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,
#11351
Frederick Thomas Trouton
1863 - 1922 (59 years)
Frederick Thomas Trouton FRS was an Irish physicist known for Trouton's rule and experiments to detect the Earth's motion through the luminiferous aether. Life and work Trouton was born in Dublin on 24 November 1863, the youngest son of the wealthy and prominent Thomas Trouton. He attended Royal School Dungannon and went on to Trinity College, Dublin in 1884, where he studied engineering and physical science. While still an undergraduate student, Trouton observed a relationship between boiling points and energies of vaporisationss, which he presented in two short papers. He found the change o...
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Joseph Plateau
1801 - 1883 (82 years)
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope.
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Shin Hirayama
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Shin Hirayama, also read as Makoto Hirayama, was the first Japanese astronomer to discover an asteroid. In 1900 he discovered 498 Tokio and 727 Nipponia. The crater Hirayama on the Moon is jointly named after him and Kiyotsugu Hirayama.
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Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt
1728 - 1810 (82 years)
Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt was a Polish–Lithuanian Jesuit, astronomer and mathematician. He was professor of Vilnius University for over 50 years, serving as its rector from 1780 to 1799. The crater Poczobutt on the Moon is named after him.
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Cleomedes
1 - 1 (0 years)
Cleomedes was a Greek astronomer who is known chiefly for his book On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies , also known as The Heavens . Placing his work chronologically His birth and death dates are not known—historians have suggested that he wrote his work sometime between the mid-1st century BC and 400 AD. The earlier estimates rely on the fact that Cleomedes refers extensively in his writing to the work of mathematician and astronomer Posidonius of Rhodes , and yet seemingly not at all to the work of Ptolemy .
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Wilhelm Julius Foerster
1832 - 1921 (89 years)
Wilhelm Julius Foerster was a German astronomer. His name can also be written Förster, but is usually written "Foerster" even in most German sources where 'ö' is otherwise used in the text. Biography A native of Grünberg, Silesia, he studied at the University of Berlin and Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and worked as Johann Franz Encke's assistant. In 1860, he co-discovered asteroid 62 Erato with Oskar Lesser, the first co-discovery on record. He became professor of astronomy at the University of Berlin in 1863. After Encke's death in 1865, he became director of the Berlin Observatory and served in this position until 1904.
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Giorgio Abetti
1882 - 1982 (100 years)
Prof Giorgio Abetti HFRSE was an Italian solar astronomer. Life He was born in Padua, the son of noted astronomer Antonio Abetti. He was educated at the Universities of Padua and of Rome. He began his career at the Collegio Romano observatory in Rome as an assistant astronomer.
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André Lallemand
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
André Lallemand was a French astronomer and director of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. Lallemand made important contributions to the development of photomultipliers for astronomical use and the "electronic telescope" . He was awarded the Lalande Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1938 and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1962 for his work.
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William Mitchinson Hicks
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Mitchinson Hicks, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1873, and became a fellow at the college. Hicks spent most of his career at Sheffield, contributing to the development of the university there. He was principal of Firth College from 1892 to 1897. In 1897, Firth College merged with two other colleges to form the University College of Sheffield, and Hicks was its first principal until 1905, when the college received its own royal charter and became the University of Sheffield. Hicks was the first vice chancellor of...
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William Francis Magie
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
William Francis Magie was an American physicist, a founder of the American Physical Society and the first professor of physics at Princeton University, where he had graduated and where he served for two decades as dean of the faculty. His papers on the contact angle of liquids and solids and on the specific heat of solutions were notable, as was his text Principles of Physics.
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Tobias Mayer
1723 - 1762 (39 years)
Tobias Mayer was a German astronomer famous for his studies of the Moon. He was born at Marbach, in Württemberg, and brought up at Esslingen in poor circumstances. A self-taught mathematician, he earned a living by teaching mathematics while still a youth. He had already published two original geometrical works when, in 1746, he entered J. B. Homann's cartographic establishment at Nuremberg. Here he introduced many improvements in mapmaking, and gained a scientific reputation which led to his election to the chair of economy and mathematics at the University of Göttingen. In 1754 he became s...
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Franz Brünnow
1821 - 1891 (70 years)
Franz Friedrich Ernst Brünnow was a German astronomer. He was the first foreigner to become director of an American observatory, serving as director of Detroit Observatory from 1854 to 1863. He played a major role in establishing the study of astronomy in the United States at a time when the only other serious faculty was run by Benjamin Peirce at Harvard University. He introduced the teaching of rigorous German analytical methods and trained a number of students who went on to further American astronomy, including Asaph Hall and James Craig Watson . In addition, Charles Augustus Young lea...
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Jerzy Pniewski
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Jerzy Pniewski was a Polish physicist. Pniewski was born in Płock. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Warsaw. In 1952, he co-discovered the hypernucleus with Marian Danysz. In 1962, he discovered hypernuclear isomery.
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Emil Cohn
1854 - 1944 (90 years)
Emil Georg Cohn , was a German physicist. Life Cohn was born in Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg on 28 September 1854. He was the son of August Cohn, a lawyer, and Charlotte Cohn. At the age of 17, Cohn began to study jurisprudence at the University of Leipzig. However, at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg and the University of Strasbourg he began to study physics. In Strasbourg, he graduated in 1879. From 1881 to 1884, he was an assistant of August Kundt at the physical institute. In 1884 he habilitated in theoretical physics and was admitted as a private lecturer. From 1884 to 1918, he was ...
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Hermann Arthur Jahn
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Hermann Arthur Jahn was a British scientist of German descent. With Edward Teller, he identified the Jahn–Teller effect. Early life He was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Jahn and Marion May Curtiss. He attended City School in Lincoln.
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Moritz von Jacobi
1801 - 1874 (73 years)
Moritz Hermann or Boris Semyonovich Jacobi was a Prussian and Russian Imperial engineer and physicist of Jewish descent. Jacobi worked mainly in the Russian Empire. He furthered progress in galvanoplasticss, electric motors, and wire telegraphy.
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Bertil Lindblad
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Bertil Lindblad was a Swedish astronomer. After finishing his secondary education at Örebro högre allmänna läroverk, Lindblad matriculated at Uppsala University in 1914. He received his filosofie magister degree in 1917, his filosofie licentiat degree in 1918 and completed his doctorate and became a docent at the university in 1920. From 1927 he was professor and astronomer of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and head of the Stockholm Observatory. In the latter capacity he was responsible for the observatory's move from the old building in the centre of Stockholm to a newly built facilit...
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Ernst Brüche
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Ernst Carl Reinhold Brüche was a German physicist. From 1944 to 1972, he was the editor of the Physikalische Blätter, a publication of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. Education Brüche studied physics at the Danzig Technische Hochschule from 1919 to 1924. From 1920, he was a teaching assistant in the physics department. In 1926 he completed his doctorate under Carl Ramsauer at the Danzig Technische Hochschule. He completed his Habilitation in 1927.
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Gunnar Malmquist
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Karl Gunnar Malmquist was a Swedish astronomer. Biography Gunnar Malmquist was born in Ystad, where he completed his secondary school education before matriculating at the Lund University in 1911. He received his Ph.D. in 1921, was an amanuensis at the Lund Observatory 1915-1920 and a docent from 1920. He continued to work at the observatory in Lund until 1929, was observator at the Stockholm Observatory and taught at the Stockholm University College 1930-1939, and was Professor of Astronomy at the Uppsala University from 1939 until his retirement in 1959.
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Zvonimir Richtmann
1901 - 1941 (40 years)
Zvonimir Richtmann was a Croatian-Jewish physicist, philosopher, politician and publicist who was killed during World War II by Ustaše. Biography Richtmann was born on 22 November 1901 in Zagreb, where he achieved his education. He studied at the Vienna University of Technology from where he graduated in 1925, and at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb which he finished and graduated from in 1932. After graduation, Richtmann taught as a professor at the engineering high school in Zagreb. Richtmann held many public lectures and has published articles about physics.
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Vojislav Mišković
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Vojislav Mišković was a Yugoslac astronomer, head of the Belgrade Observatory in 1926–1950 and 1951–1954.
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Ludwig Hopf
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Ludwig Hopf was a German-Jewish theoretical physicist who made contributions to mathematics, special relativity, hydrodynamics, and aerodynamics. Early in his career he was the assistant to and a collaborator and co-author with Albert Einstein.
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Mikhail Leontovich
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Leontovich was a Soviet physicist, member of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, specializing in plasma and radiophysics. He was awarded:Three Orders of LeninFive Orders of the Red Banner of LabourLenin Prize
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H. G. van de Sande Bakhuyzen
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Hendricus Gerardus van de Sande Bakhuyzen was a Dutch astronomer. His surname, van de Sande Bakhuyzen, is sometimes erroneously given as Backhuyzen or Bakhuysen. His first name is sometimes given as Hendrik Gerard.
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Atanasije Stojković
1775 - 1832 (57 years)
Atanasije Stojković was a Serbian, Austrian and Russian writer, pedagogue, scholar, physicist, mathematician and astronomer. He is considered the founder of Russian meteoritics. Stojković was the president of the Imperial University of Kharkov from 1807 to 1809 and from 1811 to 1813.
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William L. McMillan
1936 - 1984 (48 years)
William L. McMillan was an American physicist noted for his research of condensed matter physics. McMillan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, professor of physics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences McMillan received the 1978 Fritz London Memorial Prize for his work in superconductors. The National Academies Press called him "the ablest condensed matter physicist of his generation". The University of Illinois established an award in his name: The William L. McMillan Award.
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Enrique Gaviola
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Ramón Enrique Gaviola was an Argentinian astrophysicist. Student of Richard Gans at the Universidad de La Plata went in 1922 to Germany where he continued his studies in physics. He studied with Max Planck, Max Born and Albert Einstein, graduating from the University of Berlin in 1926.
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Ormond Stone
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Ormond Stone , was an American astronomer, mathematician and educator. He was the director of Cincinnati Observatory and subsequently the first director of the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, where he trained a significant number of scientists. He served as the editor of the Annals of Mathematics and towards the end of his life made donations which led to the founding of the Fairfax Public Library System.
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David Fabricius
1564 - 1617 (53 years)
David Fabricius was a German pastor who made two major discoveries in the early days of telescopic astronomy, jointly with his eldest son, Johannes Fabricius . David Fabricius was born at Esens, studied at the University of Helmstedt starting in 1583 and served as pastor for small towns near his birthplace in Frisia , at Resterhafe near Dornum in 1584 and at Osteel in 1603. As was common for Protestant ministers of the day, he dabbled in science: his particular interest was astronomy. Fabricius corresponded with astronomer Johannes Kepler.
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Sameera Moussa
1917 - 1952 (35 years)
Sameera Moussa or Samira Musa Aly was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner "Atoms for Peace." She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.
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Daniel Hay Guest
#11382
Benjamin Markarian
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Benjamin "Benik" Egishevitch Markarian was an Armenian astrophysicist. Markarian's Chain is a group of galaxies which was named after him when he discovered that its members move with a common motion. He is also the namesake of a catalog of compact, optically bright galaxies known as Markarian galaxies.
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David Gill
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Sir David Gill was a Scottish astronomer who is known for measuring astronomical distances, for astrophotography and geodesy. He spent much of his career in South Africa. Life and work David Gill was born at 48 Skene Terrace in Aberdeen the son of David Gill, watchmaker and his wife Margaret Mitchell. He was educated first at Bellevue Academy in Aberdeen then at Dollar Academy. He spent two years at Aberdeen University, where he was taught by James Clerk Maxwell, and then joined his father's clock-making business. His most important influence at university was probably from Prof David Thomson.
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Bruno Finzi
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Bruno Finzi was an Italian mathematician, engineer and physicist. Biography Born at Gardone Val Trompia, Finzi received in 1920 his Laurea as an engineer and in 1921 as a mathematician at the University of Pavia. In 1922 he became an assistant of Umberto Cisotti at the Polytecnico di Milano. In 1931 he became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Milan, but returned in 1947 to the Polytecnico di Milano as the successor to Cisotti and became there director of the Mathematical Institute. From 1949 he was the head of the newly founded Institute of Aeronautics and in 1967 he bec...
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Charles-Eugène Delaunay
1816 - 1872 (56 years)
Charles-Eugène Delaunay was a French astronomer and mathematician. His lunar motion studies were important in advancing both the theory of planetary motion and mathematics. Life Born in Lusigny-sur-Barse, France, to Jacques‐Hubert Delaunay and Catherine Choiselat, Delaunay studied under Jean-Baptiste Biot at the Sorbonne. He worked on the mechanics of the Moon as a special case of the three-body problem. He published two volumes on the topic, each of 900 pages in length, in 1860 and 1867. The work hints at chaos in the system, and clearly demonstrates the problem of so-called "small denominators" in perturbation theory.
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Peter Herbert Jensen
1913 - 1955 (42 years)
Peter Herbert Jensen was a German experimental nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranverein. After the war, he was a department director in the high-voltage section of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, and a supernumerary professor at the University of Mainz.
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Tom W. Bonner
1910 - 1961 (51 years)
Tom Wilkerson Bonner was an American experimental physicist who developed important instruments and techniques for neutron physics and nuclear physics . Biography Bonner earned his bachelor's degree in physics from SMU in 1931 and his PhD from Rice University in 1934. In 1934–1936, he was a National Research Council fellow at Caltech. At Rice University, he became an instructor in 1936, a professor in 1945, and chair of the physics department in 1947. In the academic year 1938–1939, he was a Guggenheim fellow. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he did radar research at the MIT Radiation Lab.
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Thomas Cowling
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Thomas George Cowling FRS was an English astronomer. Early life and education Cowling was born in Hackney, London, the second of four sons of George Cowling and Edith Eliza Cowling . He was educated at Sir George Monoux Grammar School in Walthamstow and read mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results.
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Fernando Sanford
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Fernando Sanford was an American physicist and university professor. He was one of the 22 "pioneer professors" for Stanford University. Sanford was born on a farm near Franklin Grove in Lee County, Illinois, on February 12, 1854. He was the son of Faxton and Maria Mariah Sanford. He attended Carthage College, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1879. He taught school until the mid-1880s, then studied physics in Germany under Hermann von Helmholtz for two years.
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Clement D. Child
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Clement D. Child was an American physicist and educator. He is noted particularly for "Child's law" , which is an equation that describes the electric current that flows between the plates of a vacuum tube. Vacuum tubes were the main components in electronics from about 1905 to 1960, when transistors and integrated circuits mostly supplanted them. Child's Law is still a staple of textbooks treating charged particle motion in vacuum and in solids.
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Lionel Wilberforce
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Lionel Robert Wilberforce was a British physicist. He is best known for the invention of the Wilberforce pendulum, which exhibits a curious motion in which periods of purely rotational oscillation gradually alternate with periods of purely up and down oscillation.
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Zoltán Lajos Bay
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Zoltán Lajos Bay was a Hungarian physicist, professor, and engineer who developed technologies, including tungsten lamps and microwave devices. He was the leader of the second group to observe radar echoes from the Moon . From 1930, he worked at the University of Szeged as a professor of theoretical physics.
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James Dunlop
1793 - 1848 (55 years)
James Dunlop FRSE was a Scottish astronomer, noted for his work in Australia. He was employed by Sir Thomas Brisbane to work as astronomer's assistant at his private observatory, once located at Paramatta , New South Wales, about west of Sydney during the 1820s and 1830s. Dunlop was mostly a visual observer, doing stellar astrometry work for Brisbane, and after its completion, then independently discovered and catalogued many new telescopic southern double stars and deep-sky objects. He later became the Superintendent of Paramatta Observatory when it was finally sold to the New South Wales ...
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Johannes Bosscha
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Johannes Bosscha Jr. was a Dutch physicist. Bosscha came from a family long known for their academic achievements. His great-grandfather and grandfather were classical scholars. His father, Johannes Bosscha Sr. , was a professor of history and literature and also was minister of church-state relationships in two governments . From 1844–1848 Johannes Jr. attended a Latin school in Amsterdam, after which he enrolled at Leiden University. In 1854 he obtained his doctoral degree with a thesis on galvanometry. After a brief sojourn in Berlin he returned to the physics department in Leiden.
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Edward Leamington Nichols
1854 - 1937 (83 years)
Edward Leamington Nichols was an American scientist. He was a physicist and astronomer, professor of physics at Cornell University. Biography He was born of American parentage at Leamington, England, and received his education at Cornell University, graduating in 1875. After Studying at Leipzig, Berlin, and Göttingen he was appointed fellow in physics at Johns Hopkins. He then spent some time in the Thomas Edison laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and subsequently became professor of physics and chemistry in the Central University of Kentucky , professor of physics and astronomy at the Un...
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James Ferguson
1710 - 1776 (66 years)
James Ferguson was a Scottish astronomer. He is known as the inventor and improver of astronomical and other scientific apparatus, as a striking instance of self education and as an itinerant lecturer.
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Cargill Gilston Knott
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Cargill Gilston Knott FRS, FRSE LLD was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was a pioneer in seismological research. He spent his early career in Japan. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and President of the Scottish Meteorological Society.
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Marc-Auguste Pictet
1752 - 1825 (73 years)
Marc-Auguste Pictet was a Swiss scientific journalist and experimental natural philosopher. Pictet's main contribution to learning was his editing of the scientific section of the Bibliothèque Britannique , a publication devoted to the diffusion on the Continent of knowledge and arts produced in Great Britain. His own scientific research focused on the fields of physical science, especially calorimetry, but also astronomy, geology, meteorology and technology, especially chronometry and the manufacture of fine earthenware.
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Christopher Clavius
1538 - 1612 (74 years)
Christopher Clavius, SJ was a Jesuit German mathematician, head of mathematicians at the , and astronomer who was a member of the Vatican commission that accepted the proposed calendar invented by Aloysius Lilius, that is known as the Gregorian calendar. Clavius would later write defences and an explanation of the reformed calendar, including an emphatic acknowledgement of Lilius' work. In his last years he was probably the most respected astronomer in Europe and his textbooks were used for astronomical education for over fifty years in and even out of Europe.
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Evan James Williams
1903 - 1945 (42 years)
Evan James Williams FRS was a Welsh experimental physicist who worked in a number of fields with some of the most notable physicists of his day, including Patrick Blackett, Lawrence Bragg, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr.
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