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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Physics,
#1151
Maria Spiropulu
#36516
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Maria Spiropulu is a Greek particle physicist. She is the Shang-Yi Ch'en Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Biography Maria Spiropulu received her bachelor's degree in physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1993, and obtained her PhD with the CDF experiment from Harvard University in 2000. For her doctoral thesis, she applied for the first time in hadron colliders a novel double blind analysis method to search for evidence of supersymmetry. She excluded a large part of the parameter space where SUSY particles were expected to emerge.
Go to Profile#1152
Muhammad Suhail Zubairy
#7179
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, HI, SI, FPAS , is a University Distinguished Professor as of 2014 in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Texas A&M University and is the inaugural holder of the Munnerlyn-Heep Chair in Quantum Optics.
Go to Profile#1153
H. Richard Crane
#13122
Overall Influence
1907 - 2007 (100 years)
Horace Richard Crane was an American physicist, the inventor of the Race Track Synchrotron, a recipient of President Ronald Reagan's National Medal of Science "for the first measurement of the magnetic moment and spin of free electrons and positrons". He was also noted for proving the existence of neutrinos. The National Academy of Sciences called Crane "an extraordinary physicist". The University of Michigan called him "one of the most distinguished experimental physicists of the 20th century". Crane was a chairman of the department of physics and a professor of physics at the University of...
Go to Profile#1154
Alar Toomre
#21661
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Alar Toomre is an American astronomer and mathematician. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Toomre's research is focused on the dynamics of galaxies. He is a 1984 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#1155
Basarab Nicolescu
#11134
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Basarab Nicolescu is an honorary theoretical physicist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is also a professor at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and Docteur ès-Sciences Physiques , 1972, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He was appointed Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, South Africa for the period 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2016 and was elected as Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study Fellow in 2011.
Go to Profile#1156
Alan Cottrell
#12518
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Sir Alan Howard Cottrell, FRS was an English metallurgist and physicist. He was also former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University 1977–1979. Early life Cottrell was educated at Moseley Grammar School and the University of Birmingham, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1939 and a PhD for research on welding in 1942.
Go to Profile#1157
Madis Kõiv
#18158
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Madis Kõiv was an Estonian writer, philosopher and physicist. Education Kõiv attended school in Tartu after the second World War, graduating in the early 1950s with a degree in nuclear physics. Kõiv worked as a scientist and lecturer until 1991.
Go to Profile#1158
Daniel Zajfman
#14185
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Daniel Zajfman is an Israeli physicist whose main research interests are centered on the physics of simple molecular ions. On December 1, 2006, he was elected as the tenth president of the Weizmann Institute.
Go to Profile#1159
Walter M. Elsasser
#16196
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Walter Maurice Elsasser was a German-born American physicist, a developer of the presently accepted dynamo theory as an explanation of the Earth's magnetism. He proposed that this magnetic field resulted from electric currents induced in the fluid outer core of the Earth. He revealed the history of the Earth's magnetic field by the study of the magnetic orientation of minerals in rocks. He was also the first to suggest that the wave-like nature of matter might be investigated by electron scattering experiments using crystalline solids.
Go to Profile#1160
Jesse L. Greenstein
#31206
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Jesse Leonard Greenstein was an American astronomer. His parents were Maurice G. and Leah Feingold. He earned a Ph.D, with thesis advisor Donald H. Menzel, from Harvard University in 1937, having started there at age 16. Before leaving Harvard, Greenstein was involved in a project with Fred Lawrence Whipple to explain Karl Jansky's discovery of radio waves from the Milky Way and to propose a source. He began his professional career at Yerkes Observatory under Otto Struve and later went to Caltech. With Louis G. Henyey he invented a new spectrograph and a wide-field camera. He directed th...
Go to Profile#1161
Robert D. Richtmyer
#5082
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Robert Davis Richtmyer was an American physicist, mathematician, educator, author, and musician. Biography Richtmyer was born on October 10, 1910, in Ithaca, New York. His father was physicist Floyd K. Richtmyer and mother was Bernice Davis Richtmyer. He studied physics at the University of Göttingen and Cornell University, graduating in 1932 when his father was dean of the graduate school. He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1935 under advisor John C. Slater. He taught at Stanford University as an instructor in the physics department from 1936 through 1940.
Go to Profile#1162
Marcia Bartusiak
#32218
Overall Influence
Marcia F. Bartusiak is an author, journalist, and Professor of the Practice Emeritus of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained in both communications and physics , she writes about the fields of astronomy and physics. Bartusiak has been published in National Geographic, Discover, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, Science, Popular Science, World Book Encyclopedia, Smithsonian, and MIT Technology Review. The author of seven books, she is also a columnist for Natural History magazine.
Go to Profile#1163
Jean-Luc Margot
#28261
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jean-Luc Margot is a Belgian-born astronomer and a UCLA professor with expertise in planetary sciences and SETI. Career Margot has discovered and studied several binary asteroids with radar and optical telescopes. His discoveries include Sylvia I Romulus, Kalliope I Linus, S/2003 1, Alauda I Pichi üñëm, and the binary nature of Hermes.
Go to Profile#1164
Jean Meeus
#24268
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Jean Meeus is a Belgian meteorologist and amateur astronomer specializing in celestial mechanics, spherical astronomy, and mathematical astronomy. Meeus studied mathematics at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he received the Degree of Licentiate in 1953. From then until his retirement in 1993, he was a meteorologist at Brussels Airport.
Go to Profile#1165
Jürgen Kurths
#25903
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jürgen Kurths is a German physicist and mathematician. He is senior advisor in the research department Complexity Sciences of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at the Institute of Physics at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and a 6th-century chair for Complex Systems Biology at the Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology at Kings College, Aberdeen University . His research is mainly concerned with nonlinear physics and complex systems sciences and their applications to challenging problems in Earth system, physiology, systems ...
Go to Profile#1166
Michel Hénon
#6578
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Michel Hénon was a French mathematician and astronomer. He worked for a long time at the Nice Observatory. In astronomy, Hénon is well known for his contributions to stellar dynamics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he made important contributions on the dynamical evolution of star clusters, in particular globular clusters. He developed a numerical technique using Monte Carlo methods to follow the dynamical evolution of a spherical star cluster much faster than the so-called n-body methodss.
Go to Profile#1167
Sankar Das Sarma
#24594
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sankar Das Sarma is an India-born American theoretical condensed matter physicist, who has worked in the broad research topics of theoretical physics, condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics, quantum physics, and quantum information. He has been a member of the department of physics at University of Maryland, College Park since 1980.
Go to Profile#1168
Steve Squyres
#12832
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Steven Weldon Squyres is an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the Solar System such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission .
Go to Profile#1169
Brebis Bleaney
#21879
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Brebis Bleaney was a British physicist. His main area of research was the use of microwave techniques to study the magnetic properties of solids. He was head of the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford from 1957 to 1977. In 1992, Bleaney received the International Zavoisky Award "for his contribution to the theory and practice of electron paramagnetic resonance of transition ions in crystals."
Go to Profile#1170
Teresa Paneque
#40308
Overall Influence
1997 - Present (27 years)
Teresa Paz Paneque Carreño is a Spanish-Chilean astronomer and writer. Biography Early years and education Paneque was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1997. Her father is a biochemist and her mother a pharmaceutic chemist. When she was five years old, she moved to Glasgow due to her parents' postdoctoral research. At the age of nine, she moved to Chile, and due to her education in Europe, she entered the 6th grade of primary school, two years before the corresponding age; there, she began to be interested by robotics, taking part in the Chile's FIRST Lego League Challenge.
Go to Profile#1171
Michael Cates
#17183
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Michael Elmhirst Cates is a British physicist. He is the 19th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and has held this position since 1 July 2015. He was previously Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and has held a Royal Society Research Professorship since 2007.
Go to Profile#1172
Mark Trodden
#32493
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Mark Trodden is a theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist. He is the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics and Co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#1173
Simon Shnoll
#21050
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Simon El'evich Shnol was a biophysicist, and a historian of Soviet science. He was a professor at Physics Department of Moscow State University and a member of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. His fields of interest were the oscillatory processes in biology, the theory of evolution, chronobiology, and the history of science. He had mentored many successful scientists, including Anatoly Zhabotinsky.
Go to Profile#1174
Andrzej Trautman
#16043
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Andrzej Mariusz Trautman is a Polish mathematical physicist who has made contributions to classical gravitation in general and to general relativity in particular. He made contributions to gravitation as early as 1958. The "Trautman-Bondi mass" is named after him.
Go to Profile#1175
Michael Aizenman
#11972
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Aizenman is an American-Israeli mathematician and a physicist at Princeton University, working in the fields of mathematical physics, statistical mechanics, functional analysis and probability theory.
Go to Profile#1176
David Shoenberg
#25745
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
David Shoenberg, MBE FRS, was a British physicist who worked in condensed matter physics. Shoenberg is known for having developed experimental and theoretical principles to study the De Haas–Van Alphen effect to characterize the electrical conduction of metals.
Go to Profile#1177
Hiranya Peiris
#38495
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, University College London, and Stockholm University, best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe."
Go to Profile#1178
Nikolay Kudryavtsev
#24740
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nikolay Kudryavtsev is rector at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Career Nikolay Kudryavtsev graduated from the Department of Molecular and Chemical Physics of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics from the same institute in 1977. Dr. Kudryavtsev worked at MIPT in various positions including Molecular Physics Chair and dean of the Department of Molecular and Chemical Physics. He became professor in 1990. Since June 1997 he serves as rector at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 2007 he was elected to Schlumberger Board of Directors.
Go to Profile#1179
Yves Rocard
#13135
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Yves-André Rocard was a French physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb for France. Lifes Rocard was born in Vannes. After obtaining a double doctorate in mathematics and physics he was awarded a professorship in electronic physics at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
Go to Profile#1180
Trinh Xuan Thuan
#12750
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Trịnh Xuân Thuận is a Vietnamese-American astrophysicist. Biography Trịnh Xuân Thuận was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. He completed his B.S. at the California Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. He has taught astronomy at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor, since 1976, and is also a research associate at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. He was a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion.
Go to Profile#1181
Devendra Lal
#21170
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Devendra Lal FRS was an Indian geophysicist. Life He was born in Varanasi, India. He graduated from Banaras Hindu University. He graduated from Bombay University; his thesis was on cosmic ray physics; his thesis adviser was Bernard Peters.
Go to Profile#1182
Norman Ramsey Jr.
#44183
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was an American physicist who was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics, for the invention of the separated oscillatory field method which had important applications in the construction of atomic clocks. A physics professor at Harvard University for most of his career, Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies as NATO and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Among his other accomplishments are helping to found the United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab.
Go to Profile#1183
Harold Lewis
#14716
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Harold Warren Lewis was an American Emeritus Professor of Physics and former department chairman at the University of California, Santa Barbara . He was chairman of the JASON Defense Advisory Group from 1966 to 1973, and was active in US government investigations into safety of nuclear reactors.
Go to Profile#1184
Prajval Shastri
#41335
Overall Influence
Prajval Shastri is an astrophysicist, formerly at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore and specializes in the area of phenomenology of active galaxies driven by supermassive blackholes using multi-wavelength observations ranging from radio to X-ray wavelengths.
Go to Profile#1185
Emilio Del Giudice
#28502
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Emilio Del Giudice was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked in the field of condensed matter. Pioneer of string theory in the early 1970s, later on he became better known for his work with Giuliano Preparata at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics ;
Go to Profile#1186
Clifford Charles Butler
#25458
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
Sir Clifford Charles Butler FRS was an English physicist, best known for the discovery of the hyperon and meson types of particles. In later life, Butler was involved in educational policy, serving as director of the Nuffield Foundation and vice-chancellor of Loughborough University.
Go to Profile#1187
Brian G. Marsden
#15394
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Brian Geoffrey Marsden was a British astronomer and the longtime director of the Minor Planet Center at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian . Education Marsden was educated at The Perse School in Cambridge, New College, Oxford and Yale University . His thesis advisor was Dirk Brouwer.
Go to Profile#1188
Alan Cook
#20251
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Sir Alan Hugh Cook FRS was an English physicist who specialised in geophysics, astrophysics and particularly precision measurement. Early life and family Cook was born in Felsted, Essex in 1922. He was the eldest of the six children of Reginald Thomas Cook, a customs and excise officer, and his wife, Ethel, Saxon, who was active in the Congregational church. His family were active churchgoers and Cook retained a lifelong Christian commitment. He was educated first at the village school at Felsted, then at West Leigh School and finally at Westcliff High School for Boys. In 1939 he won a majo...
Go to Profile#1189
Boris Rauschenbach
#11412
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach Russian physicist of German ethnicity who worked as an engineer in the former Soviet space program. Trained as an engineer, he found great success in designing rockets and who developed the theory and instruments for interplanetary flight control and navigation in 1955-1960s. He is also notable for his studies in Christian theology and theory of Art.
Go to Profile#1190
Franco Selleri
#31771
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Franco Selleri was an Italian theoretical physicist and professor at the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. He received his Doctorate / Ph.D. cum laude at the Università di Bologna in 1958, and was a fellow of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare beginning 1959. He was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Fondation Louis de Broglie, and served on the board of directors of the Italian Physical Society.
Go to Profile#1191
Amitava Raychaudhuri
#21491
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Amitava Raychaudhuri is an Indian theoretical particle physicist. He is Professor Emeritus at the Physics Department of the Science College, University of Calcutta where he earlier held the Sir Tarak Nath Palit Chair Professorship. He is the nephew of another renowned Indian physicist, Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri.
Go to Profile#1192
Josif Frenkel
#48442
Overall Influence
#1193
Jean Dalibard
#26805
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jean Dalibard is a French physicist, Professor at the École Polytechnique, member of the French Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the École Normale Supérieure. In 2009, Dalibard received the Blaise Pascal medal of the European Academy of Sciences for "his outstanding and influential works in atomic physics and quantum optics". In 2012, he received the Max Born Award and Davisson–Germer Prize. He was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. In 2020, he was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1194
Charles Sadron
#39001
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Charles Sadron , was a French physicist who specialized in the study of biological macromolecules. Biography Charles Sadron was professor at the university of Strasbourg. He founded in 1945 the Centre d'Étude de Physique Macromoléculaire , renamed in 1954, Centre de Recherche sur les Macromolécules, where he was appointed director until 1967. In 1967, he moved to Orléans where he became head of the Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire . He was the first laureate of the Holweck Prize, given by the British Institute of Physics in 1946.
Go to Profile#1195
Alireza Mashaghi
#2395
Overall Influence
Alireza Mashaghi is a physician-scientist and biophysicist at Leiden University. He is known for his contributions to single-molecule analysis of chaperone assisted protein folding, molecular topology and medical systems biophysics and bioengineering. He is a leading advocate for interdisciplinary research and education in medicine and pharmaceutical sciences.
Go to Profile#1196
Alastair Reynolds
#13552
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alastair Preston Reynolds is a British science fiction author. He specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle University, where he studied physics and astronomy. Afterwards, he earned a PhD in astrophysics from the University of St Andrews. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette . There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full-time. He returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff.
Go to Profile#1197
Mark M. Phillips
#37800
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mark M. Phillips is an American astronomer who works on the observational studies of all classes of supernovae. He has worked on SN 1986G, SN 1987A, the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and the Phillips relationship. This relationship has allowed the use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles, leading to the precise measurements of the Hubble constant H0 and the deceleration parameter q0, the latter implying the existence of dark energy or a cosmological constant in the Universe.
Go to Profile#1198
Stuart Parkin
#22713
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stuart Stephen Papworth Parkin is an experimental physicist, director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Institute of Physics of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.
Go to Profile#1199
James Trefil
#29728
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
James Stanley Trefil is an American physicist and author of nearly fifty books. Much of his published work focuses on science for the general audience. He has served as Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and, since 1988, as Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. Among his books is Are We Unique?, an argument for human uniqueness in which he questions the comparisons between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Trefil has also given presentations to judges and public officials about the intersections between science and the law.
Go to Profile#1200
Jens Nørskov
#40518
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jens Kehlet Nørskov is the Villum Kann Rasmussen professor at the Technical University of Denmark. He is a Danish physicist most notable for his work on theoretical description of surfaces, catalysis, materials, nanostructures, and biomolecules.
Go to Profile