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,
#151
George F. R. Ellis
#2540
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, Hon. FRSSAf , is the emeritus distinguished professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. From 1989 to 1992 he served as president of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He...
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John Robert Schrieffer
#1949
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
John Robert Schrieffer was an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity.
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Edwin McMillan
#1216
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Edwin Mattison McMillan was an American physicist credited with being the first to produce a transuranium element, neptunium. For this, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg.
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Luciano Maiani
#5893
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Luciano Maiani is a Sammarinese physicist best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Glashow and John Iliopoulos . Academic history In 1964 Luciano Maiani received his degree in physics and he became a research associate at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy. During that same year he collaborated with Raoul Gatto's theoretical physics group at the University of Florence. He crossed the Atlantic in 1969 to do a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard's Lyman Laboratory of Physics. In 1976 Maiani became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, however ...
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Charles Kittel
#3749
Overall Influence
1916 - 2019 (103 years)
Charles Kittel was an American physicist. He was a professor at University of California, Berkeley from 1951 and was professor emeritus from 1978 until his death. Life and work Charles Kittel was born in New York City in 1916. He studied at the University of Cambridge, England, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1938. He published his thesis, under Gregory Breit, in 1941 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1947. During World War II, he joined the Submarine Operations Research Group . He served in the United States Navy as a naval attache.
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Abhay Ashtekar
#1704
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abhay Vasant Ashtekar is an Indian theoretical physicist who created Ashtekar variables and is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. Ashtekar has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists. He is an Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.
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Carlo Rubbia
#1844
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Carlo Rubbia is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. Early life and education Rubbia was born in 1934 in Gorizia, an Italian town on the border with Slovenia. His family moved to Venice then Udine because of wartime disruption. His father was an electrical engineer and encouraged him to study the same, though he stated his wish to study physics. In the local countryside, he collected and experimented with abandoned military communications equipment. ...
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Anton Zeilinger
#1466
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian quantum physicist and Nobel laureate in physics of 2022. Zeilinger is professor of physics emeritus at the University of Vienna and senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Most of his research concerns the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.
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Steven Chu
#694
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
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Michel Mayor
#2322
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize and the 2015 Kyoto Prize.
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Jerome Isaac Friedman
#4248
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Jerome Isaac Friedman is an American physicist. He is institute professor and professor of physics, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.", work which showed an internal structure for protons later known to be quarks. Friedman sits on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the...
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Juan Maldacena
#2993
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Juan Martín Maldacena is an Argentine theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory.
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John L. Hall
#1963
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
John Lewis "Jan" Hall is an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics. He shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch and Roy Glauber for his work in precision spectroscopy.
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Grote Reber
#5450
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Grote Reber was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, which combined his interests in amateur radio and amateur astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies.
Go to Profile#165
Jim Peebles
#2602
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Phillip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and theoretical cosmologist who is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science, emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.
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Margaret Burbidge
#4403
Overall Influence
1919 - 2020 (101 years)
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.
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Robert Bacher
#2398
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Robert Fox Bacher was an American nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. Born in Loudonville, Ohio, Bacher obtained his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan, writing his 1930 doctoral thesis under the supervision of Samuel Goudsmit on the Zeeman effect of the hyperfine structure of atomic levels. After graduate work at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he accepted a job at Columbia University. In 1935 he accepted an offer from Hans Bethe to work with him at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
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Frank J. Tipler
#1727
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Frank Jennings Tipler is an American mathematical physicist and cosmologist, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University. Tipler has written books and papers on the Omega Point based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's religious ideas, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead. He is also known for his theories on the Tipler cylinder time machine. His work has attracted criticism, most notably from Quaker and systems theorist George Ellis who has argued that his theories are largely pseudoscience.
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Siegfried Flügge
#3593
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Siegfried Flügge was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear energy project. From 1941 onward he was a lecturer at several German universities, and from 1956 to 1984, editor of the 54-volume, prestigious Handbuch der Physik.
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Bruno Pontecorvo
#3293
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian and Soviet nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.
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Barry Barish
#2198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
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Willy Fischler
#4787
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Willy Fischler is a theoretical physicist. He is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is affiliated with the Weinberg theory group. He is also a certified Flight Paramedic and was a Licensed Paramedic with Marble Falls Area EMS and a volunteer EMT with the Westlake Fire Department.
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Lisa Randall
#2582
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#174
Nicolaas Bloembergen
#2003
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Nicolaas Bloembergen was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During his career, he was a professor at Harvard University and later at the University of Arizona and at Leiden University in 1973 .
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John B. Goodenough
#1173
Overall Influence
1922 - 2023 (101 years)
John Bannister Goodenough was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1996 he was a professor of Mechanical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
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Hendrik Casimir
#1696
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was a Dutch physicist who made significant contributions to the field of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He is best known for his work on the Casimir effect, which describes the attractive force between two uncharged plates in a vacuum due to quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field.
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Makoto Kobayashi
#4247
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#178
Yang Chen-Ning
#1611
Overall Influence
1922 - Present (102 years)
Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang , also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang, is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics. He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction. The two proposed that one of the basic quantum-mechanics laws, the conservation of parity, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles.
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Fabiola Gianotti
#4941
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian experimental particle physicist who is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 January 2016 and ran for a period of five years. At its 195th Session in 2019, the CERN Council selected Gianotti for a second term as Director-General. Her second five-year term began on 1 January 2021 and goes on until 2025. This is the first time in CERN's history that a Director-General has been appointed for a full second term.
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Wolfgang Paul
#2145
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Wolfgang Paul was a German physicist, who co-developed the non-magnetic quadrupole mass filter which laid the foundation for what is now called an ion trap. He shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work with Hans Georg Dehmelt; the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.
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Neil Armstrong
#91
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who in 1969 became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. Armstrong was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He entered Purdue University, studying aeronautical engineering, with the U.S. Navy paying his tuition under the Holloway Plan. He became a midshipman in 1949 and a naval aviator the following year. He saw action in the Korean War, flying the Grumman F9F Panther from the aircraft carrier . After the war, he completed his bachelor's degree at Purdue...
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Pervez Hoodbhoy
#1141
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy is a Pakistani nuclear physicist and activist who serves as a professor at the Forman Christian College and previously taught physics at the Quaid-e-Azam University. Hoodbhoy is also a prominent activist in particular concerned with promotion of freedom of speech, secularism, scientific temper and education in Pakistan.
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Viatcheslav Mukhanov
#6112
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Viatcheslav Fyodorovich Mukhanov is a Soviet/Russian born German theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is best known for the theory of Quantum Origin of the Universe Structure. Working in 1980-1981 with Gennady Chibisov in the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow he predicted the spectrum of inhomogeneities in the Universe, which are originated from the initial quantum fluctuations. The numerous experiments in which there were measured the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation are in excellent agreement with this theoretical prediction, thus confirming that the galaxies and their clusters originated from the initial quantum fluctuations.
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Jack Steinberger
#1759
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Jack Steinberger was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for the discovery of the muon neutrino. Through his career as an experimental particle physicist, he held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University , and the CERN . He was also a recipient of the United States National Medal of Science in 1988, and the Matteucci Medal from the Italian Academy of Sc...
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Paul Townsend
#3893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Paul Kingsley Townsend FRS is a British physicist, currently a Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is notable for his work on string theory.
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Alexander Prokhorov
#2168
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Alexander Mikhailovich Prokhorov was an Australian-born Russian physicist known for his pioneering research on lasers and masers in the former Soviet Union for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Charles Hard Townes and Nikolay Basov.
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James Bjorken
#5615
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
James Daniel "BJ" Bjorken is an American theoretical physicist. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1954, received a BS in physics from MIT in 1956, and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1959. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1962. Bjorken is emeritus professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and was a member of the Theory Department of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory .
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Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#1369
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is a French physicist. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms. Currently he is still an active researcher, working at the École normale supérieure .
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John Preskill
#2396
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
John Phillip Preskill is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also the director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
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Nicholas Metropolis
#1059
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was a Greek-American physicist. Metropolis received his BSc and PhD in physics at the University of Chicago. Shortly afterwards, Robert Oppenheimer recruited him from Chicago, where he was collaborating with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller on the first nuclear reactors, to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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Antony Garrett Lisi
#3263
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Antony Garrett Lisi , known as Garrett Lisi, is an American theoretical physicist. Lisi works as an independent researcher without an academic position. Lisi is known for "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," an unpublished preprint paper proposing a unified field theory based on the E Lie group, combining particle physics with Einstein's theory of gravitation. The theory is incomplete and has unresolved problems. The theory has been extensively criticized in the scientific community.
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Martinus J. G. Veltman
#3245
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory.
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N. David Mermin
#3503
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Nathaniel David Mermin is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term "boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on solid-state physics, and for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information science.
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Georges Charpak
#1846
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Georges Charpak was a Polish-born French physicist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992. Life Georges Charpak was born in 1926 as Jerzy Charpak to Jewish parents, Anna and Maurice Charpak, in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland . Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old, beginning his study of mathematics in 1941 at the Lycée Saint Louis. The actor and film director André Charpak was his younger brother.
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Richard E. Taylor
#4057
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Richard Edward Taylor, , was a Canadian physicist and Stanford University professor. He shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."
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Ashoke Sen
#2583
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ashoke Sen FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences , Bangalore. A former distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, He is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research , Bhubaneswar, India he is also a Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening th...
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Anthony Peratt
#7687
Overall Influence
Anthony L. Peratt is an American physicist whose most notable achievements have been in plasma physics,plasma petroglyphs, nuclear fusion and the monitoring of nuclear weapons. Education Peratt was a graduate student of Nobel Prize winning Hannes Alfvén. He received a Ph.D in electrical engineering / plasma physics in 1971 from the University of Southern California , Los Angeles. He was awarded a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1967, also from USC.
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Charles W. Misner
#5159
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Charles W. Misner was an American physicist and one of the authors of Gravitation. His specialties included general relativity and cosmology. His work has also provided early foundations for studies of quantum gravity and numerical relativity.
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Reinhard Genzel
#3370
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, ; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.
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Ben Roy Mottelson
#2522
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Ben Roy Mottelson was an American-Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei. Early life Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 9 July 1926, the son of Georgia and Goodman Mottelson, an engineer. His family was Jewish. After graduating from Lyons Township High School in La Grange, Illinois, he joined the United States Navy and was sent to attend officers training at Purdue University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1947. He then earned a PhD in nuclear physics from Harvard University in 1950. His...
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