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Allen Shenstone
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Allen Goodrich Shenstone, was a Canadian physicist. He earned bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cambridge. After a brief stint as a junior faculty member at the University of Toronto, he returned to Princeton, where he was a professor in the Department of Physics 1925–62. He chaired the department 1949–60. He worked primarily in the field of atomic spectroscopy. He was awarded the Military Cross for his service in the Royal Engineers in World War I and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for ...
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Bengt Strömgren
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Bengt Georg Daniel Strömgren was a Danish astronomer and astrophysicist. Life and career Bengt Strömgren was born in Gothenburg. His parents were Hedvig Strömgren and Elis Strömgren, who was professor of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and director of the University Observatory in Copenhagen. Bengt grew up in the professor's mansion surrounded with scientists, assistants, observers and guests. His father paced and promoted Bengt into a life with science, and Bengt's first paper was published already at the age of 14. He graduated from high school in 1925 and enrolled at the Copenhagen university.
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Francis Sears
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Francis Weston Sears was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at MIT for 35 years before moving to Dartmouth College in 1956. At Dartmouth, Sears was the Appleton Professor of Physics. He is best known for co-authoring University Physics, an introductory physics textbook, with Mark Zemansky. The book, first published in 1949, is often referred to as "Sears and Zemansky", although Hugh Young became a coauthor in 1973.
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Samuel Jackson Barnett
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Samuel Jackson Barnett was an American physicist. He was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Barnett was born in Woodson County, Kansas, the son of a minister. In 1894, he received a B.A. in physics from the University of Denver and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1898. From 1898 to 1918 he taught at several universities: Colorado College, Stanford University, Tulane University, and Ohio State University. In 1903 he published his book Elements of Electromagnetic Theory, which he dedicated to his friend Professor Francis H. Smith at the University of Vir...
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Heinz Pagels
1939 - 1988 (49 years)
Heinz Rudolf Pagels was an American physicist, an associate professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He wrote the popular science books The Cosmic Code , Perfect Symmetry , and The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity .
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Jerrold R. Zacharias
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Jerrold Reinach Zacharias was an American physicist and institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an education reformer. His scientific work was in the area of nuclear physics.
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Hans Wolter
1911 - 1978 (67 years)
Hans Wolter was a German physicist who designed an aplanatic system of grazing incidence mirrors that satisfied the Abbe sine condition . Wolter showed such a system could be produced using a combination of a paraboloid with either a hyperboloid or ellipsoid secondary. The three simplest designs are outlined and are known as Wolter telescopes of types I, II and III.
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Shin'ichirō Tomonaga
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Shinichiro Tomonaga, usually cited as Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in English, was a Japanese physicist, influential in the development of quantum electrodynamics, work for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
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J. Allen Hynek
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Josef Allen Hynek was an American astronomer, professor, and ufologist. He is perhaps best remembered for his UFO research. Hynek acted as scientific advisor to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force under three projects: Project Sign , Project Grudge and Project Blue Book .
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Gerald Maurice Clemence
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Gerald Maurice Clemence was an American astronomer. Inspired by the life and work of Simon Newcomb, his career paralleled the huge advances in astronomy brought about by the advent of the electronic computer. Clemence did much to revive the prestige of the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office.
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Earle Hesse Kennard
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Earle Hesse Kennard was a theoretical physicist and professor at Cornell University. Biography Kennard was born in Columbus, Ohio and studied at Pomona College and Oxford University as part of a Rhodes Scholarship. He went on to earn his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1913, where he would continue most of his scientific career. During a 1926 sabbatical spent at the University of Göttingen, he learned the newly developing quantum mechanics of Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan. With this knowledge, he derived the first rigorous form of the uncertainty principle and fully solved several simple quantum mechanics problems for the first time.
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John Stuart Foster
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
John Stuart Foster was a Canadian physicist. Biography Born in Clarence, Nova Scotia, he completed his Ph.D. at Yale University with a dissertation on the first measurements of the Stark effect in Helium. In 1924 he gained an appointment as assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, where he taught physics. He became associate professor in 1930.
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John G. Trump
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
John George Trump was an American electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1973, he was a recipient of the National Medal of Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Trump was noted for developing rotational radiation therapy. Together with Robert J. Van de Graaff, he developed one of the first million-volt X-ray generators.
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Otto Laporte
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Otto Laporte was a German-born American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, electromagnetic wave propagation theory, spectroscopy, and fluid dynamics. His name is lent to the Laporte rule in spectroscopy and to the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society.
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Herbert L. Anderson
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Herbert Lawrence Anderson was an American nuclear physicist who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He contributed to the Manhattan Project. He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University. He participated in the first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity. After the close of World War II, he was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1982. There, he helped Fermi establish the Enrico Fermi Institute and was its director from 1958 to 1962.
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Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner was a British physicist. Biography Skinner was born on 7 October 1900 at 15 Woodville Road, Ealing, the only son of George Herbert, director of the shoe firm Lilley & Skinner, and Mabel Elizabeth . He was taught at home before starting school, age 9, at Durston House, from where he won a mathematical scholarship to Rugby in 1914. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1919 to read natural sciences and mathematics; he graduated in 1922.
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James Rainwater
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Leo James Rainwater was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs. In 1949, he began developing his theory that, contrary to what was then believed, not all atomic nuclei are spherical. His ideas were later tested and confirmed by Aage Bohr's and Ben Mottelson's experiments. He also contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission ...
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Stuart Thomas Butler
1926 - 1982 (56 years)
Stuart Thomas Butler was an Australian nuclear physicist who served as Director of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission from 1977 until 1982, and was noted for his contributions to theoretical physics including stripping reactionss, energy loss of particles in plasma and atmospheric tides induced by absorption of solar radiation in the ozone layer.
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Bernard Lippmann
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Bernard Abram Lippmann. was an American theoretical physicist. A former Professor of Physics at New York University, Lippmann is mainly known for the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, a widely used tool in non-relativistic scattering theory, which he formulated together with his doctoral supervisor Julian Schwinger
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Ralph A. Sawyer
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Ralph Alanson Sawyer was an American physicist and a leader in American science. A New Hampshire native, he graduated from the Atkinson Academy in 1911 and in 1915 from Dartmouth. He then went to the University of Chicago where, under the direction of R. A. Millikan, he finished his PhD in 1919, a time during which he also served as a scientific liaison officer in the United States Navy. At the invitation of Harrison M. Randall, Sawyer then joined the faculty of the physics department at the University of Michigan, an affiliation that he retained for his entire career.
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Joseph Henry Keenan
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.
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Marianus Czerny
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Marianus Czerny was a German experimental physicist who focused on molecular spectroscopy, especially infrared spectroscopy. He was Professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. Early life and education He was the son of the pediatrician Adalbert Czerny, his mother was the daughter of a large landowner in Upper Silesia. He attended high school in Strasbourg and later achieved the rank of lieutenant in the Guards Infantry.
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Harold Masursky
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...
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Robert Brode
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Robert Bigham Brode was an American physicist, who during World War II led the group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the fuses used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Arthur Edward Ruark
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Arthur Edward Ruark was an American physicist and academic known for his role in the development of quantum mechanics. He wrote the book Atoms, Molecules, and Quanta with Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Harold Clayton Urey in 1930, and is the author of numerous scientific papers on quantum physics.
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Gopinath Kartha
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Gopinath Kartha was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.
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Alfred Landé
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Alfred Landé was a German-American physicist known for his contributions to quantum theory. He is responsible for the Landé g-factor and an explanation of the Zeeman effect. Life and achievements Alfred Landé was born on 13 December 1888 in Elberfeld, Rhineland, Germany, today part of the city of Wuppertal.
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Brenna Flaugher
Brenna Lynn Flaugher is an experimental cosmologist who works as a distinguished scientist at Fermilab, where she heads the Astrophysics Department. Flaugher led the development of the Dark Energy Camera at the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile, part of the Dark Energy Survey; she has also been involved in the development of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. By seeking a greater understanding of dark matter, she aims to explain the observed accelerating expansion of the universe.
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John J. Livingood
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
John Jacob Livingood was an American nuclear physicist specialising in the design of particle accelerators. With Glenn Seaborg he discovered and characterized a number of new radioisotopes useful for nuclear medicine, including cobalt-60, iodine-131 and iron-59.
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Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was a Mexican physicist. He was a Physics professor at both MIT and the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . Biography Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico City into a family that descended from Ignacio Vallarta, a prominent liberal leader during the War of Reform. He received his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1921; in 1924, MIT awarded him his Ph.D. He joined MIT's physics faculty in 1923, eventually rising to the rank of full professor. In 1927, Vallarta received a two-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study physics in Germany. The Un...
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Robert Julius Trumpler
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Robert Julius Trumpler was a Swiss-American astronomer. Career After initial schooling, Trumpler entered the Universität Zürich but later transferred to the University of Göttingen where he earned his PhD in 1910. In 1915, during World War I, he emigrated to the United States and joined the University of California. He took a position at Allegheny Observatory, and later went to Lick Observatory. In 1921, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1932.
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George Yuri Rainich
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
George Yuri Rainich was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. Career Rainich studied mathematics from 1904 to 1908 in Odessa, in Göttingen , and in Munich , eventually obtaining his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Kazan. After teaching at the University of Kazan, in 1922 , he emigrated with his wife to the United States. After three years at Johns Hopkins University, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he remained until his retirement in 1956. After his retirement as professor emeritus, he was in 1957 at Brown University as a member...
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