The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#11351
Wilhelm Anderson
1880 - 1940 (60 years)
Wilhelm Robert Karl Anderson was a Russian-Estonian astrophysicist of Baltic German descent who studied the physical structure of the stars. Life Wilhelm Anderson was born in Minsk into a Baltic German family. His younger brothers were the well known mathematician Oskar Anderson and the folklorist Walter Anderson . Anderson spent some of his youth in Kazan, where his father Nikolai Anderson was a university professor for Finno-Ugric languages.
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Henry DeWolf Smyth
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Henry DeWolf "Harry" Smyth was an American physicist, diplomat, and bureaucrat. He played a number of key roles in the early development of nuclear energy, as a participant in the Manhattan Project, a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission , and U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency .
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Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of 395 minor planets. Scientific career From 1912 to 1957, Reinmuth was working as an astronomer at the Heidelberg Observatory an astronomical observatory on the Königstuhl hill above Heidelberg in southern Germany. He was a member at the minor planet studies group at Astronomisches Rechen-Institut between 1947 and 1950, and later became "Oberobservator" or chief-observer at Heidelberg Observatory until his retirement in 1957. Reinmuth obtained more than 12,500 precise astrometric measurements of minor planets' positions...
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Clabon Allen
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Clabon Walter Allen FRAS, was an Australian astronomer, director of the University of London Observatory and author of Astrophysical Quantities. Allen was born at Subiaco, Perth the third child of James Bernard Allen , a South Australian-born lecturer in physics at Perth Technical School, and his wife Alice Hooper, née Aitken, a New Zealand-born trained nurse. Cla was educated at the High School, Perth, Western Australia and the University of Western Australia . Allen was appointed to a research fellowship at the newly established Commonwealth Solar Observatory in 1926 at Mount Stromlo, Aus...
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Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Kozyrev was a Soviet Russian astronomer and astrophysicist. Biography He was born in St. Petersburg, and by 1928 he had graduated from the Leningrad State University. In 1931 he began working at the Pulkovo Observatory, located to the south of Leningrad. He was considered to be one of the most promising astrophysicists in Russia. Kozyrev was a victim of the Stalinist purges of the Pulkovo Observatory. Started by the accusations of a disgruntled graduate student, most of the observatory staff died as a result. Kozyrev was arrested in November 1936 and sentenced to 10 years for counterrevolutionary activity.
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Georg Matthias Bose
1710 - 1761 (51 years)
Georg Matthias Bose , also known as Mathias Bose, was an electrical experimenter in the early days of the development of electrostatics. He is credited with being the first to develop a way of temporarily storing static charges by using an insulated conductor . His demonstrations and experiments raised the interests of the German scientific community and the public in the development of electrical research.
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Aleksander Jabłoński
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Aleksander Jabłoński was a Polish physicist and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research was in molecular spectroscopy and photophysics. Life and career He was born on 26 February 1898 in Woskresenówka near Kharkiv in Imperial Russia. He attended Gymnasium high school in Kharkiv as well as a music school where he learned to play the violin under supervision of Konstanty Gorski. In 1916, he started to study physics at the University of Kharkiv.
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Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille
1713 - 1762 (49 years)
Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille , formerly sometimes spelled de la Caille, was a French astronomer and geodesist who named 14 out of the 88 constellations. From 1750 to 1754, he studied the sky at the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa. Lacaille observed over 10,000 stars using just a half-inch refracting telescope.
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Henri Abraham
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Henri Abraham was a French physicist who made important contributions to the science of radio waves. He performed some of the first measurements of the propagation velocity of radio waves, helped develop France's first triode vacuum tube, and with Eugene Bloch invented the astable multivibrator. He was murdered at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
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Rudolf Tomaschek
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Rudolf Karl Anton Tomaschek was a German experimental physicist. His scientific efforts included work on phosphorescence, fluorescence, and gravitation. Tomaschek was a supporter of deutsche Physik, which resulted in his suspension from his university posts after World War II. From 1948 to 1954, he worked in England for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company . In 1954, when AIOC became BP, he went to Germany and was president of the Permanent Tidal Commission.
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Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim
1801 - 1869 (68 years)
Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim was a German physicist, geographer, and crystallographer. Life and education Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim was born in 1801 in Brunswick. His family was Jewish. He attended the Gymnasium there and in Wolfenbüttel. Afterwards he went to Berlin to attend the Alma Mater Berolinensis to study physics. In 1823 he completed a dissertation titled Dissertatio de Theoria Gasorum et Vaporum Meditationes . Inspired by the research of his teacher Christian Samuel Weiss , he became interested in crystallography. In 1827 he moved to the University of Breslau, where he was assistant professor of physics, geography, and mathematics from 1827 to 1850.
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Annibale de Gasparis
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Annibale de Gasparis was an Italian astronomer, known for discovering asteroids and his contributions to theoretical astronomy. Biography De Gasparis was born in 1819 in Bugnara to Angelo de Gasparis and Eleonora Angelantoni originally from Tocco da Casauria. Son of a doctor, he studied in the seminars of Sulmona and Chieti, becoming passionate of classic novels and learning mathematics as a self-taught person. In 1838 he arrived in Naples to study engineering at the School of Bridges and Roads, today's Engineering faculty of Naples University, and the following year he was accepted as a student at the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte by the director Ernesto Capocci.
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David M. Dennison
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
David Mathias Dennison was an American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the physics of molecular structure. Education In 1917, Dennison entered Swarthmore College, where he graduated in 1921. He then went to the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, for graduate studies in physics with Walter F. Colby and Oskar Klein. Klein, already associated with the Kaluza–Klein theory , joined the faculty at Michigan in 1922, after a six-year stay at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, under Niels Bohr, at the University of Copenhagen. It was through Klein that D...
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Hans Benndorf
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Hans Benndorf was an Austrian physicist. He made several contributions in the field of seismology and in his research of atmospheric electricity. Life and career Benndorf was born on 13 December 1870 in Zürich. He was the son of archaeologist Otto Benndorf and the grandson of physiologist Rudolf Wagner .
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Wilhelm Schickard
1592 - 1635 (43 years)
Wilhelm Schickard was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in 1623 and 1624.
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Frans Michel Penning
1894 - 1953 (59 years)
Frans Michel Penning was a Dutch experimental physicist. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1923, and studied low pressure gas discharges at the Philips Laboratory in Eindhoven, developing new electron tubes during World War II. Many detailed observations of gas ionization were done with colleagues, finding notable results for helium and magnetic fields. He made precise measurements of Townsend discharge coefficients and cathode voltage fall. Penning made important contributions to the advancement of high resolution mass spectrometry.
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Thorvald N. Thiele
1838 - 1910 (72 years)
Thorvald Nicolai Thiele was a Danish astronomer and director of the Copenhagen Observatory. He was also an actuary and mathematician, most notable for his work in statistics, interpolation and the three-body problem.
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F. J. M. Stratton
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick John Marrian Stratton PRAS was a British astrophysicist, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1928 to 1947 and a decorated British Army officer.
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Walter Guyton Cady
1874 - 1974 (100 years)
Walter Guyton Cady was a noted American physicist and electrical engineer. He was a pioneer in piezoelectricity, and in 1921 developed the first quartz crystal oscillator. Cady was born in Providence, Rhode Island, graduated from Brown University in 1895, and studied 1897-1900 at the University of Berlin, receiving his Ph.D. in Physics in 1900. He was a magnetic observer from 1900 to 1902 with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and from 1902 to 1946 he was a professor of physics at Wesleyan University, where his principal interests included electrical discharges in gases, piezoelec...
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Meton of Athens
500 BC - 460 BC (40 years)
Meton of Athens was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, geometer, and engineer who lived in Athens in the 5th century BC. He is best known for calculations involving the eponymous 19-year Metonic cycle, which he introduced in 432 BC into the lunisolar Attic calendar. Euphronios says that Colonus was Meton's deme.
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John Henry Manley
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
John Henry Manley was an American physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a group leader during the Manhattan Project. Biography He was born in 1907 in Harvard, Illinois. He graduated with a BS from the University of Illinois in 1929 and received his PhD in physics from the University of Michigan in 1934. He was a lecturer at Columbia University and later a professor at the University of Illinois from 1937 to 1942. He married Kathleen , and had two daughters Kim and Kathleen.
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John Keill
1671 - 1721 (50 years)
John Keill FRS was a Scottish mathematician, natural philosopher, and cryptographer who was an important defender of Isaac Newton. Biography Keill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 December 1671. His father was Robert Keill, an Edinburgh lawyer. His mother was Sarah Cockburn. His brother, James Keill, became a noted physician.
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David Gregory
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
David Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, and later Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, and a proponent of Isaac Newton's Principia.
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Albert Potter Wills
1873 - 1937 (64 years)
Albert Potter Wills was an American physicist who researched magnetic materials and was the PhD advisor of the Nobel Prize winner Isidor Isaac Rabi. During his career he investigated magnetic susceptibilities, magnetic shielding, magnetostriction, conduction of electricity through mercury vapor, and hydrodynamics. He also wrote a textbook on vector analysis.
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Joseph Petzval
1807 - 1891 (84 years)
Joseph Petzval was a mathematician, inventor, and physicist best known for his work in optics. He was born in the town of Szepesbéla in the Kingdom of Hungary . Petzval studied and later lectured at the Institutum Geometricum in Buda . He headed the Institute of Practical Geometry and Hydrology/Architecture between 1841 and 1848. Later in life, he accepted an appointment to a chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna. Petzval became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1873.
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Thomas Andrews
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
Thomas Andrews FRS FRSE was an Irish chemist and physicist who did important work on phase transitions between gases and liquids. He was a longtime professor of chemistry at Queen's University of Belfast.
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Félix Tisserand
1845 - 1896 (51 years)
François Félix Tisserand was a French astronomer. Life Tisserand was born at Nuits-Saint-Georges, Côte-d'Or. In 1863 he entered the École Normale Supérieure, and on leaving he went for a month as professor at the lycée at Metz. Urbain Le Verrier offered him a post in the Paris Observatory, which he entered as astronome adjoint in September 1866. In 1868 he took his doctor's degree with a thesis on Delaunay's Method, which he showed to be of much wider scope than had been contemplated by its inventor. Shortly afterwards he went out to Kra Isthmus with Édouard Stephan and Georges Rayet to observe the 1868 solar eclipse.
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Felix Auerbach
1856 - 1933 (77 years)
Felix Auerbach was a German physicist. Life Auerbach was born in Breslau on 12 November 1856. His father, Leopold Auerbach, was a respected physician and professor of medicine at the University of Breslau. His mother was Arabella Auerbach, née Hess. From her, he acquired the talent and love for music that accompanied him throughout his life. Felix was the eldest of six siblings. The chemist, Friedrich Auerbach , and Wroclaw pianist, Max Auerbach were his younger brothers.
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William D. Coolidge
1873 - 1975 (102 years)
William David Coolidge was an American physicist and engineer, who made major contributions to X-ray machines. He was the director of the General Electric Research Laboratory and a vice-president of the corporation. He was also famous for the development of "ductile tungsten", which is important for the incandescent light bulb.
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Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt
1807 - 1851 (44 years)
Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt was a German astronomer, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent who was a professor of astronomy at the University of Göttingen. He is also known as Benjamin Goldschmidt, C. W. B. Goldschmidt, Carl Goldschmidt, and Karl Goldschmidt.
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Frank Schlesinger
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
Frank Schlesinger was an American astronomer. His work concentrated on using photographic plates rather than direct visual studies for astronomical research. Biography Schlesinger was born in New York City and attended public schools there. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1890. He then worked as a surveyor, becoming a special student in astronomy at Columbia in 1894. In 1896, he received a fellowship which enabled him to study full-time, and he received a PhD in 1898. After his graduation, he spent the summer at Yerkes Observatory as a volunteer assisting director George Ellery Hale.
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Ștefania Mărăcineanu
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Ștefania Mărăcineanu was a Romanian physicist. She worked with Marie Curie studying the element named for Curie's homeland Polonium. She made proposals that would lead to Irène Joliot-Curie's Nobel Prize. Mărăcineanu believed that Joliot-Curie had taken her work on Induced radioactivity to gain the prize.
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Arthur Robert Hinks
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Arthur Robert Hinks, CBE, FRS was a British astronomer and geographer. As an astronomer, he is best known for his work in determining the distance from the Sun to the Earth from 1900 to 1909: for this achievement, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His later professional career was in surveying and cartography, an extension of his astronomical interests.
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Georges Bruhat
1887 - 1945 (58 years)
Georges Bruhat was a French physicist. Life and academic career Bruhat studied physics from 1906 until 1909 at the École normale supérieure of Paris , with, among other, Henri Abraham, Marcel Brillouin and Aimé Cotton, and at the Sorbonne, among others with Gabriel Lippmann and Edmond Bouty. After being awarded a first degree in mathematics and physics, he taught for a year at Gymnasium and afterwards was an assistant at the École normale supérieure de Paris, which gave him time to prepare his PhD thesis with Aimé Cotton in Optics, which he defended in 1914 before the start of World War I.
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Robert E. Cox
1917 - 1989 (72 years)
Robert Edward Cox was an American optical engineer and a popularizer of amateur telescope making. He conducted the popular "Gleanings for ATMs" column in Sky and Telescope magazine for 21 years. Career Cox worked briefly at Perkin Elmer in 1939. Shortly thereafter he was inducted into the Army Air Corps and served for two years in the South Pacific as a weather specialist. After the war, Cox accepted part-time positions as photographic technician at Harvard Observatory and as staff member at Sky and Telescope. He also became associate editor of Weatherwise magazine.
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Karl Kreil
1798 - 1862 (64 years)
Karl Kreil was an Austrian meteorologist and astronomer, born in Ried. Before university, he was educated at the Benedictine Kremsmünster Abbey, under the astronomer Boniface Schwarzenbrunner. He was educated at the University of Vienna, where he studied law before devoting himself to astronomy. In 1827 he became an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, from which he went to Milan in 1831 and thence in 1838 to Prague, where he was from 1845 to 1851 director of the observatory, then returned to Vienna to take charge of the Central Meteorological and Magnetic Bureau.
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Isaac Argyros
1300 - 1375 (75 years)
Isaac Argyros was a Byzantine mathematician and monk, born about 1312, who wrote a treatise named Easter Rule, along with books on arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Works An Easter Rule, a treatise on EasterNew Tables: An Astronomical treatise, based on Ptolemaic astronomy
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William Arnold Anthony
1835 - 1908 (73 years)
William Arnold Anthony was a U.S. physicist. Biography Anthony was born in Coventry, Rhode Island. He was educated at the Yale Scientific School and graduated in 1860. Between 1857 and 1860 he was director of a grade school in Crompton, Rhode Island. From 1860 to 1861 he taught natural sciences at the Providence Conference Seminary, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, followed by a teaching position at the Delaware Literary Institute in Franklin, New York until 1867. That year he became professor of physics and chemistry at the Antioch College, where he stayed until 1870. After a short time teachi...
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Charles S. Hastings
1848 - 1932 (84 years)
Charles Sheldon Hastings was an American physicist known for his work in optics. His father was Panet Marshall Hastings and his mother was Jane Sheldon Hastings. The father was a physician and anatomy teacher at Hamilton College, where Charles was born. At the age of six the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Charles received his early education. Hastings entered Yale University's Sheffield School of Science in 1867 and received his bachelor's degree in 1870. His early interest in astronomy and telescopes were likely due to Chester Lyman, Chair of Physics and Astronomy at the Sheffield School.
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Sven Gösta Nilsson
1927 - 1979 (52 years)
Sven Gösta Nilsson was a Swedish theoretical physicist at the Lund Institute of Technology. Nilsson's father was a preacher. As an undergraduate engineering student, he spent a year at Occidental College in California. He obtained a Master of Science in engineering physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Influenced by Tommy Lauritsen and Torsten Gustafson, Nilsson decided to switch paths from engineering to physics, and in 1950 he was admitted to postgraduate studies in Lund with Gustafson as his supervisor.
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Annibale Riccò
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
Annibale Riccò was an Italian astronomer. Biography He was born in Milan, Italy. In 1868 he was awarded a bachelor's degree from the Università di Modena, then an engineering degree from the Politecnico di Milano. Between 1868 and 1877 he worked as an assistant at the Modena Observatory, teaching mathematics and physics at the Università di Modena. He taught at Naples and then Palermo, where he also worked at the observatory.
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Hugh Longbourne Callendar
1863 - 1930 (67 years)
Hugh Longbourne Callendar was a British physicist known for his contributions to the areas of thermometry and thermodynamics. Callendar was the first to design and build an accurate platinum resistance thermometer suitable for use, which allowed scientists and engineers to obtain consistent and accurate results. He conducted experiments and researched thermodynamics, producing and publishing reliable tables on the thermodynamic properties of steam used for calculations. Callendar worked with multiple institutions during World War I, helping to research and develop useful tools for the Navy.
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Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels
1865 - 1913 (48 years)
Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels was a German physicist. He was born in Italy to Captain Theodore Pockels and Alwine Becker. He obtained a doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1888, and from 1900 to 1913 he was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Heidelberg.
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Werner Meyer-Eppler
1913 - 1960 (47 years)
Werner Meyer-Eppler , was a Belgian-born German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist and information theorist. Meyer-Eppler was born in Antwerp. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, first at the University of Cologne and then in Bonn, from 1936 until 1939, when he received a doctorate in Physics. From 1942 to 1945 he was a scientific assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Bonn. From the time of his habilitation on 16 September 1942, he was also Lecturer in Experimental Physics. After the end of the war, Meyer-Eppler turned attention increasingly to phonetics and speech synthesis.
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Mashallah ibn Athari
740 - 815 (75 years)
Māshāʾallāh ibn Atharī , known as Mashallah, was an 8th century Persian Jewish astrologer, astronomer, and mathematician. Originally from Khorasan, he lived in Basra during the reigns of the Abbasid caliphs al-Manṣūr and al-Ma’mūn, and was among those who introduced astrology and astronomy to Baghdad. The bibliographer ibn al-Nadim described Mashallah "as virtuous and in his time a leader in the science of jurisprudence, i.e. the science of judgments of the stars". Mashallah served as a court astrologer for the Abbasid caliphate and wrote works on astrology in Arabic. Some Latin translations ...
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Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein
1723 - 1795 (72 years)
Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein was a German-born doctor, physicist and engineer. From 1753 to the end of his life he was a professor at the University of Copenhagen where he served as rector four times. He is especially known for his investigations of the use of electricity in medicine and the first attempts at mechanical speech synthesis. As a teacher he wrote the first textbook on experimental physics in the united kingdom of Denmark-Norway.
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Charles Pritchard
1808 - 1893 (85 years)
Reverend Charles Pritchard was a British astronomer, clergyman, and educational reformer. He founded the Clapham Grammar School in 1834 and included sciences in the curriculum. A chapel was erected in 1846.
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Solomon Pikelner
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
Solomon Borisovich Pikelner was a Soviet astronomer who made a significant contribution to the theory of the interstellar medium, solar plasma physics, stellar atmospheres, and magnetohydrodynamics. He was professor of astronomy at Moscow State University starting in 1959. The crater [[Pikelner |Pikelner]] on the Moon and asteroid 1975 Pikelner bear his name.
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Gustave-Adolphe Hirn
1815 - 1890 (75 years)
Gustave-Adolphe Hirn was a French physicist, astronomer, mathematician, and engineer who made important measurements of the mechanical equivalent of heat and contributions to the early development of thermodynamics. He further applied his science in the practical development of steam engines.
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Fyodor Bredikhin
1831 - 1904 (73 years)
Fyodor Aleksandrovich Bredikhin was a Russian astronomer. His surname is sometimes given as Bredichin in the literature, and non-Russian sources sometimes render his first name as Theodor. Information In 1857 he joined the staff of the observatory at Moscow University, becoming its director in 1873. In 1890 he became director of Pulkovo Observatory and in the same year became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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