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,
#11801
Harrison Brown
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Harrison Scott Brown was an American nuclear chemist and geochemist. He was a political activist, who lectured and wrote on the issues of arms limitation, natural resources and world hunger. During World War II, Brown worked at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and Clinton Engineer Works, where he worked on ways to separate plutonium from uranium. The techniques he helped develop were used at the Hanford Site to produce the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. After the war he lectured on the dangers of nuclear weapons.
Go to Profile#11802
Christian T. Elvey
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Christian Thomas Elvey was an American astronomer and geophysicist. Biography He was born in Phoenix, Arizona to John A. and Lizzie Christina . As a student at the University of Kansas, he studied Astronomy and Physics, and was awarded a B.A. in 1921 then a Masters in 1923. His doctoral work in astrophysics was performed at the University of Chicago, where he was granted a Ph.D. in 1930 with a thesis concerning "the Relations Between the Observed Contours of Spectral Lines and the Physical Properties of the Stars".
Go to Profile#11803
Alexander Obukhov
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Alexander Mikhailovich Obukhov was a Soviet and Russian geophysicist and applied mathematician known for his contributions to statistical theory of turbulence and atmospheric physics. He was one of the founders of modern boundary layer meteorology. He served as the Head of the theoretical department at Sternberg Astronomical Institute, a division of Moscow State University.
Go to Profile#11804
George Van Biesbroeck
1880 - 1974 (94 years)
George A. Van Biesbroeck was a Belgian–American astronomer. He worked at observatories in Belgium, Germany and the United States. He specialized in the observation of double stars, asteroids and comets. He is notable for his long career as an observational astronomer.
Go to Profile#11805
John Mauchly
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
John William Mauchly was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
Go to Profile#11806
Wander Johannes de Haas
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Wander Johannes de Haas was a Dutch physicist and mathematician. He is best known for the Shubnikov–de Haas effect, the De Haas–Van Alphen effect and the Einstein–de Haas effect. Personal life Wander de Haas was born in Lisse, a small town near Leiden. He was the son of Albertus de Haas, principal of the Teacher's College in Middelburg, and Maria Efting. On 22 December 1910 he married Geertruida Luberta Lorentz, the eldest daughter of Hendrik Lorentz. They had two daughters and two sons. He was an atheist.
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Clinton Davisson
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Clinton Joseph Davisson was an American physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction in the famous Davisson–Germer experiment. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson.
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Günther Porod
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Günther Porod was an Austrian physicist. He is best known for his work on the small-angle X-ray scattering method, done in collaboration with his teacher Otto Kratky, and in particular for Porod's law, which describes the asymptote of the scattering intensity I for large scattering wave numbers q. In polymer physics, the worm-like chain model, introduced in a 1949 paper, is sometimes called the Kratky–Porod model.
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John P. Vinti
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
John Pascal Vinti was an American theoretical physicist, who published papers not only in physics, but also in mathematics and engineering. He is known for the Vinti integral. Biography His father, Giovanni Giuseppe Vinti , was born in Naples, Italy. In 1922 John P. Vinti graduated from Rogers High School in Newport, Rhode Island. At his high school graduation, he was honored with a prize in scholarship and a prize in mathematics. At age 15 Vinti matriculated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . There he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1927 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1932.
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David L. Webster
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
David Locke Webster was an American physicist and physics professor, whose early research on X-rays and Parson's magneton influenced Arthur Compton. Biography David Locke Webster was born November 6, 1888, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Andrew Gerrish Webster and Elizabeth Florence Briggs. He attended Harvard University, earning an A.B. in 1910 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1913. His teaching career began at Harvard as a mathematics instructor, 1910–1911; physics assistant, 1911–15; and physics instructor, 1915–1917, during which time he published several papers on X-ray theory. This work continu...
Go to Profile#11811
S. Pancharatnam
1934 - 1969 (35 years)
Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam was an Indian physicist who did significant work in the field of optics. He is noted for his discovery of a type of geometric phase sometimes known as Pancharatnam phase for polarized beams passing through crystals.
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T. H. Laby
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Thomas Howell Laby FRS , was an Australian physicist and chemist, Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of Melbourne 1915–1942. Along with George Kaye, he was one of the founding editors of the reference book Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants and Some Mathematical Functions, usually known simply as "Kaye and Laby".
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Rem Soloukhin
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
Rem Ivanovich Soloukhin was a Soviet scientist, specializing in physics and mechanics. Biography Rem Soloukhin was born in a teachers' family in Gus-Khrustalny, Soviet Union in 1930. He graduated from Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1953 and became PhD in 1957.
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Paul Ehrenfest
1880 - 1933 (53 years)
Paul Ehrenfest was an Austrian theoretical physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem. He bonded with Albert Einstein on a visit to Prague in 1912 and became a professor in Leiden, where he frequently hosted Einstein. He died by murder-suicide in 1933; he killed his disabled son Wassik, and then himself.
Go to Profile#11815
Leslie Comrie
1893 - 1950 (57 years)
Leslie John Comrie FRS was an astronomer and a pioneer in mechanical computation. Life Leslie John Comrie was born in Pukekohe , New Zealand, on 15 August 1893. He attended Auckland University College from 1912 to 1916, graduating with BA and MA degrees with Honours in Chemistry. During World War I, despite severe deafness, he saw action in France with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and lost his left leg in February 1918 to a British shell. While convalescing, he started using a mechanical calculator and went on to modify commercial calculators for specific projects.
Go to Profile#11816
Kate Scholberg
Kate Scholberg is a Canadian and American neutrino physicist whose research has included experimental studies of neutrino oscillation and the detection of supernovae. She is currently the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics and Bass Fellow at Duke University.
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Hideki Yukawa
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Hideki Yukawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate for his prediction of the pi meson, or pion. Biography He was born as Hideki Ogawa in Tokyo and grew up in Kyoto with two older brothers, two older sisters, and two younger brothers. He read the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean, and later Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. His father, for a time, considered sending him to technical college rather than university since he was "not as outstanding a student as his older brothers". However, when his father broached the idea with his middle school principal, the princi...
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Beatrice Tinsley
1941 - 1981 (40 years)
Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley was a British-born New Zealand astronomer and cosmologist, and the first female professor of astronomy at Yale University, whose research made fundamental contributions to the astronomical understanding of how galaxies evolve, grow and die.
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Vern Oliver Knudsen
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Vern Oliver Knudsen was an American acoustical physicist. Biography Knudsen received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University with an A.B. in 1915. Following his graduation from BYU Knudsen served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1915-1918 in the Northern States Mission, which was headquartered in Chicago. Knudsen then joined the staff of Bell Laboratories where he worked with Harvey Fletcher, who had been one of his professors at BYU.
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John Quincy Stewart
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
John Quincy Stewart was an American astrophysicist. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1919. He taught astrophysics at Princeton from 1921 until he retired in 1963. Stewart was a civilian aeronautical engineer, an Army 1st Lieutenant, and later served as a chief instructor in the Army Engineering School, during World War I. He was later a research engineer in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. He became interested in social physics in 1946, , demonstrating the use of physical laws in the area of social sciences, for example, demographic gravitation.
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Banesh Hoffmann
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Banesh Hoffmann was a British mathematician and physicist known for his association with Albert Einstein. Life Banesh Hoffmann was born in Richmond, Surrey, on 6 September 1906. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to earn his doctorate at Princeton University.
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M. Stanley Livingston
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Milton Stanley Livingston was an American accelerator physicist, co-inventor of the cyclotron with Ernest Lawrence, and co-discoverer with Ernest Courant and Hartland Snyder of the strong focusing principle, which allowed development of modern large-scale particle accelerators. He built cyclotrons at the University of California, Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he served in the operations research group at the Office of Naval Research.
Go to Profile#11823
Rudolph Minkowski
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Rudolph Minkowski was a German-American astronomer. Biography Minkowski was the son of Marie Johanna Siegel and physiologist Oskar Minkowski. His uncle was Hermann Minkowski, a mathematician and one of Einstein's teachers in Zürich. Rudolph studied supernovae and, together with Walter Baade, divided them into two classes based on their spectral characteristics. He and Baade also found optical counterparts to various radio sources.
Go to Profile#11824
Luis Walter Alvarez
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Luis Walter Alvarez was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. In 2007 the American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."
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Hertha Sponer
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Hertha Sponer was a German physicist and chemist who contributed to modern quantum mechanics and molecular physics and was the first woman on the physics faculty of Duke University. She was the older sister of philologist and resistance fighter Margot Sponer.
Go to Profile#11826
Edison Pettit
1889 - 1962 (73 years)
Edison Pettit was an American astronomer. He was born in Peru, Nebraska. Pettit received his bachelor's degree from the Nebraska State Normal School in Peru. He taught astronomy at Washburn College in Topeka, Kansas from 1914 to 1918. He married Hannah Steele Pettit, who was an assistant at Yerkes Observatory, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1920.
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Adolf Smekal
1895 - 1959 (64 years)
Adolf Gustav Stephan Smekal was an Austrian theoretical physicist, with interests in solid state physics, known for the prediction of the inelastic scattering of photons . Adolf Smekal studied at the Vienna College of Technology , received his doctorate from the University of Graz , and then studied at the University of Berlin .
Go to Profile#11828
Max Born
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Max Born was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".
Go to Profile#11829
Paul Dirac
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He is credited with laying the foundations of quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.
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Irving Langmuir
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Irving Langmuir was an American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry. Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis.
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Percy Williams Bridgman
1882 - 1961 (79 years)
Percy Williams Bridgman was an American physicist who received the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures. He also wrote extensively on the scientific method and on other aspects of the philosophy of science. The Bridgman effect, the Bridgman–Stockbarger technique, and the high-pressure mineral bridgmanite are named after him.
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Werner Heisenberg
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a major breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, his matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".
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Julius Ashkin
1920 - 1982 (62 years)
Julius Ashkin was a leader in experimental and theoretical physics known for furthering the evolution of particle physics from nuclear physics. As a theoretical physicist he made contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics, solid state physics, nuclear physics, and elementary particle physics. As an experimental physicist his main contributions concerned the passage of certain particles through solid matter and their subsequent decay. He was recognized for the quality of his research and teaching.
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William Shockley
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American inventor, physicist, and eugenicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
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Philip M. Morse
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Philip McCord Morse , was an American physicist, administrator and pioneer of operations research in World War II. He is considered to be the father of operations research in the U.S. Biography Morse graduated from the Case School of Applied Science in 1926 with a B.S. in physics. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1929. In 1930, he was granted an International Fellowship, which he used to do postgraduate study and research at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld during the winter of 1930 to the spring of 1931.
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Lars Onsager
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Lars Onsager was an American physical chemist and theoretical physicist. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968.
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Dennis Gabor
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Dennis Gabor was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics. He obtained British citizenship in 1934, and spent most of his life in England.
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Robert J. Havighurst
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Robert James Havighurst was a chemist and physicist, educator, and expert on human development and aging. Havighurst worked and published well into his 80s. He died of Alzheimer's disease in January 1991 in Richmond, Indiana at the age of 90.
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Enrico Fermi
1901 - 1954 (53 years)
Enrico Fermi was an Italian and later naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics. Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements. With his colleagues, Fermi filed several patents related to the use of nuclear power, all of which were taken over by the US government.
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Norman Feather
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Norman Feather FRS FRSE PRSE , was an English nuclear physicist. Feather and Egon Bretscher were working at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge in 1940, when they proposed that the 239 isotope of element 94 would be better able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. This research, a breakthrough, was part of the Tube Alloys project, the secret British project during World War II to develop nuclear weapons.
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Ralph H. Fowler
1889 - 1944 (55 years)
Sir Ralph Howard Fowler was a British physicist and astronomer and physical chemist. Education Fowler was born at Roydon, Essex, on 17 January 1889 to Howard Fowler, from Burnham, Somerset, and Frances Eva, daughter of George Dewhurst, a cotton merchant from Manchester. He was initially educated at home, going on to attend Evans' preparatory school at Horris Hill and Winchester College. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge and studied mathematics, becoming a wrangler in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos.
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Kenneth Stewart Cole
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Kenneth Stewart Cole was an American biophysicist described by his peers as "a pioneer in the application of physical science to biology". Cole was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1967. Biography He was born on July 10, 1900, in Ithaca, New York, to Charles Nelson Cole, an instructor in Latin at Cornell University and Mabel Stewart. Kenneth had a younger brother, , with whom he remained very close throughout his life despite a large difference in age; they were joint authors of four papers published between 1936 and 1942.
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Leopold Infeld
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Leopold Infeld was a Polish physicist who worked mainly in Poland and Canada . He was a Rockefeller fellow at Cambridge University and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Early life Leopold Infeld was born into a family of Polish Jews in Kraków, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . He studied physics at Kraków's Jagiellonian University and from 1920 in Berlin, where he had engaged Albert Einstein's help to gain admission to the University of Berlin. He obtained a doctorate in 1921. In 1933 he left for England, then for the United States and Canada after the death of his second ...
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Vladimir Fock
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock was a Soviet physicist, who did foundational work on quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Biography He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1922 he graduated from Petrograd University, then continued postgraduate studies there. He became a professor there in 1932. In 1919–1923 and 1928–1941 he collaborated with the Vavilov State Optical Institute, in 1924–1936 with the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology, in 1934–1941 and 1944–1953 with the Lebedev Physical Institute.
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Edward Andrade
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Edward Neville da Costa Andrade FRS was an English physicist, writer, and poet. He told The Literary Digest his name was pronounced "as written, i.e., like air raid, with and substituted for air." In the scientific world Andrade is best known for work that first determined the wavelength of a type of gamma radiation, proving it was far higher in energies than X-rays known at the time. Also, a rheological model suggested by him and bearing his name is still widely employed in continuum mechanics and its geophysical applications. In popular culture he was best known for his appearances on The ...
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Douglas Hartree
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano.
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Harrie Massey
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey was an Australian mathematical physicist who worked primarily in the fields of atomic and atmospheric physics. A graduate of the University of Melbourne and Cambridge University, where he earned his doctorate at the Cavendish Laboratory, Massey became an independent lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1933. He was appointed Goldsmid Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London, in 1938. During the Second World War, Massey worked at the Admiralty Research Laboratory , where he helped devise countermeasures ...
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Lawrence Bragg
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Sir William Lawrence Bragg, was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays"; an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography.
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Mark Zemansky
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Mark Waldo Zemansky was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the City College of New York for decades and is best known for co-authoring University Physics, an introductory physics textbook, with Francis Sears. The book, first published in 1949, is often referred to as "Sears and Zemansky", although Hugh Young became a coauthor in 1973.
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William Fuller Brown Jr.
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
William Fuller Brown Jr. was an American physicist who developed the theory of micromagnetics, a continuum theory of ferromagnetism that has had numerous applications in physics and engineering. He published three books: Magnetostatic Principles in Ferromagnetism, Micromagnetics, and Magnetoelastic Interactions.
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