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,
#11401
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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Pyotr Lebedev
1866 - 1912 (46 years)
Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev was a Russian physicist. His name was also transliterated as Peter Lebedew and Peter Lebedev. Lebedev was the creator of first scientific school in Russia. Career Lebedev made his doctoral degree in Strasbourg under the supervision of August Kundt in 1887–1891. In 1891, he started working in Moscow State University in the group of Alexander Stoletov. There he made his famous experimental studies of electromagnetic waves.
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John Louis Emil Dreyer
1852 - 1926 (74 years)
John Louis Emil Dreyer was a Danish astronomer who spent most of his career working in Ireland. He spent the last decade of his life in Oxford, England. Life Dreyer was born in Copenhagen. His father, Lieutenant General John Christopher Dreyer, was the Danish Minister for War and the Navy. When he was 14 he became interested in astronomy and regularly visited Hans Schjellerup at the Copenhagen observatory. He was educated in Copenhagen, taking an MA in 1872. While the same university later awarded him a PhD, in 1874. But in 1874, at the age of 22, he went to Parsonstown, Ireland. There he wo...
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Henry Draper
1837 - 1882 (45 years)
Henry Draper was an American doctor and amateur astronomer. He is best known today as a pioneer of astrophotography. Life and work Henry Draper's father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, botanist, and professor at New York University; he was also the first to photograph the moon through a telescope . Draper's mother was Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the personal physician to the Emperor of Brazil. His niece, Antonia Maury was also an astronomer.
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Emil Lenz
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz , usually cited as Emil Lenz or Heinrich Lenz in some countries, was a Russian physicist of Baltic German descent who is most noted for formulating Lenz's law in electrodynamics in 1834.
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Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
1201 - 1274 (73 years)
Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi , also known as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi or simply as Tusi, was a Persian polymath, architect, philosopher, physician, scientist, and theologian. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was a well published author, writing on subjects of math, engineering, prose, and mysticism. Additionally, al-Tusi made several scientific advancements. In astronomy, al-Tusi created very accurate tables of planetary motion, an updated planetary model, and critiques of Ptolemaic astronomy. He also made strides in logic, mathematics but especially trigonometry, biology, and chemistry. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi left behind a great legacy as well.
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Herbert Dingle
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Herbert Dingle was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953. He is best known for his opposition to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity and the protracted controversy that this provoked.
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Anatoly Vlasov
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Anatoly Aleksandrovich Vlasov was a Russian, later Soviet, theoretical physicist prominent in the fields of statistical mechanics, kinetics, and especially in plasma physics. Biography Anatoly Vlasov was born in Balashov, in the family of a steamfitter. In 1927 he entered into the Moscow State University and graduated from the MSU in 1931. After the graduation Vlasov continued to work in the MSU, where he spent all his life, collaborating with Nobelists Pyotr Kapitsa, Lev Landau, and other leading physicists. He became a full Professor at the Moscow State University in 1944 and was the head ...
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Heinrich Schwabe
1789 - 1875 (86 years)
Samuel Heinrich Schwabe was a German astronomer remembered for his work on sunspots. Schwabe was born in Dessau, Germany. At first an apothecary, he turned his attention to astronomy, and in 1826 commenced his observations on sunspots. Schwabe was looking for a theoretical planet inside the orbit of Mercury, known as Vulcan. Because of the proximity to the Sun, it would have been very difficult to observe such a planet, and Schwabe believed one possibility to detect a new planet might be to see it during its transit in front of the Sun. For 17 years, from 1826 to 1843, on every clear day, Schwabe would scan the Sun and record its spots trying to detect any new planet among them.
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Marcel Brillouin
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Louis Marcel Brillouin was a French physicist and mathematician. Born in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy. There he attended the Lycée Condorcet. The Brillouin family returned to Saint-Martin-lès-Melle during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to escape the fighting. There he spent time teaching himself from his grandfather's philosophy books. After the war, he returned to Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874 and graduated in 1878. He became a physics assistant to Éleuthère Mascart at the Collège de...
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Theodor Wulf
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Theodor Wulf was a German physicist and Jesuit priest who was one of the first experimenters to detect excess atmospheric radiation. Theodor Wulf became a Jesuit priest at the age of 20, before studying physics with Walther Nernst at the University of Göttingen. He taught physics at Valkenburg, a Jesuit University from 1904 to 1914 and 1918-1935. He designed and built an electrometer which could detect the presence of energetic charged particles . Since natural radiation sources on the ground were detected by his electrometer, he predicted that if he moved far enough away from those sources h...
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Heber Doust Curtis
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Heber Doust Curtis was an American astronomer. He participated in 11 expeditions for the study of solar eclipses, and, as an advocate and theorist that additional galaxies existed outside of the Milky Way, was involved in the 1920 Shapley–Curtis Debate concerning the size and galactic structure of the universe.
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Albert Marth
1828 - 1897 (69 years)
Albert Marth was a German astronomer who worked in Britain and Ireland. Life After studying theology at the University of Berlin, his interest in astronomy and mathematics led him to study astronomy under C. A. F. Peters at the University of Königsberg.
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Edward Emerson Barnard
1857 - 1923 (66 years)
Edward Emerson Barnard was an American astronomer. He was commonly known as E. E. Barnard, and was recognized as a gifted observational astronomer. He is best known for his discovery of the high proper motion of Barnard's Star in 1916, which is named in his honor.
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Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve
1793 - 1864 (71 years)
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was a Baltic German astronomer and geodesist. He is best known for studying double stars and for initiating a triangulation survey later named Struve Geodetic Arc in his honor.
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Nicholas of Cusa
1401 - 1464 (63 years)
Nicholas of Cusa , also referred to as Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus , was a German Catholic cardinal, philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, and astronomer. One of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism, he made spiritual and political contributions in European history. A notable example of this is his mystical or spiritual writings on "learned ignorance," as well as his participation in power struggles between Rome and the German states of the Holy Roman Empire.
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Theon of Alexandria
335 - 400 (65 years)
Theon of Alexandria was a Greek scholar and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He edited and arranged Euclid's Elements and wrote commentaries on works by Euclid and Ptolemy. His daughter Hypatia also won fame as a mathematician.
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James David Forbes
1809 - 1868 (59 years)
James David Forbes was a Scottish physicist and glaciologist who worked extensively on the conduction of heat and seismology. Forbes was a resident of Edinburgh for most of his life, educated at its University and a professor there from 1833 until he became principal of the United College of St Andrews in 1859.
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Madhava of Sangamagrama
1350 - 1425 (75 years)
Mādhava of Sangamagrāma was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who is considered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of the greatest mathematician-astronomers of the Late Middle Ages, Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".
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David Rittenhouse
1732 - 1796 (64 years)
David Rittenhouse was an American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman, and public official. Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint.
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Regiomontanus
1436 - 1476 (40 years)
Johannes Müller von Königsberg , better known as Regiomontanus , was a mathematician, astrologer and astronomer of the German Renaissance, active in Vienna, Buda and Nuremberg. His contributions were instrumental in the development of Copernican heliocentrism in the decades following his death.
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Bhāskara II
1114 - 1185 (71 years)
Bhāskara II , also known as Bhāskarāchārya , and as Bhāskara II to avoid confusion with Bhāskara I, was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. From verses, in his main work, Siddhānta Shiromani , it can be inferred that he was born in 1114 in Vijjadavida and living in the Satpuda mountain ranges of Western Ghats, believed to be the town of Patana in Chalisgaon, located in present-day Khandesh region of Maharashtra by scholars. He is the only ancient mathematician who has been immortalized on a monument. In a temple in Maharashtra, an inscription supposedly created by his grandson Changadeva...
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Mihajlo Pupin
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin , also known as Michael Pupin, was a Serbian physicist, physical chemist and philanthropist based in the United States. Pupin is best known for his numerous patents, including a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire . Pupin was a founding member of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics on 3 March 1915, which later became NASA, and he participated in the founding of American Mathematical Society and American Physical Society.
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Horia Hulubei
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Horia Hulubei was a Romanian nuclear physicist, known for his contributions to the development of X-ray spectroscopy. Education and military service Born in Iași, he graduated in 1915 first in his class at the Boarding High School of Iași. He then enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Iași, but his studies were interrupted by the entry of Romania in World War I; conscripted into the army, he fought as a second lieutenant at the battles of Nămoloasa, Băltăreți, and Mărășești in the summer of 1917. General Henri Mathias Berthelot, the head of the French military mission to Ro...
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Karol Olszewski
1846 - 1915 (69 years)
Karol Stanisław Olszewski was a Polish chemist, mathematician and physicist. Together with Zygmunt Wróblewski, he was the first scientist in the world to liquify oxygen and nitrogen in 1883. Biography Olszewski was a graduate of Kazimierz Brodziński High School in Tarnów . He studied at Kraków's Jagiellonian University in the departments of mathematics and physics, and chemistry and biology. He carried out his first experiments using a personally improved compressor, compressing and condensing carbon dioxide.
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Svein Rosseland
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Svein Rosseland was a Norwegian astrophysicist and a pioneer in the field of theoretical astrophysics. Biography Svein Rosseland was born in Kvam, in Hardanger, Norway. Rosseland grew up the youngest of nine siblings. He went to his final exams in Haugesund in 1917 and then went to the University of Oslo. After only three semesters at the University he left in 1919 to work as an assistant professor with the meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes at the Bergen School of Meteorology. In 1920 he went to the Institute of Physics in Copenhagen, where he met Niels Bohr and other prominent physicists, and where he wrote two seminal papers.
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Wilhelm Westphal
1882 - 1978 (96 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Westphal was a German physicist. From 1918, he was a professor at the University of Berlin. During the period 1922 to 1924, he was also an expert adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Arts and Culture. From 1928, he was simultaneously a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin. His position at the former ended when it fell in the Russian sector at the close of World War II, but he achieved emeritus status at the latter in 1955.
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Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
1778 - 1850 (72 years)
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume , for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.
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Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen was a Dutch physicist known for her early contributions to the theory of magnetism. She studied at Leiden University under the guidance of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, obtaining her doctorate in 1919. Her thesis explained why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect, a result now referred to as the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem. She continued to investigate magnetic materials at the "Technische Hogeschool Delft" , first as "assistant" between September 1920 and April 1947, and then she was promoted to "lector in de theoretische en toegepaste natuurkunde" .
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Orest Khvolson
1852 - 1934 (82 years)
Orest Danilovich Khvolson or Chwolson was a Russian and later Soviet physicist and honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . He is most noted for being one of the first to study the gravitational lens effect.
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Heinrich Gustav Magnus
1802 - 1870 (68 years)
Heinrich Gustav Magnus was a notable German experimental scientist. His training was mostly in chemistry but his later research was mostly in physics. He spent the great bulk of his career at the University of Berlin, where he is remembered for his laboratory teaching as much as for his original research. He did not use his first given name, and was known throughout his life as Gustav Magnus.
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Maria Mitchell
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar College in 1865. She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association ...
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Stefan Meyer
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Stefan Meyer was an Austrian physicist involved in research on radioactivity. He became director of the Institute for Radium Research in Vienna and received the Lieben Prize in 1913 for his research on radium. He was the brother of Hans Leopold Meyer who was also awarded the Lieben Prize.
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Enrico Persico
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Enrico Persico was an Italian physicist notable for propagating the field of quantum mechanics in Italy. He was a professor at the University of Turin and is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Ugo Fano.
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Johannes de Sacrobosco
1195 - 1256 (61 years)
Johannes de Sacrobosco, also written Ioannes de Sacro Bosco, later called John of Holywood or John of Holybush , was a scholar, monk, and astronomer who taught at the University of Paris. He wrote a short introduction to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Judging from the number of manuscript copies that survive today, for the next 400 years it became the most widely read book on that subject. He also wrote a short textbook which was widely read and influential in Europe during the later medieval centuries as an introduction to astronomy. In his longest book, on the computation of the date of Ea...
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Bruno Touschek
1921 - 1978 (57 years)
Bruno Touschek was an Austrian physicist, a survivor of the Holocaust, and initiator of research on electron-positron colliders. Biography Touschek was born and attended school in Vienna. In 1937, he was not allowed to finish high school since his mother was Jewish. He passed the final year exam in a different school as an external pupil. Shortly after he started studying physics and mathematics at the University in Vienna, he again had to quit for racial reasons. Thanks to a couple of friends, he could keep on studying in Hamburg, where nobody knew of his origins. In order to make a living, ...
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Ole Rømer
1644 - 1710 (66 years)
Ole Christensen Rømer was a Danish astronomer who, in 1676, made the first measurement of the speed of light and discovery that light travels at a finite speed. Rømer also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between two fixed points, namely the points at which water respectively boils and freezes.
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Marcello Conversi
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Marcello Conversi was an Italian particle physicist. He is best known for his 1946 cosmic ray experiment where he showed that the "mesotron", now known as the muon, was not a strongly interacting particle.
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Georg Ohm
1789 - 1854 (65 years)
Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist and mathematician. As a school teacher, Ohm began his research with the new electrochemical cell, invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm found that there is a direct proportionality between the potential difference applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current. This relation is called Ohm's law, and the ohm, the unit of electrical resistance, is named after him.
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