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,
#11901
John Sealy Townsend
1868 - 1957 (89 years)
Sir John Sealy Edward Townsend, FRS was an Irish-British mathematical physicist who conducted various studies concerning the electrical conduction of gases and directly measured the electrical charge. He was a Wykeham Professor of physics at Oxford University.
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Edward W. Morley
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Edward Williams Morley was an American scientist known for his precise and accurate measurement of the atomic weight of oxygen, and for the Michelson–Morley experiment. Biography Morley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Anna Clarissa Treat and the Reverend Sardis Brewster Morley. Both parents were of early colonial ancestry and of purely British origin. He grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. During his childhood, he suffered much from ill health and was therefore educated by his father at home until the age of nineteen.
Go to Profile#11903
Heraclides Ponticus
385 BC - 322 BC (63 years)
Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was born in Heraclea Pontica, now Karadeniz Ereğli, Turkey, and migrated to Athens. He is best remembered for proposing that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. He is also hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory; although this is disputed.
Go to Profile#11904
Henryk Niewodniczański
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Henryk Niewodniczański was a Polish physicist, professor at the Jagiellonian University and the creator and director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków. Niewodniczański graduated from the Stefan Batory University in Wilno in 1924 and in 1926 received his PhD from the same university. In 1927, he was awarded a fellowship at University of Tübingen. At that time his main field of interest was optics of metals and molecular optics. By studying the influence of the magnetic field on the fluorescence of mercury vapour he discovered magnetic dipole radiation.
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Thābit ibn Qurra
836 - 901 (65 years)
Thābit ibn Qurra ; 826 or 836 – February 19, 901, was a polymath known for his work in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and translation. He lived in Baghdad in the second half of the ninth century during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate.
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Julius von Mayer
1814 - 1878 (64 years)
Julius Robert von Mayer was a German physician, chemist, and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed". In 1842, Mayer described the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. His achievements were overlooked and priority for the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat was attributed to James Joule in the following year.
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Arthur Schuster
1851 - 1934 (83 years)
Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster was a German-born British physicist known for his work in spectroscopy, electrochemistry, optics, X-radiography and the application of harmonic analysis to physics. Schuster's integral is named after him. He contributed to making the University of Manchester a centre for the study of physics.
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Camille Flammarion
1842 - 1925 (83 years)
Nicolas Camille Flammarion FRAS was a French astronomer and author. He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels, and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie, starting in 1882. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.
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Al-Battani
858 - 930 (72 years)
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Raqqī al-Ḥarrānī aṣ-Ṣābiʾ al-Battānī , usually called al-Battānī, a name that was in the past Latinized as Albategnius, was an astronomer, astrologer and mathematician, who lived and worked for most of his life at Raqqa, now in Syria. He is considered to be the greatest and most famous of the astronomers of the medieval Islamic world.
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Wilhelm Lenz
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Wilhelm Lenz was a German physicist, most notable for his invention of the Ising model and for his application of the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector to the old quantum mechanical treatment of hydrogen-like atoms.
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Norman Lockyer
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer was an English scientist and astronomer. Along with the French scientist Pierre Janssen, he is credited with discovering the gas helium. Lockyer also is remembered for being the founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature.
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Jérôme Lalande
1732 - 1807 (75 years)
Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande was a French astronomer, freemason and writer. Biography Lalande was born at Bourg-en-Bresse to Pierre Lefrançois and Marie‐Anne‐Gabrielle Monchinet. His parents sent him to Paris to study law, but as a result of lodging in the Hôtel Cluny, where Delisle had his observatory, he was drawn to astronomy, and became the zealous and favoured pupil of both Delisle and Pierre Charles Le Monnier. Having completed his legal studies, he was about to return to Bourg to practise as an advocate, when Lemonnier obtained permission to send him to Berlin, to make observat...
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Pierre Gassendi
1592 - 1655 (63 years)
Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, Catholic priest, astronomer, and mathematician. While he held a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
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Johann Bayer
1572 - 1625 (53 years)
Johann Bayer was a German lawyer and uranographerer . He was born in Rain, Lower Bavaria, in 1572. At twenty, in 1592 he began his study of philosophy and law at the University of Ingolstadt, after which he moved to Augsburg to begin work as a lawyer, becoming legal adviser to the city council in 1612.
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Philolaus
470 BC - 390 BC (80 years)
Philolaus was a Greek Pythagorean and pre-Socratic philosopher. He was born in a Greek colony in Italy and migrated to Greece. Philolaus has been called one of three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition and the most outstanding figure in the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras developed a school of philosophy that was dominated by both mathematics and mysticism. Most of what is known today about the Pythagorean astronomical system is derived from Philolaus's views. He may have been the first to write about Pythagorean doctrine. According to August Böckh , who cites Nicomachus, Philo...
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Friedrich Paschen
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Louis Carl Heinrich Friedrich Paschen , was a German physicist, known for his work on electrical discharges. He is also known for the Paschen series, a series of hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region that he first observed in 1908. He established the now widely used Paschen curve in his article "Über die zum Funkenübergang in Luft, Wasserstoff und Kohlensäure bei verschiedenen Drücken erforderliche Potentialdifferenz". He is known for the Paschen-Back effect, which is the Zeeman effect's becoming non-linear at high magnetic field. He helped explain the hollow cathode effect in 1916...
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Dominique, comte de Cassini
1748 - 1845 (97 years)
Jean-Dominique, comte de Cassini was a French astronomer, son of César-François Cassini de Thury and great-grandson of Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Cassini was born at the Paris Observatory. He succeeded his father as director of the observatory in 1784; but his plans for its restoration and re-equipment were wrecked in 1793 by the animosity of the National Assembly. His position having become intolerable, he resigned on 6 September and was thrown into prison in 1794, but released after seven months. He then withdrew to Thury, where he died in 1845.
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Heinrich Bruns
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Ernst Heinrich Bruns was a German mathematician and astronomer, who also contributed to the development of the field of theoretical geodesy. Early life Heinrich Bruns was born on 4 September 1848 in Berlin to Christian Gerhard Bruns, a landscape painter, and his wife, Caroline Henriette Hasse.
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Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin
1717 - 1783 (66 years)
Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin , Swedish astronomer and demographer. Wargentin was the son of the vicar of Sunne Wilhelm Wargentin and his spouse Christina Aroselia, and the great grandson of Joachim Wargentin , a Lübeck-born burgher of Åbo in Finland.
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Eugène Joseph Delporte
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Eugène Joseph Delporte was a Belgian astronomer born in Genappe. He discovered a total of sixty-six asteroids. Notable discoveries include 1221 Amor and the Apollo asteroid 2101 Adonis. He discovered or co-discovered some comets as well, including periodic comet 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte. He worked in the Observatoire Royal de Belgique , situated in the town of Uccle . He started there in 1903 after receiving his doctorate that year from the Free University of Brussels.
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Georges-Louis Le Sage
1724 - 1803 (79 years)
Georges-Louis Le Sage was a Genevan physicist and is most known for his theory of gravitation, for his invention of an electric telegraph and his anticipation of the kinetic theory of gases. Furthermore, he was a contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander
1799 - 1875 (76 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander was a German astronomer. He is known for his determinations of stellar brightnesses, positions, and distances. Life and work Argelander was born in Memel in the Kingdom of Prussia , the son of a father of Finnish descent, Johann Gottlieb Argelander, and German mother, Dorothea Wilhelmina Grünhagen. He studied with Friedrich Bessel, whose assistant he became in 1820, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1822 at University of Königsberg. From 1823 until 1837, Argelander was the head of the Finnish observatory, first in Turku and then in Helsinki. He then moved to Bonn, Germany.
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August Kopff
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
August Kopff was a German astronomer and discoverer of several comets and asteroids. Kopff studied and worked in Heidelberg, getting his PhD there in 1906 and he then joined the Humboldt University of Berlin where he became the Director of the Institute for Astronomical Calculation.
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Louis Harold Gray
1905 - 1965 (60 years)
Louis Harold Gray FRS was an English physicist who worked mainly on the effects of radiation on biological systems. He was one of the earliest contributors of the field of radiobiology A summary of his work is given below. Amongst many other achievements, he defined a unit of radiation dosage which was later named after him as an SI unit, the gray.
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Theodor Meyer
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Theodor Meyer was a German mathematician, a student of Ludwig Prandtl, and a founder of the scientific discipline now known as compressible flow or gas dynamics. Biography As a youth, Meyer studied mathematics and physics. He was privileged to learn from several of the great minds in these fields, including David Hilbert, Carl Runge, Hermann Minkowski, and Ludwig Prandtl. He and Prandtl made a great team, for Prandtl's intuitive and experimental approach to fluid mechanics has become legendary, and Meyer complemented his advisor's strengths with a formidable mathematical talent.
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Theodore Lyman IV
1874 - 1954 (80 years)
Theodore Lyman IV was an American physicist and spectroscopist, born in Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1897, from which he also received his Ph.D. in 1900. Career Lyman became an assistant professor in physics at Harvard, where he remained, becoming full professor in 1917, and where he was also director of the Jefferson Physical Laboratory . He made important studies in phenomena connected with diffraction gratings, on the wavelengths of vacuum ultraviolet light discovered by Victor Schumann and also on the properties of light of extremely short wavelength, on all of which he contribute...
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Erwin Fues
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Erwin Richard Fues , was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to atomic physics and molecular physics, quantum wave mechanics, and solid-state physics. Education and career During the period 1912 to 1914, Fues studied at the University of Berlin and then the University of Munich. He served in the military in 1914 to circa 1915, and then attended the University of Tübingen from 1916 to 1918. During 1918, he became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld and he received the doctor rerum naturalium from the University of Munich in 1920. From 1922 he did postgraduate work at the Stuttgart ...
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Egon Orowan
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Egon Orowan FRS was a Hungarian-British physicist and metallurgist. According to György Marx, he was one of The Martians. Life Orowan was born in the Óbuda district of Budapest. His father, Berthold , was a mechanical engineer and factory manager, and his mother, Josze Spitzer Ságvári, was the daughter of an impoverished land owner.
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Walter Herrmann
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Walter Herrmann was a German nuclear physicist and mechanical engineer who worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II. After the war, he headed a laboratory for special issues of nuclear disintegration at Laboratory V in the Soviet Union.
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Frederick Sumner Brackett
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Frederick Sumner Brackett , was an American physicist and spectroscopist. Born in Claremont, California, to Frank and Lucretia Brackett, he graduated from Pomona College and worked as an observer at Mount Wilson Observatory until 1920. He observed the infra-red radiation of the Sun. Brackett received a doctorate in physics from the Johns Hopkins University in 1922. Applying a hydrogen filled discharge tube, he discovered the hydrogen Brackett series, where an electron jumps up from or drops down to the fourth fundamental level, in 1922.
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James Edward Keeler
1857 - 1900 (43 years)
James Edward Keeler was an American astronomer. He was an early observer of galaxies using photography, as well as the first to show observationally that the rings of Saturn do not rotate as a solid body.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes
1777 - 1834 (57 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes was a German physicist, meteorologist, and astronomer. Brandes was born in 1777 in Groden near Ritzebüttel , the third son of Albert Georg Brandes, a preacher. He studied at the University of Göttingen from 1796 to 1798 under Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Carl Friedrich Gauss was a fellow student. He attained his doctorate in 1800, and spent a short time teaching privately. As an astronomer, he was noted for demonstrating that meteors occur in the upper atmosphere and thus not really a meteorological phenomenon.
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Thomas Andrew Broadbent
#11934
Giovanni Caselli
1815 - 1891 (76 years)
Giovanni Caselli was an Italian priest, inventor, and physicist. He studied electricity and magnetism as a child which led to his invention of the pantelegraph , the forerunner of the fax machine. The world's first practical operating facsimile machine system put into use was by Caselli. He had worldwide patents on his system. His technology idea was further developed into today's analog television.
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André-Louis Danjon
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
André-Louis Danjon was a French astronomer born in Caen to Louis Dominique Danjon and Marie Justine Binet. Danjon devised a method to measure "earthshine" on the Moon using a telescope in which a prism split the Moon's image into two identical side-by-side images. By adjusting a diaphragm to dim one of the images until the sunlit portion had the same apparent brightness as the earthlit portion on the unadjusted image, he could quantify the diaphragm adjustment, and thus had a real measurement for the brightness of earthshine. He recorded the measurements using his method from 1925 until the ...
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Johann Daniel Titius
1729 - 1796 (67 years)
Johann Daniel Titius was a German astronomer and a professor at Wittenberg. Titius was born in Konitz , Royal Prussia to Jakob Tietz, a merchant and council member from Konitz, and Maria Dorothea, née Hanow. His original name was Johann Tietz, but as was customary in the 18th century, when he became a university professor, he Latinized his surname to Titius. Tietz attended school in Danzig and studied at the University of Leipzig . He died in Wittenberg, Electorate of Saxony.
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Cornelis Bakker
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Cornelis Jan Bakker was a Dutch physicist and second Director General of CERN. He was also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Biography Bakker studied physics at the University of Amsterdam under Pieter Zeeman.
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Carl Barus
1856 - 1935 (79 years)
Carl Barus was an American physicist and the maternal great-uncle of the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Barus was born in Cincinnati, United States. The son of German immigrants , Barus graduated from Woodward High School, together with William Howard Taft, in 1874.
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John Gamble Kirkwood
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Early life and background Kirkwood was born in Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an attorney and was a distributor for the Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline and Margaret .
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Maurice de Broglie
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
#11941
William Cranch Bond
1789 - 1859 (70 years)
William Cranch Bond was an American astronomer, and the first director of Harvard College Observatory. Upbringing William Cranch Bond was born in Falmouth, Maine on September 9, 1789. When he was young, his father, William Bond, established himself as a clockmaker after a failed business venture; trained by his father and aided by his penchant for engineering, W. C. Bond built his first clock when he was fifteen years old. He eventually took over his father’s business, becoming an expert clockmaker himself. The William Bond clock shop remained in existence at 9 Park Street in Boston until t...
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Otto Wilhelm von Struve
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Otto Wilhelm von Struve was a Russian astronomer of Baltic German origins. In Russian, his name is normally given as Otto Vasil'evich Struve . Together with his father, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, Otto Wilhelm von Struve is considered a prominent 19th century astronomer who headed the Pulkovo Observatory between 1862 and 1889 and was a leading member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Zygmunt Florenty Wróblewski
1845 - 1888 (43 years)
Zygmunt Florenty Wróblewski was a Polish physicist and chemist. Together with Karol Olszewski, he was the first scientist in the world to liquify oxygen and nitrogen in 1883. Biography Wróblewski was born in Grodno . He studied at Kiev University. After a six-year exile for participating in the January 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, he studied in Berlin and Heidelberg. He defended his doctoral dissertation at Munich University in 1876 and became an assistant professor at Strasburg University. In 1880 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.
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Barnaba Oriani
1752 - 1832 (80 years)
Barnaba Oriani was an Italian priest, geodesist, astronomer and scientist. Life Oriani was born in Garegnano , the son of a mason, and died in Milan. After getting his elementary education in Garegnano, he went on to study at the College of San Alessandro in Milan, under the tutelage and with the support of the Order of Barnabites, which he later joined. After completing his studies in the humanities, physical and mathematical sciences, philosophy, and theology, he was ordained a priest in 1775.
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Robert Watson-Watt
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt was a Scottish pioneer of radio direction finding and radar technology. Watt began his career in radio physics with a job at the Met Office, where he began looking for accurate ways to track thunderstorms using the radio waves given off by lightning. This led to the 1920s development of a system later known as high-frequency direction finding . Although well publicized at the time, the system's enormous military potential was not developed until the late 1930s. Huff-duff allowed operators to determine the location of an enemy radio transmitter in seconds and ...
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Iris Runge
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Iris Anna Runge was a German applied mathematician and physicist. Life and work Iris Runge was the eldest of six children of mathematician Carl Runge. She started studying physics, mathematics, and geography at the University of Göttingen in 1907, with the aim of becoming a teacher. At that time, she only attended the lectures, since women were not allowed to formally study at Prussian universities until 1908–1909. She attended lectures given by her father and spent a semester at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich working with Arnold Sommerfeld, which led to her first publication, Anwendungen der Vektorrechnung auf die Grundlagen der Geometrischen Optik in Annalen der Physik .
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Adelaide Ames
1900 - 1932 (32 years)
Adelaide Ames was an American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard University. She contributed to the study of galaxies with her co-authorship of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude, which was later known as the Shapley-Ames catalog. Ames was a member of the American Astronomical Society. She was a contemporary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and her closest friend at the observatory.
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Vsevolod Frederiks
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Vsevolod Konstantinovich Frederiks was a Russian/Soviet physicist. His primary contribution was in the field of liquid crystals. The Frederiks transition is named after him. After high school, Frederiks attended Geneva University and attended the lectures of Paul Langevin in Paris for one semester. After defending his thesis and obtaining his PhD, Frederiks decided to continue his studies at Göttingen University. He was there for more than eight years, and with the outbreak of World War I he became a civil prisoner. During that period, he became personal assistant to David Hilbert.
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Ludwig August Seeber
1793 - 1855 (62 years)
Ludwig August Seeber was a German physicist. From 1819 to 1822 he was teacher at the cadet school at Karlsruhe. Subsequently, he was professor ordinarius for physics at the University of Freiburg until 1834. From 1834 to 1840, he was professor of physics at the Lyceum and Polytechnicum in Karlsruhe.
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Christian August Friedrich Peters
1806 - 1880 (74 years)
Christian August Friedrich Peters was a German astronomer. He was the father of astronomer Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Peters. He was born in Hamburg and died in Kiel. Peters was the son of a merchant and, although he did not attend secondary school regularly, he obtained a good knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. In 1826 he became assistant to Heinrich Christian Schumacher at Altona Observatory. Schumacher encouraged him to study astronomy and Peters did a PhD under Friedrich Bessel at the University of Königsberg. In 1834 he became an assistant at Hamburg Observatory and in 1839 joined the staff of Pulkovo Observatory.
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