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.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#11601
William L. McMillan
1936 - 1984 (48 years)
William L. McMillan was an American physicist noted for his research of condensed matter physics. McMillan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, professor of physics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences McMillan received the 1978 Fritz London Memorial Prize for his work in superconductors. The National Academies Press called him "the ablest condensed matter physicist of his generation". The University of Illinois established an award in his name: The William L. McMillan Award.
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Enrique Gaviola
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Ramón Enrique Gaviola was an Argentinian astrophysicist. Student of Richard Gans at the Universidad de La Plata went in 1922 to Germany where he continued his studies in physics. He studied with Max Planck, Max Born and Albert Einstein, graduating from the University of Berlin in 1926.
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Ormond Stone
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Ormond Stone , was an American astronomer, mathematician and educator. He was the director of Cincinnati Observatory and subsequently the first director of the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, where he trained a significant number of scientists. He served as the editor of the Annals of Mathematics and towards the end of his life made donations which led to the founding of the Fairfax Public Library System.
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David Fabricius
1564 - 1617 (53 years)
David Fabricius was a German pastor who made two major discoveries in the early days of telescopic astronomy, jointly with his eldest son, Johannes Fabricius . David Fabricius was born at Esens, studied at the University of Helmstedt starting in 1583 and served as pastor for small towns near his birthplace in Frisia , at Resterhafe near Dornum in 1584 and at Osteel in 1603. As was common for Protestant ministers of the day, he dabbled in science: his particular interest was astronomy. Fabricius corresponded with astronomer Johannes Kepler.
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Sameera Moussa
1917 - 1952 (35 years)
Sameera Moussa or Samira Musa Aly was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner "Atoms for Peace." She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.
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Daniel Hay Guest
#11607
Benjamin Markarian
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Benjamin "Benik" Egishevitch Markarian was an Armenian astrophysicist. Markarian's Chain is a group of galaxies which was named after him when he discovered that its members move with a common motion. He is also the namesake of a catalog of compact, optically bright galaxies known as Markarian galaxies.
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David Gill
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Sir David Gill was a Scottish astronomer who is known for measuring astronomical distances, for astrophotography and geodesy. He spent much of his career in South Africa. Life and work David Gill was born at 48 Skene Terrace in Aberdeen the son of David Gill, watchmaker and his wife Margaret Mitchell. He was educated first at Bellevue Academy in Aberdeen then at Dollar Academy. He spent two years at Aberdeen University, where he was taught by James Clerk Maxwell, and then joined his father's clock-making business. His most important influence at university was probably from Prof David Thomson.
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Bruno Finzi
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Bruno Finzi was an Italian mathematician, engineer and physicist. Biography Born at Gardone Val Trompia, Finzi received in 1920 his Laurea as an engineer and in 1921 as a mathematician at the University of Pavia. In 1922 he became an assistant of Umberto Cisotti at the Polytecnico di Milano. In 1931 he became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Milan, but returned in 1947 to the Polytecnico di Milano as the successor to Cisotti and became there director of the Mathematical Institute. From 1949 he was the head of the newly founded Institute of Aeronautics and in 1967 he bec...
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Charles-Eugène Delaunay
1816 - 1872 (56 years)
Charles-Eugène Delaunay was a French astronomer and mathematician. His lunar motion studies were important in advancing both the theory of planetary motion and mathematics. Life Born in Lusigny-sur-Barse, France, to Jacques‐Hubert Delaunay and Catherine Choiselat, Delaunay studied under Jean-Baptiste Biot at the Sorbonne. He worked on the mechanics of the Moon as a special case of the three-body problem. He published two volumes on the topic, each of 900 pages in length, in 1860 and 1867. The work hints at chaos in the system, and clearly demonstrates the problem of so-called "small denominators" in perturbation theory.
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Peter Herbert Jensen
1913 - 1955 (42 years)
Peter Herbert Jensen was a German experimental nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranverein. After the war, he was a department director in the high-voltage section of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, and a supernumerary professor at the University of Mainz.
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Tom W. Bonner
1910 - 1961 (51 years)
Tom Wilkerson Bonner was an American experimental physicist who developed important instruments and techniques for neutron physics and nuclear physics . Biography Bonner earned his bachelor's degree in physics from SMU in 1931 and his PhD from Rice University in 1934. In 1934–1936, he was a National Research Council fellow at Caltech. At Rice University, he became an instructor in 1936, a professor in 1945, and chair of the physics department in 1947. In the academic year 1938–1939, he was a Guggenheim fellow. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he did radar research at the MIT Radiation Lab.
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Thomas Cowling
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Thomas George Cowling FRS was an English astronomer. Early life and education Cowling was born in Hackney, London, the second of four sons of George Cowling and Edith Eliza Cowling . He was educated at Sir George Monoux Grammar School in Walthamstow and read mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results.
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Fernando Sanford
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Fernando Sanford was an American physicist and university professor. He was one of the 22 "pioneer professors" for Stanford University. Sanford was born on a farm near Franklin Grove in Lee County, Illinois, on February 12, 1854. He was the son of Faxton and Maria Mariah Sanford. He attended Carthage College, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1879. He taught school until the mid-1880s, then studied physics in Germany under Hermann von Helmholtz for two years.
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Clement D. Child
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Clement D. Child was an American physicist and educator. He is noted particularly for "Child's law" , which is an equation that describes the electric current that flows between the plates of a vacuum tube. Vacuum tubes were the main components in electronics from about 1905 to 1960, when transistors and integrated circuits mostly supplanted them. Child's Law is still a staple of textbooks treating charged particle motion in vacuum and in solids.
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Lionel Wilberforce
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Lionel Robert Wilberforce was a British physicist. He is best known for the invention of the Wilberforce pendulum, which exhibits a curious motion in which periods of purely rotational oscillation gradually alternate with periods of purely up and down oscillation.
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Zoltán Lajos Bay
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Zoltán Lajos Bay was a Hungarian physicist, professor, and engineer who developed technologies, including tungsten lamps and microwave devices. He was the leader of the second group to observe radar echoes from the Moon . From 1930, he worked at the University of Szeged as a professor of theoretical physics.
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James Dunlop
1793 - 1848 (55 years)
James Dunlop FRSE was a Scottish astronomer, noted for his work in Australia. He was employed by Sir Thomas Brisbane to work as astronomer's assistant at his private observatory, once located at Paramatta , New South Wales, about west of Sydney during the 1820s and 1830s. Dunlop was mostly a visual observer, doing stellar astrometry work for Brisbane, and after its completion, then independently discovered and catalogued many new telescopic southern double stars and deep-sky objects. He later became the Superintendent of Paramatta Observatory when it was finally sold to the New South Wales ...
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Johannes Bosscha
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Johannes Bosscha Jr. was a Dutch physicist. Bosscha came from a family long known for their academic achievements. His great-grandfather and grandfather were classical scholars. His father, Johannes Bosscha Sr. , was a professor of history and literature and also was minister of church-state relationships in two governments . From 1844–1848 Johannes Jr. attended a Latin school in Amsterdam, after which he enrolled at Leiden University. In 1854 he obtained his doctoral degree with a thesis on galvanometry. After a brief sojourn in Berlin he returned to the physics department in Leiden.
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Edward Leamington Nichols
1854 - 1937 (83 years)
Edward Leamington Nichols was an American scientist. He was a physicist and astronomer, professor of physics at Cornell University. Biography He was born of American parentage at Leamington, England, and received his education at Cornell University, graduating in 1875. After Studying at Leipzig, Berlin, and Göttingen he was appointed fellow in physics at Johns Hopkins. He then spent some time in the Thomas Edison laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and subsequently became professor of physics and chemistry in the Central University of Kentucky , professor of physics and astronomy at the Un...
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James Ferguson
1710 - 1776 (66 years)
James Ferguson was a Scottish astronomer. He is known as the inventor and improver of astronomical and other scientific apparatus, as a striking instance of self education and as an itinerant lecturer.
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Cargill Gilston Knott
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Cargill Gilston Knott FRS, FRSE LLD was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was a pioneer in seismological research. He spent his early career in Japan. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and President of the Scottish Meteorological Society.
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Marc-Auguste Pictet
1752 - 1825 (73 years)
Marc-Auguste Pictet was a Swiss scientific journalist and experimental natural philosopher. Pictet's main contribution to learning was his editing of the scientific section of the Bibliothèque Britannique , a publication devoted to the diffusion on the Continent of knowledge and arts produced in Great Britain. His own scientific research focused on the fields of physical science, especially calorimetry, but also astronomy, geology, meteorology and technology, especially chronometry and the manufacture of fine earthenware.
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Christopher Clavius
1538 - 1612 (74 years)
Christopher Clavius, SJ was a Jesuit German mathematician, head of mathematicians at the , and astronomer who was a member of the Vatican commission that accepted the proposed calendar invented by Aloysius Lilius, that is known as the Gregorian calendar. Clavius would later write defences and an explanation of the reformed calendar, including an emphatic acknowledgement of Lilius' work. In his last years he was probably the most respected astronomer in Europe and his textbooks were used for astronomical education for over fifty years in and even out of Europe.
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Evan James Williams
1903 - 1945 (42 years)
Evan James Williams FRS was a Welsh experimental physicist who worked in a number of fields with some of the most notable physicists of his day, including Patrick Blackett, Lawrence Bragg, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr.
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Joseph O. Hirschfelder
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and in the creation of the nuclear bomb. Biography Hirschfelder was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a Jewish couple, Arthur Douglas and May Rosalie . He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1929 and at Yale University from 1929 to 1931. Hirschfelder received doctorates in physics and chemistry from Princeton University under the direction of Eugene Wigner, Henry Eyring and Hugh Stott Taylor. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with John von Neumann for a year after his PhD at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Aryeh Kaplan
1934 - 1983 (49 years)
Aryeh Moshe Eliyahu Kaplan was an American Orthodox rabbi, author, and translator best known for his Living Torah edition of the Torah and extensive Kabbalistic commentaries. He became well-known as a prolific writer and was lauded as an original thinker. His wide-ranging literary output, inclusive of introductory pamphlets on Jewish beliefs, and philosophy written at the request of NCSY are often regarded as significant factors in the growth of the baal teshuva movement.
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Otto Scherzer
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Otto Scherzer was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to electron microscopy. Education Scherzer studied physics at the Munich Technical University and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich from 1927 to 1931. At LMU his thesis advisor was Arnold Sommerfeld, and he was granted his doctorate in 1931. His thesis was on the quantum theory of Bremsstrahlung. From 1932 to 1933, Scherzer was an assistant to Carl Ramsauer at the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, an electric combine with headquarters in Berlin and Frankfurt-on-Main. There, he did research on electron optics.
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Otto Lehmann
1855 - 1922 (67 years)
Otto Lehmann was a German physicist and "father" of liquid crystal. Life Otto was the son of Franz Xavier Lehmann, a mathematics teacher in the Baden-Wurtemberg school system, with a strong interest in microscopes. Otto learned to experiment and keep records of this findings. Between 1872 and 1877, Lehmann studied natural sciences at the University of Strassburg and obtained the Ph.D. under crystallographer Paul Groth. Otto used polarizers in a microscope so that he might watch for birefringence appearing in the process of crystallization.
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Frederick Guthrie
1833 - 1886 (53 years)
Frederick Guthrie FRS FRSE was a British physicist, chemist, and academic author. He was the son of Alexander Guthrie, a London tradesman, and the younger brother of mathematician Francis Guthrie. Along with William Fletcher Barrett he founded the Physical Society of London in 1874 and was president of the society from 1884 until 1886. He believed that science should be based on experimentation rather than discussion.
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Johan Peter Holtsmark
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Johan Peter Holtsmark was a Norwegian physicist, who studied spectral line broadening and electron scattering. In 1929, while at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Holtsmark established acoustics research laboratories, focusing on architectural acoustics and sound insulation. Holtsmark was also a consultant for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation throughout the 1930s.
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Vitold Tserasky
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Vitold Karlovich Tserasky also spelled Witold Cerasky was a Russian astronomer and inventor of astronomical tools and techniques. The asteroid 807 Ceraskia and the Lunar crater Tseraskiy are named after him.
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Jules Violle
1841 - 1923 (82 years)
Jules Louis Gabriel Violle was a French physicist and inventor. He is notable for having determined the solar constant at Mont Blanc in 1875, and, in 1881, for proposing a standard for luminous intensity, called the Violle, equal to the light emitted by 1 cm² of platinum at its melting point. It was notable as the first unit of light intensity that did not depend on the properties of a particular lamp. This was much larger than traditional measures such as candlepower, so the standard SI unit candela was originally defined in 1946 as 1/60 Violle.
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Max Bernhard Weinstein
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Max Bernhard Weinstein was a German physicist and philosopher. He is best known as an opponent of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and for having written a broad examination of various theological theories, including extensive discussion of pandeism.
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William Edward Ayrton
1847 - 1908 (61 years)
William Edward Ayrton, FRS was an English physicist and electrical engineer. Life Early life and education Ayrton was born in London, the son of Edward Nugent Ayrton, a barrister, and educated at University College School and University College, London. He later studied under Lord Kelvin at Glasgow.
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Georg Hermann Quincke
1834 - 1924 (90 years)
Georg Hermann Quincke FRSFor HFRSE was a German physicist. Biography Born in Frankfurt-on-Oder, Quincke was the son of prominent physician Geheimer Medicinal-Rath Hermann Quincke and the elder brother of physician Heinrich Quincke.
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Ellen Hayes
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Ellen Amanda Hayes was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was a controversial figure, not only because of being a female college professor, but also for embracing many radical causes. Early life Hayes was born in Granville, Ohio, the first of six children to Ruth Rebecca Hayes and Charles Coleman Hayes. At the age of seven she studied at the Centerville school, a one-room ungraded public school and, in 1867, at sixteen, was employed to teach at a country school. In 1872, she entered the preparatory department at Oberlin College and was admitted as a freshman in 1875, where her mai...
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Étienne-Louis Malus
1775 - 1812 (37 years)
Étienne-Louis Malus was a French officer, engineer, physicist, and mathematician. Malus was born in Paris, France. He participated in Napoleon's expedition into Egypt and was a member of the mathematics section of the Institut d'Égypte. Malus became a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1810. In 1810 the Royal Society of London awarded him the Rumford Medal.
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Anders Donner
1854 - 1938 (84 years)
Anders Donner was a professor of astronomy at the University of Helsinki observatory between 1883 and 1915. Before that, he served as a docent of astronomy between 1881–83. He was the rector of the university between 1911 and 1915 and acting chancellor 1917–1919 and 1921–1926.
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Aristyllus
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Aristyllus was a Greek astronomer, presumably of the school of Timocharis . He was among the earliest meridian-astronomy observers. Six of his stellar declinations are preserved at Almajest 7.3. All are exactly correct within his over-cautious rounding to 1/4 degree. See discussion at DIO 7.1 ‡1 p. 13 .
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Herbert E. Ives
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Herbert Eugene Ives was a scientist and engineer who headed the development of facsimile and television systems at AT&T in the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for the 1938 Ives–Stilwell experiment, which provided direct confirmation of special relativity's time dilation, although Ives himself did not accept special relativity, and argued instead for an alternative interpretation of the experimental results. Ives has been described as "the most authoritative opponent of relativity in United States between the late 1930s and the early 1950s."
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Antonio Abetti
1846 - 1928 (82 years)
Antonio Abetti was an Italian astronomer. Born in San Pietro di Gorizia , he earned a degree in mathematics and engineering at the University of Padua. He was married to Giovanna Colbachini in 1879 and they had two sons. He died in Arcetri.
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Charlotte Riefenstahl
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Charlotte Houtermans was a German physicist. Education Riefenstahl began her studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen in 1922, where her teachers included, among others, Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Emmy Noether, Robert Pohl, and Carl Runge. She received her doctorate under Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann in 1927, the same year as Robert Oppenheimer, under Born, and Fritz Houtermans, under Franck. She was courted by both Oppenheimer and Houtermans.
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Carl Hellmuth Hertz
1920 - 1990 (70 years)
Carl Hellmuth Hertz was a German physicist known primarily for being involved in the development of inkjet technology and ultrasound technology. He was the son of Gustav Ludwig Hertz and great nephew of Heinrich Hertz.
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Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov was a Soviet astronomer who was a pioneer in astrobiology and is considered to be the father of astrobotany. He worked as an observer at the Pulkovo Observatory from 1906 until 1941. After undertaking an expedition to Alma-Ata to observe the solar eclipse of September 21, 1941, he remained and became one of the founders of the Kamenskoe Plateau Observatory, the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, and the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences.
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Frederik Kaiser
1808 - 1872 (64 years)
Frederik Kaiser was a Dutch astronomer. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1838 until his death. He is credited with the advancement of Dutch astronomy through his scientific contributions of positional measurements, his popularization of astronomy in the Netherlands, and by helping to build a state-of-the-art observatory in 1861. Today it is known as the "Old Observatory"
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Balthasar van der Pol
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Balthasar van der Pol was a Dutch physicist. Life and work Van der Pol began his studies of physics in Utrecht in 1911. J. A. Fleming offered van der Pol the use of the Pender Electrical Laboratory at University College for a study of the heuristics of wireless reception on board ships. In England he also worked with J. J. Thomson. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Balthsar worked with Hendrik Lorentz at Teylers Stichting. For his thesis he wrote The effect of an ionised gas on electro-magnetic wave propagation and its application to radio, as demonstrated by glow-discharge measurement under the supervision of Willem Henri Julius.
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J. Curry Street
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Jabez Curry Street was an American physicist, a co-discoverer of atomic particles called muons. Street was also notable for heading the group at MIT that created ground and ship radar systems. He also directed development of LORAN Navigation System, which is used worldwide for navigation purposes. Street was chairman of the physics department at Harvard University and acting director of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academies Press called him "a boldly innovative experimental physicist whose discoveries in cosmic rays influe...
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Anania Shirakatsi
610 - Present (1416 years)
Anania Shirakatsi was a 7th-century Armenian polymath and natural philosopher, author of extant works covering mathematics, astronomy, geography, chronology, and other fields. Little is known for certain of his life outside of his own writings, but he is considered the father of the exact and natural sciences in Armenia—the first Armenian mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer.
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Carl Charlier
1862 - 1934 (72 years)
Carl Vilhelm Ludwig Charlier was a Swedish astronomer. His parents were Emmerich Emanuel and Aurora Kristina Charlier. Career Charlier was born in Östersund. He received his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in 1887, later worked there and at the Stockholm Observatory and was Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory at Lund University from 1897.
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