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,
#11351
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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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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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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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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Leona Woods
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
Leona Harriet Woods , later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb. At age 23, she was the youngest and only female member of the team which built and experimented with the world's first nuclear reactor , Chicago Pile-1, in a project led by her mentor Enrico Fermi. In particular, Woods was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. She was the only woman present when the reactor went critical. She worked with Fe...
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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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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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Peter Debye
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Peter Joseph William Debye was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Biography Early life Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye enrolled in the Aachen University of Technology in 1901. In 1905, he completed his first degree in electrical engineering. He published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents, in 1907. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.
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Léon Van Hove
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Léon Charles Prudent Van Hove was a Belgian physicist and a Director General of CERN. He developed a scientific career spanning mathematics, solid state physics, elementary particle and nuclear physics to cosmology.
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Louis de Broglie
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.
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John Lighton Synge
1897 - 1995 (98 years)
John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician and physicist, whose seven-decade career included significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the USA. He was a prolific author and influential mentor, and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity.
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William Reginald Dean
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
William Reginald Dean was a British applied mathematician and fluid dynamicist. His research interests included Stokes flow, solid mechanics, and flow in curved channels. The Dean number bears his name.
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Gregory Wannier
1911 - 1983 (72 years)
Gregory Hugh Wannier was a Swiss physicist. He developed a complete set of orthogonal functions known as the Wannier functions which became tools of the trade for solid-state theorists. He also had made contributions to ferromagnetic theory via the Ising model. The Kramers–Wannier duality yields the exact location of the critical point for the Ising model on the square lattice.
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Leonard I. Schiff
1915 - 1971 (56 years)
Leonard Isaac Schiff was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on March 29, 1915 and died on January 21, 1971, in Stanford, California. He was a physicist best known for his book Quantum Mechanics, originally published in 1949 .
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Bernd T. Matthias
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Bernd T. Matthias was a German-born American physicist credited with discoveries of hundreds of elements and alloys with superconducting properties. He was said to have discovered more elements and compounds with superconducting properties than any other scientist.
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Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim was a German born Jewish American theoretical physicist. He was a pioneer in the applications of quantum mechanics to solid-state problems, such as thermionic emission, work function of metals, field electron emission, rectification in metal-semiconductor contacts and electrical resistance in metals and alloys. He also worked in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, cosmic rays and in nuclear physics.
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Samuel Tolansky
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Samuel Tolansky, born Turlausky, FRAS FRSA FInstP FRS , was a British physicist. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize, has a crater on the Moon named after him near the Apollo 14 landing site and he was a principal investigator to the NASA lunar project known as the Apollo program.
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Gerhard Heinrich Dieke
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Gerhard Heinrich Dieke was a German/U.S. physicist. He was a pioneer in investigating the structure of atoms and molecules by spectroscopic methods. Dieke studied at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, and received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California in 1926. After completing his graduate studies, he worked at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Tokyo and in 1929 he was Dirk Coster's assistant at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Dieke joined the department of physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1930 as an associate professor, and he...
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Carlo Franzinetti
1923 - 1980 (57 years)
Carlo Franzinetti was an Italian experimental physicist. Personal biography Carlo Franzinetti was born in Rome, son of Guido Franzinetti, a music critic, and Ada Guastalla, a mathematician and linguist. He was married to Prof. Joan Rees.
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Henry Primakoff
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Henry Primakoff was a Ukrainian-American theoretical physicist who is famous for his discovery of the Primakoff effect. Primakoff contributed to the understanding of weak interactions, double beta decay, spin waves in ferromagnetism, and the interaction between neutrinos and the atomic nucleus. Along with Theodore Holstein, Primakoff also developed the Holstein–Primakoff transformation which is designed to treat spin waves as bosonic excitations.
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Donald Howard Menzel
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Donald Howard Menzel was one of the first theoretical astronomers and astrophysicists in the United States. He discovered the physical properties of the solar chromosphere, the chemistry of stars, the atmosphere of Mars, and the nature of gaseous nebulae.
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Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil
Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil is a Turkish-American astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. She formerly served as a National Science Foundation and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research led to a discovery of an extremely rare galaxy with a unique double-ringed elliptical structure, which is now commonly referred to as Burcin's Galaxy. She was also a 2018 TED Fellow, and a 2020 TED Senior Fellow.
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Deane B. Judd
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Deane Brewster Judd was an American physicist who made important contributions to the fields of colorimetry, color discrimination, color order, and color vision. Education Judd was born in South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts and attended Ohio State University and Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1926. He was a Munsell Research Associate in colorimetry at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. in 1926.
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Derek J. de Solla Price
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Derek John de Solla Price was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist. He was known for his investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of scientometrics".
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Harald Herborg Nielsen
1903 - 1973 (70 years)
Harald Herborg Nielsen was an American physicist. Biography He was born in Menominee, Michigan, to Knud Nielsen and Maren Sorensen, immigrant parents who had moved to the United States from Denmark. He was the brother of Alvin H. Nielsen.
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Gordon Sutherland
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland FRS was a Scottish physicist. Biography Sutherland was born on 8 April 1907 at Watten, Caithness. He was the youngest of seven children of Peter Sutherland and Eliza Hope , both teachers. He was taught by his parents until he was ten, when he attended Leven Academy for a year before moving to Morgan Academy in Dundee for 6 years. From there he went to the University of St Andrews where he took the unusual route of studying for a double degree: an MA in mathematics and applied mathematics, and a BSc in physics. This involved a 5-year combination of courses that had not been taken before.
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Stanley Corrsin
1920 - 1986 (66 years)
Stanley Corrsin was an American physicist, fluid dynamicist, and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He was known for his contributions in the field of fluid dynamics in general and turbulence in particular. He was a recipient of Fluid Dynamics Prize in 1983. Corrsin died of cancer on 2 June 1986 at the age of 66.
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Lewi Tonks
1897 - 1971 (74 years)
Lewi Tonks was an American quantum physicist noted for his discovery of the Tonks–Girardeau gas. Tonks was employed by General Electric for most of his working life, researching microwaves and ferromagnetism. He worked under Irving Langmuir on plasma physics, with a special interest in ball lightning, nuclear fusion, tungsten filament light bulbs, and lasers.
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William Francis Gray Swann
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
W.F.G. Swann was an English physicist. Education He was educated at Brighton Technical College and the Royal College of Science from which he obtained a B.Sc. in 1905. He worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Sheffield, while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate at University College London, from which he received a D.Sc. in 1910.
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Frances Pleasonton
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Frances Pleasonton was a Particle Physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She was an active teacher and researcher, and a member of the team who first demonstrated neutron decay in 1951. Early life and education Pleasonton earned her bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College. She was an editor of the Bryn Mawr College yearbook. She went on to teach at Winsor School, Girls Latin School of Chicago and Brearley School. She returned to Bryn Mawr College for her master's degree, working as a warden at Pembroke East, and graduated in 1943. She was demonstrator-elect in physics and took a leave of absence for government service in 1942.
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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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Alexandru Proca
1897 - 1955 (58 years)
Alexandru Proca was a Romanian physicist who studied and worked in France. He developed the vector meson theory of nuclear forces and the relativistic quantum field equations that bear his name for the massive, vector spin-1 mesons.
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Emil Warburg
1846 - 1931 (85 years)
Emil Gabriel Warburg was a German physicist who during his career was professor of physics at the Universities of Strassburg, Freiburg and Berlin. He was president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft 1899–1905. His name is notably associated with the Warburg element of electrochemistry.
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Tullio Levi-Civita
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Tullio Levi-Civita, was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics , analytic mechanics and hydrodynamics.
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Max Valier
1895 - 1930 (35 years)
Max Valier was an Austrian rocketry pioneer. He was a leading figure in the world's first large-scale rocket program, Opel-RAK, and helped found the German Verein für Raumschiffahrt that would bring together many of the minds that would later make spaceflight a reality in the 20th century.
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Egon Bretscher
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Egon Bretscher was a Swiss-born British chemist and nuclear physicist and Head of the Nuclear Physics Division from 1948 to 1966 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, also known as Harwell Laboratory, in Harwell, United Kingdom. He was one of the pioneers in nuclear fission research and one of the first to foresee that plutonium could be used as an energy source. His work on nuclear physics led to his involvement in the British atomic bomb research project Tube Alloys and his membership of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he worked in Enrico Fermi's Advanced Development Division in the F-3 Super Experimentation group.
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Alexander Kompaneyets
1914 - 1974 (60 years)
Alexander Solomonovich Kompaneyets was born on January 4, 1914, in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire and died on August 19, 1974, in Palanga, Lithuania. He was a prominent physicist, author of a number of textbooks, and collaborator on the Soviet atomic bomb project who lived mainly in Moscow.
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Aimé Cotton
1869 - 1951 (82 years)
Aimé Auguste Cotton was a French physicist known for his studies of the interaction of light with chiral molecules. In the absorption bands of these molecules, he discovered large values of optical rotatory dispersion , or variation of optical rotation as a function of wavelength , as well as circular dichroism or differences of absorption between left and right circularly polarized light.
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Evangelista Torricelli
1608 - 1647 (39 years)
Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him.
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Wojciech Rubinowicz
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Wojciech Sylwester Piotr Rubinowicz was a Polish theoretical physicist who made contributions in quantum mechanics, mathematical physics, and the theory of radiation. He is known for the Maggie-Rubinowicz representation of Gustav Kirchhoff’s diffraction formula.
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David Brewster
1781 - 1868 (87 years)
Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA Scot FSSA MICE was a Scottish scientist, inventor, author, and academic administrator. In science he is principally remembered for his experimental work in physical optics, mostly concerned with the study of the polarization of light and including the discovery of Brewster's angle. He studied the birefringence of crystals under compression and discovered photoelasticity, thereby creating the field of optical mineralogy. For this work, William Whewell dubbed him the "father of modern experimental optics" and "the Johannes Kepler of optics."
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Josef Stefan
1835 - 1893 (58 years)
Josef Stefan was a Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire. Life and work Stefan was born in the village of St. Peter on the outskirts of KlagenfurtAleksander1805-18721815-1863.
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Nilakantha Somayaji
1444 - 1544 (100 years)
Keļallur Nilakantha Somayaji , also referred to as Keļallur Comatiri, was a major mathematician and astronomer of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of his most influential works was the comprehensive astronomical treatise Tantrasamgraha completed in 1501. He had also composed an elaborate commentary on Aryabhatiya called the Aryabhatiya Bhasya. In this Bhasya, Nilakantha had discussed infinite series expansions of trigonometric functions and problems of algebra and spherical geometry. Grahapariksakrama is a manual on making observations in astronomy based on instruments of the time.
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Richard Becker
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Richard Becker was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, superconductivity, and quantum electrodynamics. Early life Becker was born in Hamburg. His studies in zoology started in 1906 at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1909 under August Weismann. After hearing lectures by Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Becker turned his professional interest to physics. He also studied physics under Max Born at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, and Max Planck and Albert Einstein at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Walter Rogowski
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Walter Rogowski was a German physicist who bridged the gap between theoretical physics and applied technology in numerous areas of electronics. The Rogowski coil was named after him. Biography In 1900, Rogowski began his studies at the RWTH Aachen, under Arnold Sommerfeld, who occupied the Chair for Applied Mechanics. He acquired his Vordiplom in 1902 and went on to study at the Danzig Technische Hochschule , where he was also a scientific assistant. He completed his studies at Danzig in 1904, but stayed on until 1908, when he went to be a scientific assistant at the Physikalisch Technische...
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Francis Wheeler Loomis
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
Francis Wheeler Loomis , born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was an American scientist most widely known for his contributions in the field of physics. Loomis received his undergraduate degree and, in 1917, his PhD from Harvard University. His thesis was on thermodynamic measurements of mercury.
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Martin Knudsen
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Martin Hans Christian Knudsen was a Danish physicist who taught and conducted research at the Technical University of Denmark. He is primarily known for his study of molecular gas flow and the development of the Knudsen cell, which is a primary component of molecular beam epitaxy systems.
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Alexis Clairaut
1713 - 1765 (52 years)
Alexis Claude Clairaut was a French mathematician, astronomer, and geophysicist. He was a prominent Newtonian whose work helped to establish the validity of the principles and results that Sir Isaac Newton had outlined in the Principia of 1687. Clairaut was one of the key figures in the expedition to Lapland that helped to confirm Newton's theory for the figure of the Earth. In that context, Clairaut worked out a mathematical result now known as "Clairaut's theorem". He also tackled the gravitational three-body problem, being the first to obtain a satisfactory result for the apsidal precession of the Moon's orbit.
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Johannes Franz Hartmann
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Johannes Franz Hartmann was a German physicist and astronomer. In 1904, while studying the spectroscopy of Delta Orionis he noticed that most of the spectrum had a shift, except the calcium lines, which he interpreted as indicating the presence of interstellar medium.
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