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,
#11751
Fritz London
1900 - 1954 (54 years)
Fritz Wolfgang London was a German born physicist and professor at Duke University. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces are today considered classic and are discussed in standard textbooks of physical chemistry. With his brother Heinz London, he made a significant contribution to understanding electromagnetic properties of superconductors with the London equations and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on five separate occasions.
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Johann Josef Loschmidt
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Johann Josef Loschmidt , who mostly called himself Josef Loschmidt , was a notable Austrian scientist who performed ground-breaking work in chemistry, physics , and crystal forms. Born in Karlsbad, a town in the Austrian Empire , Loschmidt became professor of physical chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1868.
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Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi
903 - 986 (83 years)
ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sūfī was an Iranian astronomer. His work , written in 964, included both textual descriptions and illustrations. The Persian polymath Al-Biruni wrote that al-Sūfī's work on the ecliptic was carried out in Shiraz. Al-Sūfī lived at the Buyid court in Isfahan.
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Ludwig Biermann
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Ludwig Franz Benedikt Biermann was a German astronomer, obtaining his Ph.D. from Göttingen University in 1932. He made important contributions to astrophysics and plasma physics, discovering the Biermann battery. He predicted the existence of the solar wind which in 1947 he dubbed "solar corpuscular radiation".
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Auguste Bravais
1811 - 1863 (52 years)
Auguste Bravais was a French physicist known for his work in crystallography, the conception of Bravais lattices, and the formulation of Bravais law. Bravais also studied magnetism, the northern lights, meteorology, geobotany, phyllotaxis, astronomy, statistics and hydrography.
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Léon Brillouin
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Léon Nicolas Brillouin was a French physicist. He made contributions to quantum mechanics, radio wave propagation in the atmosphere, solid-state physics, and information theory. Early life Brillouin was born in Sèvres, near Paris, France. His father, Marcel Brillouin, grandfather, Éleuthère Mascart, and great-grandfather, Charles Briot, were physicists as well.
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Erich Fischer
1910 - 1969 (59 years)
Erich Horst Fischer was a German experimental physicist. He worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. After World War II, he helped rebuild the KWIP branch at Hechingen, was a professor at the University of Tübingen and Ankara University, and then a research scientist for the German firm GKSS.
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Pierre Victor Auger
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Pierre Victor Auger was a French physicist, born in Paris. He worked in the fields of atomic physics, nuclear physics, and cosmic ray physics. He is famous for being one of the discoverers of the Auger effect, named after him.
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André-Marie Ampère
1775 - 1836 (61 years)
André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". He is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid and the electrical telegraph. As an autodidact, Ampère was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France.
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Dirk Coster
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
Dirk Coster was a Dutch physicist. He was a professor of Physics and Meteorology at the University of Groningen. Coster was born in Amsterdam. On 26 February 1919 he married Lina Maria "Miep" Wijsman, who held a degree in Oriental languagess. Eventually, she was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate degree in this field from the University of Leiden. Dirk and Miep had two sons and two daughters . Coster is known as the co-discoverer of hafnium in 1923, along with George de Hevesy, by means of X-ray spectroscopic analysis of zirconium ore. The discovery took place in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Ejnar Hertzsprung
1873 - 1967 (94 years)
Ejnar Hertzsprung was a Danish chemist and astronomer. Career Hertzsprung was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, the son of Severin and Henriette. He studied chemical engineering at Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1898. After spending two years working as a chemist in St. Petersburg, in 1901 he studied photochemistry at Leipzig University for a year. His father was an amateur astronomer, which led to Ejnar's interest in the subject. He began making astronomical observations in Fredericksberg in 1902, and within a few years had noticed that stars with similar spectral type could have widely different absolute magnitudes.
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Giuseppe Piazzi
1746 - 1826 (80 years)
Giuseppe Piazzi was an Italian Catholic priest of the Theatine order, mathematician, and astronomer. He established an observatory at Palermo, now the Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo – Giuseppe S. Vaiana. He is perhaps most famous for his discovery of the first dwarf planet, Ceres.
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Robert W. Wood
1868 - 1955 (87 years)
Robert Williams Wood was an American physicist and inventor who made pivotal contributions to the field of optics. He pioneered infrared and ultraviolet photography. Wood's patents and theoretical work inform modern understanding of the physics of ultraviolet light, and made possible myriad uses of UV fluorescence which became popular after World War I. He published many articles on spectroscopy, phosphorescence, diffraction, and ultraviolet light.
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E. T. Whittaker
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th-century who contributed widely to applied mathematics and was renowned for his research in mathematical physics and numerical analysis, including the theory of special functions, along with his contributions to astronomy, celestial mechanics, the history of physics, and digital signal processing.
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel
1788 - 1827 (39 years)
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and i...
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John Henry Poynting
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
John Henry Poynting FRS was an English physicist. He was the first professor of physics at Mason Science College from 1880 to 1900, and then the successor institution, the University of Birmingham until his death.
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Hermann Oberth
1894 - 1989 (95 years)
Hermann Julius Oberth was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and rocket pioneer of Transylvanian Saxon descent. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Herman Potočnik . Oberth supported Nazi Germany's war effort and received the War Merit Cross in 1943.
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Johannes Rydberg
1854 - 1919 (65 years)
Johannes Robert Rydberg was a Swedish physicist mainly known for devising the Rydberg formula, in 1888, which is used to describe the wavelengths of photons emitted by changes in the energy level of an electron in a hydrogen atom.
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Alfred Kleiner
1849 - 1916 (67 years)
Alfred Kleiner was a Swiss physicist and Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Zurich. He was Albert Einstein's doctoral advisor or Doktorvater. Initially Einstein's advisor was Heinrich F. Weber. However, they had a major falling out, and Einstein chose to switch to Kleiner.
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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.
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Mário Schenberg
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Mário Schenberg was a Brazilian electrical engineer, physicist, art critic and writer. Early life Schenberg was born in Recife, Brazil. His parents were Russian-Jews of German origin. From early on he showed remarkable ability for mathematics, enchanting himself with geometry, which had a strong influence on his works. Schenberg took the primary and secondary courses in Recife. Because of his family's financial limitations, he was not able to study in Europe. He then entered the Faculty of Engineering of Recife in 1931.
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William Hyde Wollaston
1766 - 1828 (62 years)
William Hyde Wollaston was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering the chemical elements palladium and rhodium. He also developed a way to process platinum ore into malleable ingots.
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Joseph-Nicolas Delisle
1688 - 1768 (80 years)
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle was a French astronomer and cartographer. Delisle is mostly known for the Delisle scale, a temperature scale he invented in 1732. Life Joseph was born in Paris, one of the 11 sons of Claude Delisle . Like many of his brothers, among them Guillaume Delisle, he initially followed classical studies. Soon however, he moved to astronomy under the supervision of Joseph Lieutaud and Jacques Cassini. In 1714 he entered the French Academy of Sciences as pupil of Giacomo Filippo Maraldi. In the next year he discovered the Arago spot a century before Arago. Though he was a good sc...
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Pierre Duhem
1861 - 1916 (55 years)
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem was a French theoretical physicist who worked on thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity. Duhem was also a historian of science, noted for his work on the European Middle Ages, which is regarded as having created the field of the history of medieval science. As a philosopher of science, he is remembered principally for his views on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria .
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Lew Kowarski
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Lew Kowarski was a Russian born and naturalized French physicist. He was a lesser-known but important contributor to nuclear science. Early life Lew Kowarski was born in Saint Petersburg to Nicholas Kowarski, a businessman and the Ukrainian singer Olga Vlassenko. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, when Lew was 12 years old, his family fled west under adventurous circumstances and settled in Vilnius . During his youth, Lew was a talented musician and considered a music career; however, his fingers grew too large for the keyboard.
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Erich Schumann
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Erich Schumann was a German physicist who specialized in acoustics and explosives, and had a penchant for music. He was a general officer in the army and a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin. When Adolf Hitler came to power he joined the Nazi Party. During World War II, his positions in the Army Ordnance Office and the Army High Command made him one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. He ran the German nuclear energy program from 1939 to 1942, when the army relinquished control to the Reich Research Council. His role in the pr...
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James Bradley
1693 - 1762 (69 years)
James Bradley was an English astronomer and priest who served as the third Astronomer Royal from 1742. He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light , and the nutation of the Earth's axis .
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Ernst Ruska
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope. Life and career Ernst Ruska was born in Heidelberg, Germany. He was educated at the Technical University of Munich from 1925 to 1927 and then entered the Technical University of Berlin, where he posited that microscopes using electrons, with wavelengths 1000 times shorter than those of light, could provide a more detailed picture of an object than a microscope utilizing light, in which magnification is limited by the size of the wavelengths.
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Adolphe Quetelet
1796 - 1874 (78 years)
Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet FRSF or FRSE was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist who founded and directed the Brussels Observatory and was influential in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences. His name is sometimes spelled with an accent as Quételet.
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Roger Joseph Boscovich
1711 - 1787 (76 years)
Roger Joseph Boscovich was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the Republic of Ragusa. He studied and lived in Italy and France where he also published many of his works.
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Heinrich Christian Schumacher
1780 - 1850 (70 years)
Prof Heinrich Christian Schumacher FRS FRSE was a German-Danish astronomer and mathematician. Biography Schumacher was born at Bramstedt, in Holstein, near the German/Danish border. He was educated at Altona Gymnasium on the outskirts of Hamburg. He studied in Germany at Kiel, Jena, and Göttingen Universities as well as Copenhagen. He received a doctorate from Dorpat University in Russian Empire in 1807.
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Walther Meissner
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Fritz Walther Meißner was a German technical physicist. Meißner was born in Berlin to Waldemar Meißner and Johanna Greger. He studied mechanical engineering and physics at the Technical University of Berlin, his doctoral supervisor being Max Planck. He then entered the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin. From 1922 to 1925, he established the world's third largest helium-liquifier, and discovered in 1933 the Meissner effect, damping of the magnetic field in superconductors. One year later, he was called as chair in technical physics at the Technical University of Munich.
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Guillermo Haro
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Guillermo Haro Barraza was a Mexican astronomer. Through his own astronomical research and the formation of new institutions, Haro was influential in the development of modern observational astronomy in Mexico. Internationally, he is best known for his contribution to the discovery of Herbig–Haro objects.
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Edward Arthur Milne
1896 - 1950 (54 years)
Edward Arthur Milne FRS was a British astrophysicist and mathematician. Biography Milne was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. He attended Hymers College and from there he won an open scholarship in mathematics and natural science to study at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914, gaining the largest number of marks which had ever been awarded in the examination. In 1916 he joined a group of mathematicians led by A. V. Hill for the Ministry of munitions working on the ballistics of anti-aircraft gunnery, they became known as ′Hill's Brigands′. Later Milne became an expert on sound localisation. In 1917 he became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
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Friedrich Bessel
1784 - 1846 (62 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. Certain important mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli before being generalised by Bessel.
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C. F. Powell
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Cecil Frank Powell, FRS was a British physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for heading the team that developed the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion , a subatomic particle.
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Simon Newcomb
1835 - 1909 (74 years)
Simon Newcomb was a Canadian–American astronomer, applied mathematician, and autodidactic polymath. He served as Professor of Mathematics in the United States Navy and at Johns Hopkins University. Born in Nova Scotia, at the age of 19 Newcomb left an apprenticeship to join his father in Massachusetts, where the latter was teaching.
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Johann Elert Bode
1747 - 1826 (79 years)
Johann Elert Bode was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularisation of the Titius–Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name. Life and career Bode was born in Hamburg. As a youth, he suffered from a serious eye disease that particularly damaged his right eye; he continued to have trouble with his eyes throughout his life.
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Karl Heinz Beckurts
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Karl Heinz Beckurts was a German physicist and research manager. With Karl Wirtz, he wrote a textbook on neutron physics. He was co-editor of the journal Nukleonik. Along with his driver, Eckhard Groppler, Beckurts was murdered by a roadside bomb at 7:32 AM on 9 July 1986 in Straßlach, a village near Munich. The bomb used an electronic triggering device. The Red Army Faction claimed responsibility under the name "Kommando Mara Cagol" but the identity of the perpetrators is still unknown. The Bundeskriminalamt named Horst Ludwig Meyer as the only suspect for the bombing; Meyer was fatally shot...
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Heinz Pose
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Rudolf Heinz Pose was a German nuclear physicist who worked in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. He did pioneering work in nuclear physics which contributed to the understanding atom's energy levels. Pose was an early member of the Germany's Uranium Club but eventually participated in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons when he was appointed director of Laboratory B in Obninsk in Russia in 1945.
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George Francis FitzGerald
1851 - 1901 (50 years)
Prof George Francis FitzGerald FTCD was an Irish academic and physicist who served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin from 1881 to 1901. FitzGerald is known for his work in electromagnetic theory and for the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction, which became an integral part of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after him, as is a building at TCD.
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Edward Charles Pickering
1846 - 1919 (73 years)
Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote Elements of Physical Manipulations .
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Charles Galton Darwin
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
Sir Charles Galton Darwin was an English physicist who served as director of the National Physical Laboratory during the Second World War. He was a son of the mathematician George Howard Darwin and a grandson of Charles Darwin.
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Marietta Blau
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist credited with developing photographic nuclear emulsions that were usefully able to image and accurately measure high-energy nuclear particles and events, significantly advancing the field of particle physics in her time. For this, she was awarded the Lieben Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As a Jew, she was forced to flee Austria when Nazi Germany annexed it in 1938, eventually making her way to the United States. She was nominated for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry for her work, but did not win. After her return to Austria, she wo...
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Al-Biruni
973 - 1048 (75 years)
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni , known as al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He has been called variously the "founder of Indology", "Father of Comparative Religion", "Father of modern geodesy", and the first anthropologist.
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Heinrich Rubens
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Heinrich Rubens was a German physicist. He is known for his measurements of the energy of black-body radiation which led Max Planck to the discovery of his radiation law. This was the genesis of quantum theory.
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Pascual Jordan
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Ernst Pascual Jordan was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix mechanics, and developed canonical anticommutation relations for fermions. He introduced Jordan algebras in an effort to formalize quantum field theory; the algebras have since found numerous applications within mathematics.
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John Tyndall
1820 - 1893 (73 years)
John Tyndall FRS was a prominent 19th-century Irish physicist. His scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he made discoveries in the realms of infrared radiation and the physical properties of air, proving the connection between atmospheric CO and what is now known as the greenhouse effect in 1859.
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Hans von Halban
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Hans Heinrich von Halban was a French physicist, of Austrian-Jewish descent. Family He was descended on his father's side from Polish Jews, who left Kraków for Vienna in the 1850s. His grandfather, Heinrich Blumenstock, was a senior official in the Habsburg Empire and was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph I in the 1880s, taking the name of Ritter Heinrich Blumenstock von Halban. The surname Blumenstock was subsequently dropped by the family, as was the use of 'von' after the Second World War. His mother's family was from Bohemia and his great-grandfather, Moritz von Fialka, was a colonel in ...
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Charles Édouard Guillaume
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Charles Édouard Guillaume was a Swiss physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920 in recognition of the service he had rendered to precision measurements in physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys. In 1919, he gave the fifth Guthrie Lecture at the Institute of Physics in London with the title "The Anomaly of the Nickel-Steels".
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