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,
#11501
Henry Siedentopf
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Henry Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf was a German physicist and pioneer of microscopy. Biography Siedentopf worked in Carl Zeiss company from 1899 to 1938. In 1907 he was nominated as the head of the microscopy department.
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Ebbe Hoff
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Ebbe Curtis Hoff was chairman of the Department of Neurological Science at the Medical College of Virginia, founding Dean, School of Graduate Studies and founding director of the Virginia Division of Substance Abuse.
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Carlo Cattaneo
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Carlo Cattàneo was an Italian academic and one of the general relativity theorists and mathematical physicists in the 1960s and 1970s. He made contributions to general relativity theory, fluid mechanics, and elasticity theory.
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Isabelle Stone
1868 - 1966 (98 years)
Isabelle Stone was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society. She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Early life and education Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago. She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890, and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University. Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.
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René Taupin
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
René Taupin was a French translator, critic, and academic who lived most of his life in the United States and is best known for heading the Romance Languages department at Hunter College. Life Taupin moved to the United States in the 1920s. Taupin taught at Haverford College and Columbia University. In the 1930s, he began teaching at Hunter College. In 1954, Taupin was appointed chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College. He remained at Hunter until 1968, when he retired. After his retirement, he returned to Paris, where he spent the last 13 years of his life. He die...
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Werner Hartmann
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Werner Hartmann was a German physicist who introduced microelectronics into East Germany. He studied physics at the Technische Hochschule Berlin and worked at Siemens before joining Fernseh GmbH. At the end of World War II, he and his research staff were flown to the Soviet Union to work on their atomic bomb project; he was assigned to Institute G. In 1955, he arrived in the German Democratic Republic ; in the same year, he founded and became the director of the VEB Vakutronik Dresden, later VEB RFT Meßelektronik Dresden. In 1956, he completed his Habilitation at the Technische Hochschule Dresden and also became a professor for Kernphysikalische Elektronik there.
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Henri Bénard
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Henri Claude Bénard was a French physicist, best known for his research on convection in liquids that now carries his name, Bénard convection. In addition, the historical surveys of both Tokaty and von Kármán both acknowledge that Bénard studied the vortex shedding phenomenon later named the Kármán vortex street, prior to von Karman's own contributions. Bénard specialized in experimental fluid dynamics, and the use of optical methods to study it. He was a faculty member at the universities at Lyon, Bordeaux, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris.
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Bunsaku Arakatsu
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Bunsaku Arakatsu was a Japanese physics professor in the World War II Japanese Atomic Energy Research Program of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Arakatsu was a former student of Albert Einstein. Career In 1928, Arakatsu became a professor in Taihoku Imperial University . In 1934 Arakatsu built a particle accelerator at Taihoku Imperial University in Taipei, Taiwan, and performed the first atomic nucleus collision experiment in Asia there, right after the experiment performed in Cavendish Laboratory of University of Cambridge. He discovered that each nuclear fission of a U-235 atom yields, on ave...
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Georges Tiercy
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Georges César Tiercy was a Swiss astronomer and the 7th director of the Observatoire de Genève from 1928 to 1956. Tiercy received his bachelor of science degree in 1913 from the University of Paris and his Ph.D. in science and mathematics from the University of Geneva in 1915. He was a master in a private college in Ouchy from 1908 to 1912. He taught mathematics in various schools in Geneva from 1913 to 1927 and was a privat-docent at the University of Geneva from 1915. After an internship at the observatories of Hamburg in 1927 and of Arcetri in Florence in 1927–1928, Tiercy became director of the observatory of Geneva in 1928.
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Edgar Buckingham
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Edgar Buckingham was an American physicist. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1887. He did graduate work at Strasbourg and then studied under the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig, from which he was granted a PhD in 1893. He worked at the USDA Bureau of Soils from 1902 to 1906 as a soil physicist. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards 1906–1937. His fields of expertise included soil physics, gas properties, acoustics, fluid mechanics, and blackbody radiation. He is also the originator of the Buckingham theorem in the field of dimensional...
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Paul Couderc
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Paul Couderc was a French academic who held mathematics professorships at lycées in Chartres and Paris . Biography Couderc completed his education at lycées in Nevers and Dijon, followed by a doctorate in mathematical sciences from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1926, he married Blanch Jurus.
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Yuri Rumer
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Yuri Borisovich Rumer was a Soviet theoretical physicist, who mostly worked in the fields of quantum mechanics and quantum optics. Known in the West as Georg Rumer, he was a close friend of Lev Landau, and was arrested with him during the Great Purge in 1938.
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Alfred Perot
1863 - 1925 (62 years)
Jean-Baptiste Alfred Perot was a French physicist. Together with his colleague Charles Fabry he developed the Fabry–Pérot interferometer in 1899. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Janssen Medal for 1912. The Royal Society awarded Fabry and Perot the Rumford medal in 1918.
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John Randall
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Sir John Turton Randall, was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.
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Walter Thompson Welford
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Walter Thompson Welford was a British physicist with expertise in optics. Biography Welford attended Hackney Technical College, leaving at 16 to work as a technician at the London Hospital and then Oxford University Biochemistry Department. He studied mathematics privately and in 1942 obtained a first-class external degree from the University of London. After working for a time at the optical instrument manufacturer Adam Hilger Ltd., he came to Imperial College London in 1947 as a research assistant. He was appointed lecturer in 1951 and after successive promotions became a full professor of physics in 1973, retiring in 1983.
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Ernst Stueckelberg
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist, regarded as one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century. Despite making key advances in theoretical physics, including the exchange particle model of fundamental forces, causal S-matrix theory, and the renormalization group, his idiosyncratic style and publication in minor journals led to his work not being widely recognized until the mid-1990s.
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Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Geertruida Luberta de Haas-Lorentz was a Dutch physicist and the first to perform fluctuational analysis of electrons as Brownian particles. Consequently she is considered to be the first woman to work in electrical noise theory.
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Henk Dorgelo
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Hendrik Berend Dorgelo was a Dutch physicist and academic. He was the first rector magnificus of the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven. Biography Henk Dorgelo originally attended teachers' training college and became a teacher. He was drafted during World War I and did his state exams while serving as an officer. Now able to attend university, he decided to study mathematics and physics at the University of Utrecht. Following his propaedeuse in 1919, he combined study, work as a teacher at the Christelijk Gymnasium Utrecht and an internship in the laboratory of Leonard Ornstein. He earned his Ph.D in physics in 1924, writing a thesis on gas discharge physics.
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Franklin L. West
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Franklin Lorenzo Richards West was an American educator and a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . West was born and raised in Ogden, Utah Territory, to Joseph A. West and Josephine Richards. He earned a B.S. from the Utah Agricultural College in 1904 and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 1911. West was a professor of physics at the Utah Agricultural College, which is today Utah State University. For 28 years he was the dean of faculty at the school.
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Benjamin Jekhowsky
1881 - 1975 (94 years)
Benjamin Jekhowsky was a Russian–French astronomer, born in Saint-Petersburg in a noble family of a Russian railroad official. After attending Moscow University, he worked at the Paris Observatory beginning in 1912. Later he worked at the Algiers Observatory , where he became known as a specialist in celestial mechanics. After 1934, he appears to have begun signing scientific articles as Benjamin de Jekhowsky. The Minor Planet Center credits his discoveries under the name "B. Jekhovsky" . In modern English transliteration, his name would be written as Zhekhovskii or Zhekhovsky.
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Jakob Laub
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Jakob Johann Laub was a physicist from Austria-Hungary, who is best known for his work with Albert Einstein in the early period of special relativity. Life He was the son of Abraham Laub and Anna Maria Schenborn. Laub, who converted from the Jewish to the Catholic faith and changed his name from "Jakub" into "Jakob Johann", first visited High School in Rzeszów. Next stations were the University of Vienna, the University of Kraków and finally the University of Göttingen, where he studied mathematics under David Hilbert, Woldemar Voigt, Walther Nernst, Karl Schwarzschild and Hermann Minkowski. Afterwards he went to the University of Würzburg, where he attained a doctorate in 1907.
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Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski
1901 - 1964 (63 years)
Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski was a Polish-Austrian physicist, writer and businessman of Jewish descent. His testimony in the trial David Rousset vs. Les Lettres francaises and his book The Accused contributed significantly to spreading knowledge about Stalinist terror and show trials in Western Europe.
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Mieczysław Wolfke
1883 - 1947 (64 years)
Mieczysław Wolfke was a Polish physicist, professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, the forerunner of holography and television. He discovered the method of solidification of helium as well as two types of liquid helium. He was a Masonic Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge of Poland from 1931 to 1934. He served as president of the Polish Physical Society between 1930 and 1934.
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Kristian Birkeland
1867 - 1917 (50 years)
Kristian Olaf Bernhard Birkeland was a Norwegian scientist, professor of physics at the Royal Fredriks University in Oslo. He is best remembered for his theories of atmospheric electric currents that elucidated the nature of the aurora borealis. In order to fund his research on the aurorae, he invented the electromagnetic cannon and the Birkeland–Eyde process of fixing nitrogen from the air. Birkeland was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times.
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Georgi Manev
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Georgi Manev was a Bulgarian physicist, founder of the Sofia University Department of Theoretical Physics, rector of Sofia University and education minister of Bulgaria . His work, mostly known as the Manev field, is used today in aerospace science.
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Francis Lee Friedman
1918 - 1962 (44 years)
Francis Lee Friedman was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Life Born in New York City, Friedman received a BA from Harvard in 1939 and an MA also from Harvard in 1940. In 1941 he was a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin.
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Robert d'Escourt Atkinson
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was a British astronomer, physicist and inventor. Biography Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was born in Wales on April 11, 1898. He went to Manchester Grammar School and received a degree in physics from Oxford in 1922. He worked in the Clarendon Laboratory and then went to Göttingen, where he received a Ph.D. in physics in 1928. After teaching physics at the Berlin Technische Hochscule for a year, Atkinson was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Rutgers University. He taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1929 to 1937, when he became Chief Assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
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Paul Peter Ewald
1888 - 1985 (97 years)
Paul Peter Ewald, FRS was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods. Education Ewald received his early education in the classics at the Gymnasium in Berlin and Potsdam, where he learned to speak Greek, French, and English, in addition to his native German.
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Édmée Chandon
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Édmée Marie Juliette Chandon was an astronomer known for being the first professional female astronomer in France. She worked at the Paris Observatory from 1908 until her retirement in 1941. Biography The eldest of five children, Chandon was born to Marie Duhan and merchant François Chandon on 21 November 1885 in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. In July 1906, she completed her degree in Mathematical Sciences at the Faculté des sciences de Paris. She began working at the Paris Observatory in November 1908 as a trainee, where she met Jacques Jean Trousset after he joined her team in January 1909.
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Ruth Stokes
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.
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Pavel Molchanov
1893 - 1941 (48 years)
Pavel Alexandrovich Molchanov was a Soviet Russian meteorologist and the inventor of the first Russian radiosonde in 1930, while the French Pierre Idrac and Robert Bureau were the first to develop the radiosonde in 1929.
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Fanny Gates
1872 - 1931 (59 years)
Fanny Cook Gates was an American physicist, an American Physical Society fellow and American Mathematical Society member. She made contributions to the research of radioactive materials, determining that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively. More specifically, Gates showed that the emission of blue light from quinine was temperature dependent, providing evidence that the emitted light is produced from phosphorescence rather than radioactive decay.
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Paul Harzer
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Paul Harzer was a German mathematician and astronomer best known for his papers arguing with Albert Einstein regarding the Sagnac effect and its relationship to Special Relativity. Harzer was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Kiel and Director of its observatory. His published article on the experiment of Franz Harress drew two reply articles from Einstein.
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Samson Kutateladze
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Samson Semyonovich Kutateladze was a Soviet heat physicist and hydrodynamist. Biography Early life Kutateladze's parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, an obstetric nurse. His father, Semyon Samsonovich, had been a nobleman; he was before the October Revolution a student at Petrograd University and then an army officer. He was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp near Novosibirsk. Following the divorce, Kutateladze and his mother lived for a few years in Georgia, returning in 1922 to Petrograd.
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George Adolphus Schott
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
George Adolphus Schott FRS was a British mathematician. He is best known for developing the full theory of radiation from electrons travelling at close to the speed of light. Born in Bradford to German parents, he was educated at Bradford Grammar School and later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1890. After obtaining his Doctor of Science he became assistant lecturer to D.M. Lewis in the Department of Physics. After a years leave, in which he travelled to Germany, he became lecturer of Applied Mathematics at Aberystwyth University, where he would spend the rest of his career.
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Yrjö Väisälä
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Yrjö Väisälä was a Finnish astronomer and physicist. His main contributions were in the field of optics. He was also active in geodetics, astronomy and optical metrology. He had an affectionate nickname of Wizard of Tuorla , and a book with the same title in Finnish describes his works. His discoveries include 128 minor planets and 3 comets.
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Jean Bosler
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
Jean Bosler was a French astronomer and author of several books. Recruited by Deslandres as an astronomer at l’observatoire de Paris, Bosler discovered in 1908 in the spectrum of Comet Morehouse the spectral lines of ionized nitrogen, which was the first evidence of that element in comets. Much of his research was on the physical properties and orbits of comets. He made a report on progress in astrophysics in the United States for the 1910 annual report of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1912, he showed in his doctoral dissertation that the Sun’s magnetic field, by means of the intermediary ...
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John Augustine Zahm
1851 - 1921 (70 years)
The Rev. John Augustine Zahm , CSC was a Holy Cross priest, author, scientist, and explorer of South America. He was born at New Lexington, Ohio, and died in Munich, Germany. Early life Zahm was born on June 14, 1851 in a log home in Jackson Township, Perry County, Ohio to John and Mary Zahm. His mother was born in Pennsylvania and was of English descent, having Edward Braddock as an ancestor. His father was an immigrant to the United States from Olsberg, Germany.
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Knut Lundmark
1889 - 1958 (69 years)
Knut Emil Lundmark , was a Swedish astronomer, professor of astronomy and head of the observatory at Lund University from 1929 to 1955. Lundmark received his astronomical education at the observatory of Uppsala University. His dissertation was titled: The relations of the globular clusters and spiral nebulae to the stellar system. During the 1920s he worked at several observatories in the USA, mainly the Lick Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory.
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Friedrich Hayn
1863 - 1928 (65 years)
Friedrich Karl Traugott Hayn was a German astronomer. Biography Hayn was born in Auerbach, Saxony, in 1863, the son of a pastor. He attended high school in Dresden. From 1883 to 1888, he studied astronomy at Leipzig University and the University of Göttingen. In 1888, he received his doctorate from Göttingen after determining the orbit of Comet Swift–Tuttle, which had been discovered in 1862. In 1891, he became an assistant at Leipzig Observatory. In 1920, he turned down an offer from the Koenigsberg Observatory, and became an associate professor at Leipzig. Throughout his career, he surveyed, among other things, the Pleiades cluster and certain rotational elements of the moon.
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Theodor Kaluza
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza was a German mathematician and physicist known for the Kaluza–Klein theory, involving field equations in five-dimensional space-time. His idea that fundamental forces can be unified by introducing additional dimensions were reused much later for string theory.
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Prosper-René Blondlot
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Prosper-René Blondlot was a French physicist, who in 1891 made the first measurement of the speed of radio waves, but is now mostly remembered for his "discovery" of N rays, a phenomenon that subsequently proved to be illusory.
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Friedrich Karl Ginzel
1850 - 1926 (76 years)
Friedrich Karl Ginzel was an Austrian astronomer. From 1877 Ginzel worked at the observatory in Vienna. In 1886, he became a member of the Königlichen Astronomischen Recheninstituts in Berlin, where he was offered a professorship in 1899.
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Richard Börnstein
1852 - 1913 (61 years)
Richard Börnstein was a German physicist and meteorologist. Born into a Jewish family in Königsberg, he studied natural sciences at the University of Göttingen, and later on, worked as an assistant to Georg Hermann Quincke at the University of Heidelberg. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg, and afterwards taught classes in experimental physics and meteorology at the Agricultural Academy in Proskau. From 1881 onward, he served as a professor at the Agricultural University of Berlin.
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Paul Drude
1863 - 1906 (43 years)
Paul Karl Ludwig Drude was a German physicist specializing in optics. He wrote a fundamental textbook integrating optics with James Clerk Maxwell's theories of electromagnetism. Education Born into an ethnic German family, the son of a physician in Braunschweig, Drude began his studies in mathematics at the University of Göttingen, but later changed his major to physics. His dissertation covering the reflection and diffraction of light in crystals was completed in 1887, under Woldemar Voigt.
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Gyula Farkas
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak or Julius Farkas de Kisbarnak was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist. Biography Farkas was born on March 28, 1847, in Sárosd, Hungary. He was the eldest of seven children in a Roman Catholic Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak, which can trace back their origins to the first half of the 17th century. His father was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys; his mother was Cecília Hoffmann . His paternal grandparents were János Farkas de Kisbarnak , state administrator of Súr and Anna Fiber. His maternal grandparents were István Hoffmann, states cashier and Rozália Vitmáier.
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Eugène Cosserat
1866 - 1931 (65 years)
Eugène-Maurice-Pierre Cosserat was a French mathematician and astronomer. Born in Amiens, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1883 to 1888. He was on Science faculty of Toulouse University from 1889 and director of its observatory from 1908, a position he held for the rest of his life. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1919.
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Isaac Newton
1642 - 1727 (85 years)
Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book , first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though notably he developed calculus well before Leibniz.
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Ptolemy
100 - 170 (70 years)
Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treat...
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Ernest Rutherford
1871 - 1937 (66 years)
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. Rutherford has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday". In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." He was the first Oceanian Nobel laureate, and the first to perform the awarded work in Canada.
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