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).
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#1201
Augusta H. Teller
#19818
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Augusta Maria "Mici" Teller was a Hungarian-American scientist and computer programmer, involved in the development of the Metropolis algorithm. Life and career Teller was born as Auguszta Mária Harkányi in Hungary, the daughter of Ella/Gabriella and Ede Harkányi, originally Hirsch Sámuel. Her parents were Jewish, but had converted to Christianity. Known as "Mici," she and her brother, Ede, were adopted by their foster father after their biological father's death, who gave them their second last name. In 1924, Ede "Szuki" Schütz-Harkányi introduced Mici to his childhood friend, Edward Teller...
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Gene Dresselhaus
#29147
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Gene Frederick Dresselhaus was an American condensed matter physicist. He is known as a pioneer of spintronics and for his 1955 discovery of the eponymous Dresselhaus effect. Biography Dresselhaus studied physics at University of California, Berkeley, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1951 and his doctorate in 1955. At Berkeley he worked under the supervision of Charles Kittel and Arthur F. Kip on early cyclotron resonance experiments on semiconductors and semimetals. As a postdoc Dresselhaus was for the academic year 1955–1956 an instructor at the University of Chicago. From 1956 to 1960 he was an assistant professor at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#1203
Lance J. Dixon
#35950
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lance Jenkins Dixon is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University. Dixon received in 1982 his B.S. in physics and applied mathematics from Caltech and received in 1986 his doctorate from Princeton University. As a postdoc he was at SLAC. From 1987 he was assistant professor at Princeton University, from 1989 he was a Panofsky Fellow at the SLAC and in 1992 he became an associate professor and in 1998 a full professor at SLAC.
Go to Profile#1204
Jun Ye
#26985
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jun Ye is a Chinese-American physicist at JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the University of Colorado Boulder, working primarily in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics.
Go to Profile#1205
Edward Ott
#27288
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Edward Ott is an American physicist most noted for his contributions to the development of chaos theory. Ott was born and grew up in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union, and his Ph.D. in electrophysics from The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1967. Following receipt of his Ph.D., he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University. He then joined the faculty of the department of electrical engineering at Cornell University. S...
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Frederic M. Richards
#22381
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Frederic Middlebrook Richards , commonly referred to as Fred Richards, was an American biochemist and biophysicist known for solving the pioneering crystal structure of the ribonuclease S enzyme in 1967 and for defining the concept of solvent-accessible surface. He contributed many key experimental and theoretical results and developed new methods, garnering over 20,000 journal citations in several quite distinct research areas. In addition to the protein crystallography and biochemistry of ribonuclease S, these included solvent accessibility and internal packing of proteins, the first side-c...
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Gottfried Münzenberg
#14831
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Gottfried Münzenberg is a German physicist. He studied physics at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Giessen and Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck and completed his studies with a Ph.D. at the University of Giessen, Germany, in 1971. In 1976, he moved to the department of nuclear chemistry at GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, which was headed by Peter Armbruster. He played a leading role in the construction of SHIP, the 'Separator of Heavy Ion Reaction Products'. He was the driving force in the discovery of the cold heavy ion fusion and the discovery of the elements bohrium , hassium , meitnerium , darmstadtium , roentgenium , and copernicium .
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Ashok Das
#18868
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ashok Das is an Indian-American physicist. Early life and education Das was born in Puri, Odisha. He received his BS in 1972 and MS in 1974 in physics from the University of Delhi. He received his PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in 1977.
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Robert Freitas
#2124
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert A. Freitas Jr. is an American nanotechnologist. Early life and education Freitas was born in Camden, Maine. His father worked in agriculture and his mother was a homemaker. Freitas married Nancy, his childhood sweetheart in 1974.
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Zvi Bern
#34959
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Zvi Bern is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles . Bern studied physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate in 1986 in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Martin Halpern. Bern's dissertation manuscript can currently be found in Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's archives, examining "possible nonperturbative continuum regularization schemes for quantum field theory which are based upon the Langevin equation of Parisi and Wu."
Go to Profile#1211
Luciano Pietronero
#17226
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Luciano Pietronero is an Italian physicist and full professor at the department of Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is also Director of the Institute of Complex Systems of the National Research Council .
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Claudia de Rham
#28978
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Claudia de Rham is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity, and won the award in 2020.
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Archibald Howie
#19200
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Archibald "Archie" Howie is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge, known for his pioneering work on the interpretation of transmission electron microscope images of crystals. Born in 1934, he attended Kirkcaldy High School and the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently took up a permanent post. He has been a fellow of Churchill College since its foundation, and was President of its Senior Combination Room until 2010.
Go to Profile#1214
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
#6106
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.
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Marek Kukula
#22299
Overall Influence
Marek Janusz Kukula is a British astronomer and an author of works on popular science. After gaining a PhD in radio astronomy from the University of Manchester in 1994, he specialised in studying distant galaxies. As his research reached the limits of telescopes, he moved into the field of public engagement. In 2008 he was appointed Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
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Graham Farquhar
#39672
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Graham Douglas Farquhar, is an Australian biophysicist, Distinguished Professor at Australian National University, and leader of the Farquhar Lab. In 2018 Farquhar was named Senior Australian of the Year.
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Meg Urry
#39376
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is currently the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys, but also for her work addressing sexism and sex equality in astronomy, science, a...
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Edward Tryon
#36668
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Edward P. Tryon was an American scientist and a professor emeritus of physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York . He was the first physicist to propose that our universe originated as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum.
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Nick Kaiser
#41314
Overall Influence
1954 - 2023 (69 years)
Nicholas Kaiser was a British cosmologist. Life and career Kaiser received his Bachelor's in physics at Leeds University in 1978, and his Part III in maths at University of Cambridge in 1979. He obtained his PhD in astronomy, also at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Martin Rees.
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Emmett Leith
#9062
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Emmett Norman Leith was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and, with Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan, the co-inventor of three-dimensional holography. Leith received his B.S. in physics from Wayne State University in 1949 and his M.S. in physics in 1952. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Wayne State in 1978. Much of Leith's holographic work was an outgrowth of his research on synthetic aperture radar performed while a member of the Radar Laboratory of the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratory beginning in 1952. Leit...
Go to Profile#1221
Riccardo Rattazzi
#35944
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Riccardo Rattazzi is an Italian theoretical physicist and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His main research interests are in physics beyond the Standard Model and in cosmology.
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Peter W. Milonni
#25947
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Walden Milonni is an American theoretical physicist who deals with quantum optics, laser physics, quantum electrodynamics and the Casimir effect. Milonni earned his PhD in 1974 at the University of Rochester. He then worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory from 1974 to 1977, then working at PerkinElmer from 1977 to 1980. In 1980 he became professor of physics at the University of Arkansas; From 1986 to 1994 he was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he became a fellow of the laboratory from 1994 onwards. He then had a research professorship at the University of Rochester.
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William E. Gordon
#20108
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
William Edwin Gordon was an electrical engineer, physicist and astronomer. He was referred to as the "father of the Arecibo Observatory". Biography William E. Gordon was an Electrical Engineer. He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on January 8, 1918, and attended public schools in Totowa, New Jersey. Gordon worked his way through Montclair State Teachers College, graduating with a B.A. degree. Before World War II, he taught junior high schools in Mendham and Oradell, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#1224
Mehran Kardar
#12081
Overall Influence
Mehran Kardar is an Iranian born physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute . He received his B.A. in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1979, and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1983. Kardar is particularly known for the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation in theoretical physics, which has been named after him and his two coauthors: the Nobel Prize laureate Giorgio Parisi, and Yi-Cheng Zhang. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.
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Bradley Schaefer
#37765
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bradley Elliott Schaefer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. Early life In addition to his academic pursuits, Schaefer is remembered at MIT as the founder of the annual MIT Mystery Hunt in 1981 during his graduate studies there. The tradition of the hunt continues today.
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John Moffat
#32078
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John W. Moffat is a Canadian physicist. He is currently professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and is also an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#1227
Alexander Davydov
#21261
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Alexander Sergeevich Davydov was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist. Davydov graduated from Moscow State University in 1939. In 1963-1990 he was Director of Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1228
Avishai Dekel
#28885
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Avishai Dekel is a professor of physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, holding the Andre Aisenstadt Chair of Theoretical Physics. His primary research interests are in astrophysics and cosmology.
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Riccardo Giovanelli
#40981
Overall Influence
1946 - 2022 (76 years)
Riccardo Giovanelli was an Italian-born American astronomer. He was an emeritus professor of astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, United States. Background Born at Praticello, in northern Italy, Giovanelli spent his childhood years in western Argentina but returned with his family to Italy when he was ready to enter university. He studied physics first at the University of Parma and graduated with his laurea cum laude in physics from the University of Bologna in 1969. His parents were partisans during World War II.
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Piara Singh Gill
#20656
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Piara Singh Gill was an Indian nuclear physicist and a pioneer in cosmic ray nuclear physics. He was the first Director of Central Scientific Instruments Organisation of India. He was research fellow of University of Chicago . He was research Professorship fellow of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Officer-on-Special Duty with the Atomic Energy Commission in New Delhi. Professor and head of the Department of Physics at Aligarh University , Director of Central Scientific Instruments Organization and Professor Emeritus at Punjab Agricultural University .
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Heino Falcke
#22189
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Heino Falcke is a German professor of radio astronomy and astroparticle physics at the Radboud University Nijmegen . His main field of study is black holes, and he is the originator of the concept of the 'black hole shadow'. In 2019, Falcke announced the first Event Horizon Telescope results at the EHT Press Conference in Brussels.
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William Marciano
#35018
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
William Joseph Marciano is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics. Education and career Marciano graduated with a B.S. and an M.S. in physics at New York University. There he received in 1974 his doctorate with Alberto Sirlin as doctoral advisor. Marciano worked from 1974 to 1980 at Rockefeller University, where he started as a research associate and was then promoted to assistant professor. From 1980 to 1981 he was an associate professor at Northwestern University. At Brookhaven National Laboratory he was in 1978 a research collaborator in 1978 and in 1981 joined the physics department and was granted tenure.
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Peng Huanwu
#27824
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
Peng Huanwu was a Chinese physicist. He was a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences , and a leader of Chinese nuclear weaponry projects. Life and career Peng was born in Changchun, Jilin Province; his father was from Macheng County, Hubei Province. After graduating from department of physics of Tsinghua University, Peng continued to pursue his postgraduate degree. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, he went to teach at Yunnan University. In 1938, Peng was enrolled in foreign study program and went to study at University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and worked with prominent physicist Max Born.
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Ibtesam Badhrees
#36352
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Ibtesam Saeed Badhrees is a research scientist in experimental particle physics at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and a Distinguished Fellow of New Westminster College. Badhrees is the first Saudi woman member of CERN. In addition, she is the first Saudi female PhD holder to work in the National Center for Mathematics and Physics in King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. Her research areas are in Experimental Elementary Particle Physics, Astrophysics, Medical Physics and Nuclear Physics. In addition, Badhrees acts as an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Can...
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Marvin Leonard Goldberger
#19218
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Marvin Leonard "Murph" Goldberger was an American theoretical physicist and former president of the California Institute of Technology. Biography Goldberger was born in Chicago, Illinois. He went on to receive his B.S. at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1948. His advisor on thesis, Interaction of High-Energy Neutrons with Heavy Nuclei, was Enrico Fermi. While serving in the Army shortly after graduation, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, where he worked under renowned physicist Enrico Fermi from 1943–45.
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Kyozi Kawasaki
#26850
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
was a Japanese physicist. His research interests include chemical physics and statistical mechanics. In 2001, Kawasaki was awarded the Boltzmann Medal for "his contribution to our understanding of dynamic phenomena in condensed matter systems, in particular the mode-coupling theory of fluids near criticality, and nonlinear problems, such as critical phenomena in sheared fluids and phase separations".
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Hugh D. Young
#27631
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Hugh David Young was an American physicist who taught physics for 52 years at Carnegie Mellon University. Young is best known for co-authoring the later editions of University Physics, a highly regarded introductory physics textbook, with Francis Sears and Mark Zemansky .
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Bimla Buti
#44726
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Bimla Buti is an Indian physicist and specializes in the field of plasma physics. She was the first Indian woman Physicist Fellow of Indian National Science Academy. In 1994, she was awarded INSA-Vainu Bappu Award.
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Hugh Bradner
#8301
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hugh Bradner was an American physicist at the University of California who is credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit, which helped to revolutionize scuba diving and surfing. A graduate of Ohio's Miami University, he received his doctorate from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, in 1941. He worked at the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, where he researched naval mines. In 1943, he was recruited by Robert Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory. There, he worked with scientists including Luis Alvarez, John von Neuman...
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William Higinbotham
#5832
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
William Alfred Higinbotham was an American physicist. A member of the team that developed the first nuclear bomb, he later became a leader in the nonproliferation movement. He also has a place in the history of video games for his 1958 creation of Tennis for Two, the first interactive analog computer game and one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display.
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Girish Saran Agarwal
#43281
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Girish S. Agarwal, Fellow of the Royal Society UK, is a theoretical physicist. He is currently at the Texas A & M University with affiliations to the Departments of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering. Earlier he worked as Noble Foundation Chair and the Regents Professor at the Oklahoma State University. He is a recognized leader in the field of quantum optics and also has made major contributions to the fields of nonlinear optics, nanophotonics and plasmonics. In 2013 he published the textbook "Quantum Optics",...
Go to Profile#1242
James F. Woodward
#32161
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James F. Woodward is a professor emeritus of history and an adjunct professor of physics at California State University, Fullerton. He is best known for a physics hypothesis that he proposed in 1990, later expanded, that predicts several physical effects that he refers to as 'Mach effects'. Woodward claims the effect could be used as a reactionless drive for space travel.
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Mathias Fink
#22004
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Mathias Fink, born in 1945 in Grenoble, is a French physicist, professor at ESPCI Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences. Life and career Mathias Fink received a M.S. degree in mathematics from Paris University, and the Ph.D. degree in solid state physics. Then he moved to medical imaging and received the Doctorat es-Sciences degree from Paris University in the area of ultrasonic focusing for real-time medical imaging under the direction of Pierre Alais .
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Francis Halzen
#46865
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Francis Louis Halzen is a Belgian particle physicist. He is the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Director of its Institute for Elementary Particle Physics. Halzen is the Principal Investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, the world's largest neutrino detector which has been operational since 2010.
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Hugh Herr
#12024
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Hugh Herr is an American rock climber, engineer, and biophysicist. Early life The youngest of five siblings of a Mennonite family from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Hugh Herr was a prodigy rock climber: by age 8, he had scaled the face of the Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies, and by 17 he was acknowledged to be one of the best climbers in the United States.
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Henri Atlan
#8125
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Henri Atlan is a French biophysicist and philosopher. Early life and education Born to a Jewish family in French Algeria, Atlan gained degrees in medicine and biophysics at the University of Paris . He married Liliane Atlan in 1952; they had two children while living in Paris, Miri in 1953 and Michael in 1956. He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley working on ageing and mutation.
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Russell Targ
#4214
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Russell Targ is an American physicist, parapsychologist, and author who is best known for his work on remote viewing. Targ joined Stanford Research Institute in 1972 where he and Harold E. Puthoff coined the term "remote viewing" for the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using parapsychological means. Later, he worked with Puthoff on the US Defence Intelligence Agency's Stargate Project.
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Guido Münch
#13399
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Guido Münch Paniagua was a Mexican astronomer and astrophysicist. Biography Münch was born in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico. He studied civil engineering and mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, receiving his bachelor's degree in civil engineering and mathematics in 1939 and his master's degree in mathematics in 1944. He then went to the University of Chicago, where he was published in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1946 . He then went to the Tacubaya Observatory of the University of Mexico, but returned to the University of Chicago in 1947 as an instructor, and became an assistant professor in 1949.
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Malcolm Perry
#18958
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Malcolm John Perry is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at University of Cambridge and professor of theoretical physics at Queen Mary University of London. His research mainly concerns quantum gravity, black holes, general relativity, and supergravity.
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Robert A. Frosch
#16255
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Robert Alan Frosch FREng was an American scientist who was the fifth administrator of NASA. He was the administrator from 1977 to 1981 during the Carter administration. Biography Born in New York City, Frosch was educated in the public school system in The Bronx. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in theoretical physics at Columbia University.
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