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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Physics,
#11951
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse
1800 - 1867 (67 years)
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse , was an Anglo-Irish astronomer, naturalist, and engineer. He was president of the Royal Society , the most important association of naturalists in the world in the nineteenth century. He built several giant telescopes. His 72-inch telescope, built in 1845 and colloquially known as the "Leviathan of Parsonstown", was the world's largest telescope, in terms of aperture size, until the early 20th century. From April 1807 until February 1841, he was styled as Baron Oxmantown.
Go to Profile#11952
Georg Wulff
1863 - 1925 (62 years)
Georg Wulff, Georgy Wulff or Yuri Viktorovich Vulf was a pioneer Russian crystallographer. Biography Wulff was born in Nizhyn, Chernigov province where his mother Lydia was daughter of teacher E. V. Gudim. His father Viktor Konstantinovich Vulf was a literature teacher at the 6th Warsaw Gymnasium. He grew up in Warsaw and graduated from the 6th Warsaw Gymnasium in 1880. He then went to the Imperial Warsaw University to study natural sciences. He studied under crystallographer A. E. Lagorio, and physicists N. G. Egorov and P. A. Zilov. In the third year, he studied the electrical properties of quartz for which he received a gold medal.
Go to Profile#11953
Pietro Tacchini
1838 - 1905 (67 years)
Pietro Tacchini was an Italian astronomer. He was born and raised in Modena, Italy. He studied engineering at the University of Padova. At the age of 21, he was appointed the director of a small observatory in Modena. By 1863 he became the Primo Astronomo Aggiunto, or director of the observatory, at Palermo, Italy. He remained there until 1879, and focused most of his attention on observations of the Sun.
Go to Profile#11954
Joseph Stepling
1716 - 1778 (62 years)
Joseph Stepling was a Bohemian Jesuit priest, astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. Stepling founded the Clementinum Observatory in Prague in 1751 fitted with the best instruments available in that period, some made by Jan Klein. The earliest instrumental meteorological observations in central Europe were made at this observatory. The minor planet 6540 Stepling is named in his honour. Stepling was born in Regensburg and after the death of his father who came from Westphalia and worked at the Imperial Embassy at Ratisbon, his mother moved to her home in Prague. He attended the local Jesuit school and joined the order in 1733.
Go to Profile#11955
Thomas Corwin Mendenhall
1841 - 1924 (83 years)
Thomas Corwin Mendenhall was an American autodidact physicist and meteorologist. He was the first professor hired at Ohio State University in 1873 and the superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey from 1889 to 1894. Alongside his work, he was also an advocate for the adoption of the metric system by the United States and is the father of author profiling.
Go to Profile#11956
Walter Gordon
1893 - 1939 (46 years)
Walter Gordon was a German theoretical physicist. Life Walter Gordon was the son of businessman Arnold Gordon and his wife Bianca Gordon . The family moved to Switzerland in his early years. In 1900, he attended school in St. Gallen and in 1915 he began his studies of mathematics and physics at University of Berlin. He received his doctoral degree in 1921 from Max Planck. In 1922, while still at the University of Berlin, Gordon became the assistant of Max von Laue. In 1925, he worked for some months in Manchester with William Lawrence Bragg and later, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for fiber chemistry in Berlin.
Go to Profile#11957
Ecphantus the Pythagorean
Ecphantus or Ecphantos or Ephantus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher. He is identified as a Pythagorean of the 4th century BCE from Syracuse, Magna Graecia, but the details concerning his life are historically obscure; he may have not been a historical person, but rather a fictional character invented by Heraclides of Pontus for use in his philosophical dialogues. He also may have been the same figure as the attested Ecphantus of Croton.
Go to Profile#11958
Elmer Imes
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Elmer Samuel Imes was an internationally renowned American physicist who made important contributions in quantum, demonstrating for the first time that Quantum Theory could be applied to the rotational energy states of molecules, as well as the vibration and electronic levels, Imes' work provided an early verification of Quantum Theory, and his spectroscopy instrumentation inventions, which include one of the earliest applications of high resolution infrared spectroscopy led to development of the field of study of molecular structure through infrared spectroscopy; he was also the second African American to earn a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#11959
Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller
1809 - 1875 (66 years)
Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller was a German physicist. Biography From 1829 he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Bonn, where one of his instructors was Julius Plücker, then continued his education at the University of Giessen as a student of Justus von Liebig. In 1834 he became a teacher at the Darmstadt gymnasium, and in 1837 returned to Giessen as an instructor at the Realschule. In 1844 he was appointed professor of physics and technology at the University of Freiburg, a position he maintained up until his death in 1875.
Go to Profile#11960
Erik Prosperin
1739 - 1803 (64 years)
Erik Prosperin was a Swedish astronomer. Prosperin was a lecturer in mathematics and physics at Uppsala University in 1767, professor of observational astronomy in 1773 – 1796, and professor of Astronomy in 1797 – 1798. He became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 1771, a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1774 , and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1803.
Go to Profile#11961
Władysław Dziewulski
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Władysław Dziewulski was a Polish astronomer and mathematician. He spent most his life performing astronomical research, and published over 200 papers. Life He studied mathematics and astronomy in his native Warsaw. Then in 1902 he went to the University of Göttingen in Germany to complete his education. In 1903, he was named as an assistant at the astronomical observatory in Kraków that belonged to the Jagiellonian University and in 1906, he gained his PhD there. In 1919, he became a professor of the Batory University in Vilna and director of its Astronomical Observatory. He was also the rector of Batory University in 1924–25.
Go to Profile#11962
Joel Stebbins
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Joel Stebbins was an American astronomer who pioneered photoelectric photometry in astronomy. He was director of the University of Illinois Observatory from 1903 to 1922 where he performed innovative work with the selenium cell. In 1922 he became director of the Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he remained until 1948. After 1948, Stebbins continued his research at Lick Observatory until his final retirement in 1958.
Go to Profile#11963
Alfred Schild
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
Alfred Schild was a leading Austrian American physicist, well known for his contributions to the Golden age of general relativity . Biography Schild was born in Istanbul on September 7, 1921. His parents were German-speaking Viennese Jews, but his early education was in England. Upon the outbreak of World War II Schild was interned as an enemy alien, but later allowed to travel to Canada. In 1944 he earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto, and in 1946 completed his doctorate under the direction of Leopold Infeld. Schild spent the next eleven years at the Carnegie Institute of Technology,...
Go to Profile#11964
Eugene Bloch
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Eugène Bloch was a French physicist and professor at the École Normale Supérieure, and at the Faculty of Science of the University of Paris. Early life and education Eugène Bloch was born on 10 June 1878 in Soultz-Haut-Rhin, Alsace-Lorraine, in the German Empire. His father, an industrialist in the textile industry, sold his Alsatian factory and settled in Paris to give his two sons Leon and Eugène a French education. Eugene studied from 1897 to 1900 at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied the physics of Jules Violle, Marcel Brillouin, and Henri Abraham, and at the Faculty of Scienc...
Go to Profile#11965
Ernest O. Wollan
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Ernest Omar Wollan was an American physicist who made major contributions in the fields of neutron scattering and health physics. Biography Wollan was a native of Glenwood, Minnesota. After earning a bachelor's degree at Concordia College in 1923, he undertook graduate study at the University of Chicago, where he investigated X-ray scattering under Arthur Compton and received a Ph.D. in 1929. Over the next several years, he taught physics at North Dakota State College and Washington University in St. Louis, spent a year in Zurich as a National Research Council fellow conducting research on co...
Go to Profile#11966
Andrew Gordon
1712 - 1751 (39 years)
Andrew Gordon was a Scottish Benedictine monk, physicist and inventor. He made the first electric motor. Life Andrew Gordon was born in Cofforach, Forfarshire. He was a son of an old Scottish aristocratic family and baptized with the name George. At the age of 12, he travelled to Regensburg, Bavaria, in order to study at the Benedictine Scottish Monastery. As a Catholic Scot, there was no possibility of getting entrance to higher offices in his homeland. In Regensburg, he completed a 5-year general education course of study. Abbott Bernhard Baillie made it possible for Gordon to make education journeys to Austria, France and Italy, in particular to Rome.
Go to Profile#11967
Gabrio Piola
1791 - 1850 (59 years)
Gabrio Piola was an Italian mathematician and physicist, member of the Lombardo Institute of Science, Letters and Arts. He studied in particular the mechanics of the continuous, linking his name to the tensors called Piola–Kirchhoff.
Go to Profile#11968
Georgios Konstantinos Vouris
1802 - 1860 (58 years)
Georgios Konstantinos Vouris He was born in Vienna to Greek parents. He studied astronomy and mathematics with some of the most important scientists of the time namely Andreas von Ettingshausen and Joseph Johann von Littrow. He did significant research in the fields of astrophysics, astronomy, geodesy, meteorology, number theory, calculus, and probability theory. He moved to Greece and stayed in the country for sixteen years before moving back to Vienna where he lived out the rest of his life. He played a significant role in the founding of the physics and mathematics department at the University of Athens.
Go to Profile#11969
Miguel A. Catalán
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Miguel Antonio Catalán y Sañudo was a Spanish spectroscopist. Biography Miguel Antonio Catalán y Sañudo was born in Zaragoza, he obtained his degree in chemistry from the University of Zaragoza and received his doctorate in Madrid in 1917 for his thesis about spectrochemistry. In 1920, he began work as a researcher at Imperial College London. Examining the spectrum of the arc of manganese, he determined that the optical spectra of complex atoms consisted of groups of lines –which he called "multipletes"- between which existed certain characteristic regularities. Catalán demonstrated that stud...
Go to Profile#11970
Jules Jamin
1818 - 1886 (68 years)
Jules Célestin Jamin was a French physicist. He was professor of physics at École Polytechnique from 1852 to 1881 and received the Rumford Medal in 1858 for his work on light. He improved Brewster's inclined interference plates with the development of the Jamin interferometer.
Go to Profile#11971
John Martin Schaeberle
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
John Martin Schaeberle was a Kingdom of Württemberg-born American astronomer. Biography He was born Johann Martin Schäberle in Kingdom of Württemberg, but in 1854 immigrated as an infant to the United States. Most sources refer to him as John M. Schaeberle, but his family and friends called him Martin.
Go to Profile#11972
Aloysius Lilius
1510 - 1576 (66 years)
Aloysius Lilius , also variously referred to as Luigi Lilio or Luigi Giglio, was an Italian doctor, astronomer, philosopher and chronologist, and also the "primary author" who provided the proposal that became the basis of the Gregorian Calendar reform of 1582.
Go to Profile#11973
Johann Gottlieb Nörremberg
1787 - 1862 (75 years)
Johann Gottlieb Christian Nörremberg was a German physicist who worked on the polarization of light. From 1823 he taught classes in mathematics and physics at the military school in Darmstadt. In 1833 he became a professor of mathematics, physics and astronomy at the University of Tübingen, where he worked on surveying and the development of optical instruments. Among his better known creations was a polarization apparatus, a device used in the making of a "Nörremberg polariscope". Most of his scientific articles were published in Poggendorfs Annalen.
Go to Profile#11974
Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat was a French theoretical physicist. Her physics research focused on relativistic quantum mechanics under the influence of gravity. Along with the help of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, she attempted to propose one of the first unified field theories. She is also known for her work on the history of special and general relativity.
Go to Profile#11975
Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr
1677 - 1750 (73 years)
Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr was a German mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer. Professional life and publications He was born in Nuremberg, the son of the merchant Johann Siegmund Doppelmayr. He entered the Aegidien-Gymnasium in Nuremberg in 1689, then the University of Altdorf in 1696. His studies included mathematics, physics, and jurisprudence. Later he continued his studies in Halle and graduated in 1698 with a dissertation on the Sun.
Go to Profile#11976
Adolf Bestelmeyer
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Adolf Bestelmeyer was a German experimental physicist. Life and work Bestelmeyer studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University of Berlin, the Technical University of Munich and the University of Munich. After his promotion, he worked in 1904 as an assistant at the University of Göttingen. In World War I he was active in torpedo research, and afterwards he was professor of physics at the University of Greifswald from 1917 to 1921. He then served until the end of World War II as a laboratory manager in various companies , especially in the area of torpedo construction.
Go to Profile#11977
David Peck Todd
1855 - 1939 (84 years)
David Peck Todd was an American astronomer. He produced a complete set of photographs of the 1882 transit of Venus. Biography Todd was born in Lake Ridge, New York, the son of Sereno Edwards Todd and Rhoda Todd. He prepared at John C. Overhiser's School in Brooklyn. He studied at Columbia University from 1870 to 1872, then at Amherst College from 1873 to 1875, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in the class of 1875. He earned his M.A. from Amherst in 1878. He was awarded an honorary degree from Washington and Jefferson College in 1888.
Go to Profile#11978
Marcello Pirani
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Marcello Stefano Pirani was an Italian physicist known for his invention of the Pirani vacuum gauge, a vacuum gauge based on the principle of heat loss measurement. Throughout his career, he worked on advancing lighting technology and pioneered work on the physics of gas discharge.
Go to Profile#11979
Gottfried Kirch
1639 - 1710 (71 years)
Gottfried Kirch was a German astronomer and the first "Astronomer Royal" in Berlin and, as such, director of the nascent Berlin Observatory. Life and work The son of Michael Kirch, a shoemaker in Guben, initially he worked as a schoolmaster in Langgrün and Neundorf near Lobenstein. He also worked as a calendar-maker in Saxonia and Franconia. He began to learn astronomy with Erhard Weigel in Jena, and with Hevelius in Danzig. In Danzig in 1667, Kirch published calendars and built several telescopes and instruments. In 1679 he invented a screw micrometer for astronomical measurements. He became...
Go to Profile#11980
Jean Becquerel
1878 - 1953 (75 years)
Jean Antoine Edmond Marie Becquerel was a French physicist, the son of Antoine-Henri Becquerel. He worked on a range of experimental physics topics including magnetic effects on the optical properties of materials, and the effects of low-temperature on magnetic susceptibility. He was among the early teachers of relativity and quantum physics in France.
Go to Profile#11981
Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
Go to Profile#11982
Hugh Newall
1857 - 1944 (87 years)
Hugh Frank Newall, FRS FRAS was a British astrophysicist. He was Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge. He was the son of Robert Stirling Newall FRS and his wife Mary, daughter of Hugh Lee Pattinson, FRS.
Go to Profile#11983
Georg von Peuerbach
1423 - 1461 (38 years)
Georg von Peuerbach was an Austrian astronomer, poet, mathematician and instrument maker, best known for his streamlined presentation of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Theoricae Novae Planetarum. Peuerbach was instrumental in making astronomy, mathematics and literature simple and accessible for Europeans during the Renaissance and beyond.
Go to Profile#11984
Sergey Vavilov
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov was a Soviet physicist, the President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from July 1945 until his death. His elder brother Nikolai Vavilov was a famous Russian geneticist.
Go to Profile#11985
Thomas Fincke
1561 - 1656 (95 years)
Thomas Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, and a professor at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years. Biography Thomas Jacobsen Fincke was born in Flensburg in Schleswig. Fincke was the son of Councillor Jacob Fincke and Anna Thorsmede. He completed his primary schooling at Flensburg. From 1577, he studied mathematics, rhetoric and other philosophical studies for five years at the University of Strasbourg.
Go to Profile#11986
Albert Beaumont Wood
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Albert Beaumont Wood DSc , better known as A B Wood, was a British physicist, known for his pioneering work in the field of underwater acoustics and sonar. Wood is known for his work on developing sonar in the UK from the First World War until after the Second World War.
Go to Profile#11987
Eugeniusz Rybka
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Eugeniusz Rybka , was a Polish astronomer, professor of the Lviv University , Wrocław University and director of the Kraków Astronomical Observatory . Also he was deputy director of the International Astronomical Union .
Go to Profile#11988
Aristarkh Belopolsky
1854 - 1934 (80 years)
Aristarkh Apollonovich Belopolsky was a Russian Empire and later Soviet astronomer. He was born in Moscow but his father's ancestors are from a Serbian town called Belo Polje. Life Belopolsky got his degree at Moscow University in 1876, and in 1878, he became the assistant to Fyodor Aleksandrovich Bredikhin at Moscow Observatory. In 1888, he joined the staff of Pulkovo Observatory.
Go to Profile#11989
Paul Erman
1764 - 1851 (87 years)
Paul Erman was a German physicist from Berlin, Brandenburg and a Huguenot of the fourth generation. His work was mainly concerned with electricity and magnetism, though he also made some contributions to optics and physiology.
Go to Profile#11990
John Trowbridge
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
John Trowbridge was an American physicist, noted for his research into electricity and magnetism, and for his innovations in scientific education. Early life Born into a long-established New England family, John Trowbridge could trace his roots in Massachusetts and Connecticut back to the early seventeenth century. His father, John Howe Trowbridge, was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, but did not pursue a professional career, having inherited a sufficient fortune to finance a life of ease. Evidently this state of affairs did not last, however, and the younger Trowbridge would later recount that he was obliged to support himself in youth by monetising his talents as a painter.
Go to Profile#11991
Richard Krzymowski
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Richard Krzymowski was a German agricultural scientist. His main research interests were agricultural geography and agricultural history. Krzymowski's main work is "History of German Agriculture" an exemplary textbook for an integrated presentation of agricultural history, agricultural geography, and the history of agricultural production techniques.
Go to Profile#11992
William Morgan
1750 - 1833 (83 years)
William Morgan, FRS was a British physician, physicist and statistician, who is considered the father of modern actuarial science. He is also credited with being the first to record the "invisible light" produced when a current is passed through a partly evacuated glass tube: "the first x-ray tube".
Go to Profile#11993
Morris B. Crawford
1852 - 1940 (88 years)
Morris Barker Crawford was an American academic, and the first professor of physics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Early life and education He was born in 1852 in Sing Sing, now Ossining, New York to the Rev. Morris DeCamp Crawford and Charlotte Crawford. Both his father and his grandfather were ministers. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1874, and he was a member of the Eclectic Society and of Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a Master of Arts degree from Wesleyan in 1877.
Go to Profile#11994
Bohdan Stefanowski
1883 - 1976 (93 years)
Bohdan Stefanowski was a Polish expert in thermodynamics, one of founders of the Warsaw school of thermodynamics, the first rector of Lodz University of Technology. After graduation from the Mechanical Engineering Department of Lviv Polytechnic in 1904, Bohdan Stefanowski pursued a career in industry as a specialist in heat management and then spent several years furthering his education under the supervision of Prof. Mollier in Dresden and Prof. Joss at Königliche Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg.
Go to Profile#11995
Szczepan Szczeniowski
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Professor Szczepan Eugeniusz Szczeniowski , was a Polish physicist, and author of numerous papers on cosmic rays, electron diffraction and ferromagnetism. In early 1930s, he taught at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwow, in 1937 moving to the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. After World War II, he settled in Poznań, also cooperating with the Warsaw Polytechnic. Szczeniowski was a member of many prestigious organizations - Technical Science Academy, Polish Academy of Knowledge and Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#11996
Georg Joseph Sidler
1831 - 1907 (76 years)
Georg Joseph Sidler was a Swiss mathematician, professor at the university of Bern. Life and work Sidler was born on 31 August 1831 in Zug, Switzerland to Georg Joseph Sidler and Verena Maria Sidler . He was their only son. He also had two half-sisters from his father's first marriage. One of the girls died at the age of seven. Both of Georg's parents came from old-established families in Canton of Zug; Many of his ancestors had been involved in local and cantonal politics. His paternal grandfather, Georg Damian held a number of offices; most notably he served as a Landvogt in the Valle Maggia in Ticino.
Go to Profile#11997
Andrzej Sołtan
1897 - 1959 (62 years)
Andrzej Sołtan was a Polish nuclear physicist. He also worked on spectroscopy in the band between far ultraviolet and X-rays. During his visit to Caltech in 1932–33, together with H. Richard Crane and Charles Christian Lauritsen, he discovered a method for producing neutron beams, by bombarding lithium or beryllium nuclei with accelerated deuterons.
Go to Profile#11998
Konstanty Jodko-Narkiewicz
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Konstanty Jodko-Narkiewicz, also known as Konstanty Narkiewicz-Jodko , was a Polish geophysicist who specialized in studying cosmic radiation. He was also a mountaineer, Arctic explorer, and balloonist.
Go to Profile#11999
Ludwig Becker
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
Ludwig Wilhelm Emil Ernst Becker FRSE was Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow from 1893 until 1935 when he retired. Life Born in Wesel, Kingdom of Prussia, Becker was educated at the University of Bonn. After two years as an assistant in the Berlin Observatory, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres appointed him in 1885 to take charge of his large private observatory at Dunecht, near Aberdeen. When that institution was wound up in the autumn of 1888, the instruments were passed on to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury for a new Royal Observatory. A site on Blackford Hill in Edinburgh was selected in 1889 and Becker was included on the staff.
Go to Profile#12000
John Leigh Smeathman Hatton
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Professor John Leigh Smeathman was a mathematician and Principal of East London College, England, one of the founding colleges of what is now Queen Mary College, part of London University. He was also Vice Chancellor of London University in the 1930s.
Go to Profile