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
Jean-Antoine Nollet
1700 - 1770 (70 years)
Jean-Antoine Nollet was a French clergyman and physicist who did a number of experiments with electricity and discovered osmosis. As a deacon in the Catholic Church, he was also known as Abbé Nollet.
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Jean-Baptiste Biot
1774 - 1862 (88 years)
Jean-Baptiste Biot was a French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who co-discovered the Biot–Savart law of magnetostatics with Félix Savart, established the reality of meteorites, made an early balloon flight, and studied the polarization of light.
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Gan De
400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Gan De , also known as the Lord Gan , was an ancient Chinese astronomer and astrologer born in the State of Qi. Along with Shi Shen, he is believed to be the first in history known by name to compile a star catalogue, preceded by the anonymous authors of the early Babylonian star catalogues and followed by the Greek Hipparchus who is the first known in the Western tradition of Hellenistic astronomy to have compiled a star catalogue. He also made observations of the planets, particularly Jupiter. His writings are lost, but some of his works' titles and fragments quoted from them are known from ...
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Gustav Ludwig Hertz
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Gustav Ludwig Hertz was a German experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner for his work on inelastic electron collisions in gases, and a nephew of Heinrich Hertz. Biography Hertz was born in Hamburg, the son of Auguste and a lawyer, Gustav Theodor Hertz , Heinrich Rudolf Hertz' brother. He attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums before studying at the Georg-August University of Göttingen , the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich , and the Humboldt University of Berlin . He received his doctorate in 1911 under Heinrich Leopold Rubens.
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John Mitchell Nuttall
1890 - 1958 (68 years)
John Mitchell Nuttall was an English physicist, born in Todmorden. He is best remembered for his work with the physicist Hans Geiger, which resulted in the Geiger–Nuttall law of radioactive decay.
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Alfred Wegener
1880 - 1930 (50 years)
Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German climatologist, geologist, geophysicist, meteorologist, and polar researcher. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth . His hypothesis was controversial and widely rejected by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.
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Balfour Stewart
1828 - 1887 (59 years)
Balfour Stewart was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist. His studies in the field of radiant heat led to him receiving the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1868. In 1859 he was appointed director of Kew Observatory. He was elected professor of physics at Owens College, Manchester, and retained that chair until his death, which happened near Drogheda, in Ireland, on 19 December 1887. He was the author of several successful science textbooks, and also of the article on "Terrestrial Magnetism" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
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James Dewar
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
Sir James Dewar was a British chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. He also studied atomic and molecular spectroscopy, working in these fields for more than 25 years.
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Callippus
370 BC - 300 BC (70 years)
Callippus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician. Biography Callippus was born at Cyzicus, and studied under Eudoxus of Cnidus at the Academy of Plato. He also worked with Aristotle at the Lyceum, which means that he was active in Athens prior to Aristotle's death in 322 BC. He observed the movements of the planets and attempted to use Eudoxus' scheme of connected spheres to account for their movements. However, he found that 27 spheres were insufficient to account for the planetary movements, and so he added seven more for a total of 34. According to the description in Aristotle's Metaphys...
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Luigi Puccianti
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Luigi Puccianti was an Italian physicist. Career In 1899–1900, Puccianti constructed a highly sensitive spectrograph, with which he studied the infrared absorption of many compounds and attempted to correlate the spectra with molecular structure. He studied the emission spectra of metals and halogens and proposed measuring the wavelength of X-rays by using a diffraction grating at large angles of incidence.
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Christian Møller
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Christian Møller was a Danish chemist and physicist who made fundamental contributions to the theory of relativity, theory of gravitation and quantum chemistry. He is known for Møller–Plesset perturbation theory and Møller scattering.
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Franz Ernst Neumann
1798 - 1895 (97 years)
Franz Ernst Neumann was a German mineralogist and physicist. Biography Neumann was born in Joachimsthal, Margraviate of Brandenburg, near Berlin. In 1815 he interrupted his studies at Berlin to serve as a volunteer in the Hundred Days against Napoleon, and was wounded in the Battle of Ligny. Subsequently, he entered Berlin University as a student of theology, but soon turned to scientific subjects. His earlier papers were mostly concerned with crystallography, and the reputation they gained him led to his appointment as Privatdozent at the University of Königsberg, where in 1828 he became extraordinary, and in 1829 ordinary, professor of mineralogy and physics.
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Wilhelm Holtz
1836 - 1913 (77 years)
Wilhelm Holtz was a German physicist who was a native of Saatel bei Barth, Mecklenburg. Between 1857 and 1862, he studied physics and natural sciences in Berlin, Dijon and Edinburgh. Afterwards, he performed experiments with electricity in Berlin, and later became associated with research at the universities of Halle and Greifswald, where in 1884 he became a professor of physics.
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Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
1736 - 1806 (70 years)
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French officer, engineer, and physicist. He is best known as the eponymous discoverer of what is now called Coulomb's law, the description of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. He also did important work on friction.
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Aldo Pontremoli
1896 - 1928 (32 years)
Aldo Pontremoli was an Italian physicist who held a chair of theoretical physics at the physics department of the University of Milan from 1926 and who founded and directed the Institute of Advanced Physics at the University of Milan from 1924 until his disappearance and presumed death in May 1928. Pontremoli was one of the six men who disappeared with the airborne envelope of the airship Italia after it had crashed on the Arctic ice on 25 May 1928.
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Johann Franz Encke
1791 - 1865 (74 years)
Johann Franz Encke was a German astronomer. Among his activities, he worked on the calculation of the periods of comets and asteroids, measured the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and made observations of the planet Saturn.
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George William Hill
1838 - 1914 (76 years)
George William Hill was an American astronomer and mathematician. Working independently and largely in isolation from the wider scientific community, he made major contributions to celestial mechanics and to the theory of ordinary differential equations. The importance of his work was explicitly acknowledged by Henri Poincaré in 1905. In 1909 Hill was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal, "on the ground of his researches in mathematical astronomy". Today, he is chiefly remembered for the Hill differential equation.
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Laura Bassi
1711 - 1778 (67 years)
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti was an Italian physicist and academic. Recognized and depicted as "Minerva" , she was the first woman to have a doctorate in science, and the second woman in the world to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Working at the University of Bologna, she was also the first salaried female teacher in a university. At one time the highest paid employee of the university, by the end of her life Bassi held two other professorships. She was also the first female member of any scientific establishment, when she was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute o...
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Bart Bok
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Bartholomeus Jan "Bart" Bok was a Dutch-American astronomer, teacher, and lecturer. He is best known for his work on the structure and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, and for the discovery of Bok globules, which are small, densely dark clouds of interstellar gas and dust that can be seen silhouetted against brighter backgrounds. Bok suggested that these globules may be in the process of contracting, before forming into stars.
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Karl Ludwig Harding
1765 - 1834 (69 years)
Karl Ludwig Harding was a German astronomer, who discovered Juno, the third asteroid of the main-belt in 1804. Life and career Harding was born in Lauenburg. From 1786–89, he was educated at the University of Göttingen, where he studied theology, mathematics, and physics. In 1796 Johann Hieronymus Schröter hired Harding as a tutor for his son. Schröter was an enthusiastic astronomer and owner of a well-equipped observatory in Lilienthal near Bremen, where Harding was soon appointed observer and inspector.
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George B. Pegram
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
George Braxton Pegram was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. He graduated from Trinity College in 1895, and taught high school before becoming a teaching assistant in physics at Columbia University in 1900. He was to spend the rest of his working life at Columbia, taking his doctorate there in 1903 and becoming a full professor in 1918. His administrative career began as early as 1913 when he became the department's executive officer. By 1918, he was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences but he resigned in 1930 to relaunch ...
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Ivan Puluj
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Ivan Puluj was a Ukrainian physicist and inventor, who has been championed as an early developer of the use of X-rays for medical imaging. His contributions were largely neglected until the end of the 20th century.
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Walther Kossel
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Walther Ludwig Julius Kossel was a German physicist known for his theory of the chemical bond , Sommerfeld–Kossel displacement law of atomic spectra, the Kossel-Stranski model for crystal growth, and the Kossel effect. Walther was the son of Albrecht Kossel who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1910.
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Klara Döpel
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Klara Renate Döpel was a feminist and a German lawyer until 1933. Then she married the German nuclear physicist Robert Döpel, and they worked together as a team at Leipzig University studying nuclear reactor configurations for the German nuclear energy project. Klara was killed in an air raid near the end of World War II.
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Pierre Weiss
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Pierre-Ernest Weiss was a French physicist who specialized in magnetism. He developed the domain theory of ferromagnetism in 1907. Weiss domainss and the Weiss magneton are named after him. Weiss also developed the molecular or mean field theory, which is often called Weiss-mean-field theory, that led to the discovery of the Curie–Weiss law. Alongside Auguste Piccard, Pierre Weiss is considered one of the first discoverers of the magnetocaloric effect in 1917.
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Henrietta Swan Leavitt
1868 - 1921 (53 years)
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the understanding of the nature of the universe. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a human computer, tasked with measuring photographic plates to catalog the positions and brightness of stars. This work led her to discover the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables. Leavitt's discovery provided astronomers with the first standard candle with which to measure the distance t...
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Wilhelm Müller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Wilhelm Carl Gottlieb Müller was a German physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. He is best known as the successor of Arnold Sommerfeld as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich.
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Pierre Méchain
1744 - 1804 (60 years)
Pierre François André Méchain was a French astronomer and surveyor who, with Charles Messier, was a major contributor to the early study of deep-sky objects and comets. Life Pierre Méchain was born in Laon, the son of the ceiling designer and plasterer Pierre François Méchain and Marie–Marguerite Roze. He displayed mental gifts in mathematics and physics but had to give up his studies for lack of money. However, his talents in astronomy were noticed by Jérôme Lalande, for whom he became a friend and proof-reader of the second edition of his book "L'Astronomie". Lalande then secured a position...
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Hasan Tahsini
1811 - 1881 (70 years)
Hoxhë Hasan Tahsini or simply Hoxha Tahsim was an Albanian alim, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. He was the first rector of Istanbul University and one of the founders of the Central Committee for Defending Albanian Rights. Tahsini is regarded as one of the most prominent scholars of the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
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Friedrich Bopp
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik and with the Uranverein. He was a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a President of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. He signed the Göttingen Manifesto.
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Nevil Maskelyne
1732 - 1811 (79 years)
Nevil Maskelyne was the fifth British Astronomer Royal. He held the office from 1765 to 1811. He was the first person to scientifically measure the mass of the planet Earth. He created The Nautical Almanac, in full the British Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris for the Meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich using Tobias Mayer's corrections for Euler's Lunar Theory tables.
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Fritz Sauter
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Fritz Eduard Josef Maria Sauter was an Austrian-German physicist who worked mostly in quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics. Education From 1924 to 1928, Sauter studied mathematics and physics at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. He received his doctorate in 1928 under Arthur March, with a thesis on Kirchhoff’s theory of diffraction. After graduation, he did postdoctoral studies with Arnold Sommerfeld and was his assistant at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In January 1931, Sommerfeld recommended Sauter to Max Born, director of the Institute of Theoretical Phy...
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Ulugh Beg
1394 - 1449 (55 years)
Mīrzā Muhammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrukh , better known as Ulugh Beg , was a Timurid sultan, as well as an astronomer and mathematician. Ulugh Beg was notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry, as well as his general interests in the arts and intellectual activities. It is thought that he spoke five languages: Arabic, Persian, Chaghatai Turkic, Mongolian, and a small amount of Chinese. During his rule the Timurid Empire achieved the cultural peak of the Timurid Renaissance through his attention and patronage. Samarkand was captured and give...
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Jacobus Kapteyn
1851 - 1922 (71 years)
Prof Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn FRS FRSE LLD was a Dutch astronomer. He carried out extensive studies of the Milky Way and was the discoverer of evidence for galactic rotation. Kapteyn was also among the first to suggest the existence of dark matter using stellar velocities as early as 1922.
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Charles Drummond Ellis
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Sir Charles Drummond Ellis was an English physicist and scientific administrator. His work on the magnetic spectrum of the beta-rays helped to develop a better understanding of nuclear structure.
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Dayton Miller
1866 - 1941 (75 years)
Dayton Clarence Miller was an American physicist, astronomer, acoustician, and accomplished amateur flautist. An early experimenter of X-rays, Miller was an advocate of aether theory and absolute space and an opponent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
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Carl Ramsauer
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Carl Wilhelm Ramsauer was a German professor of physics and research physicist, famous for the discovery of the Ramsauer–Townsend effect. He pioneered the field of electron and proton collisions with gas molecules.
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Johann Tobias Mayer
1752 - 1830 (78 years)
Johann Tobias Mayer was a German physicist. Personal and professional life Mayer, born in Göttingen, was the first child of the astronomer Tobias Mayer and his wife Maria. The elder Mayer, a well-known Göttingen professor of geography, physics, and astronomy, died in 1762, when Johann was only ten.
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Robert H. Goddard
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Robert Hutchings Goddard was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Goddard successfully launched his rocket on March 16, 1926, which ushered in an era of space flight and innovation. He and his team launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941, achieving altitudes as high as and speeds as fast as 885 km/h .
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Claude-Louis Navier
1785 - 1836 (51 years)
Claude-Louis Navier was a French mechanical engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. The Navier–Stokes equations refer eponymously to him, with George Gabriel Stokes.
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Charles Greeley Abbot
1872 - 1973 (101 years)
Charles Greeley Abbot was an American astrophysicist and the fifth secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, serving from 1928 until 1944. Abbot went from being director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to becoming Assistant Secretary, and then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution over the course of his career. As an astrophysicist, he researched the solar constant, research that led him to invent the solar cooker, solar boiler, solar still, and other patented solar energy inventions.
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Kurt Symanzik
1923 - 1983 (60 years)
Kurt Symanzik was a German physicist working in quantum field theory. Life Symanzik was born in Lyck , East Prussia, and spent his childhood in Königsberg. He started studying physics in 1946 at Universität München but after a short time moved to Werner Heisenberg at Göttingen. There also the fruitful collaboration with Wolfhart Zimmermann and Harry Lehmann started. In 1954 he earned his PhD for his thesis The Schwinger functional in quantum field theory.
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Ernst Öpik
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Ernst Julius Öpik was an Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist who spent the second half of his career at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. Education Öpik was born in Kunda, Kreis Wierland, Governorate of Estonia then a part of the Russian Empire. He went to the University of Moscow to specialize in the study of minor bodies, such as asteroids, comets, and meteors. He completed his doctorate at the University of Tartu.
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Cornelius Lanczos
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Cornelius Lanczos was a Hungarian-Jewish, Hungarian-American and later Hungarian-Irish mathematician and physicist. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians. Biography He was born in Fehérvár , Fejér County, Kingdom of Hungary to Jewish parents, Károly Lőwy and Adél Hahn. Lanczos' Ph.D. thesis was on relativity theory. He sent his thesis copy to Albert Einstein, and Einstein wrote back, saying: "I studied your paper as far as my present overload allowed. I believe I may say this much: this does involve competent and original brainwork, on the basis of which a doctorate should be obtainable ...
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Julius Edgar Lilienfeld
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld was an Austro-Hungarian-American physicist and electrical engineer, who has been credited with the first patent on the field-effect transistor . He was never able to build a working practical semiconducting device based on this concept, additionally, because of his failure to publish articles in learned journals and since high-purity semiconductor materials were not available to him, his FET patent never achieved fame, causing confusion for later inventors.
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Gleb Wataghin
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Gleb Vassielievich Wataghin was a Ukrainian-Italian theoretical and experimental physicist and a great scientific leader who gave a great impulse to the teaching and research on physics in two continents: in the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and in the University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
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Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke
1835 - 1897 (62 years)
Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke was a German astronomer. Winnecke worked at Pulkovo Observatory near Saint Petersburg from 1858 to 1865, but returned to Germany and served as professor of astronomy in Strasbourg from 1872 to 1881.
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Michael Maestlin
1550 - 1631 (81 years)
Michael Maestlin was a German astronomer and mathematician, known for being the mentor of Johannes Kepler. He was a student of Philipp Apian and was known as the teacher who most influenced Kepler. Maestlin was considered to be one of the most significant astronomers between the time of Copernicus and Kepler.
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Heinrich Friedrich Weber
1843 - 1912 (69 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Weber was a physicist born in the town of Magdala, near Weimar. Biography Around 1861 he entered the University of Jena, where Ernst Abbe became the first of two physicists who decisively influenced his career . Weber soon discovered, however, that he lacked sufficient mathematical talent, and so he abandoned mathematics entirely .
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Charles Wheatstone
1802 - 1875 (73 years)
Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS FRSE , was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope , and the Playfair cipher . However, Wheatstone is best known for his contributions in the development of the Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Hunter Christie, which is used to measure an unknown electrical resistance, and as a major figure in the development of telegraphy.
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