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,
#1501
Arthur M. Wolfe
#39210
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Arthur Michael "Art" Wolfe was an American astrophysicist, professor and the former director of the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Together with Rainer K. Sachs, he authored the paper describing the Sachs-Wolfe effect.
Go to Profile#1502
Robert Boyd
#16602
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Sir Robert Lewis Fullarton Boyd was a pioneer of British space science and founding director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory . Robert Boyd was born in Saltcoats, Ayrshire as one of two twin boys. He was a pupil at Whitgift School and studied at Imperial College and University College London .
Go to Profile#1503
Peter Coles
#26738
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Peter Coles is a theoretical cosmologist at Maynooth University. He studies the large scale structure of our Universe. He studied for his PhD in 1985–1988, subsequently becoming a postdoctoral researcher at Sussex and Queen Mary, subsequently becoming a lecturer there. He was a professor at Cardiff University starting in 2007, and from 2013 he was the head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex. In 2017 he started working at Maynooth University, becoming head of the Department of Theoretical Physics in 2019.
Go to Profile#1504
Clive Ruggles
#27699
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Clive L. N. Ruggles is a British astronomer, archaeologist and academic. He is the author of academic and popular works on the subject. In 1999, he was appointed professor of archaeoastronomy at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, when it is believed to have been the only appointed chair for archaeoastronomy among the world's universities. , he was Emeritus Professor at this university.
Go to Profile#1505
Nandini Trivedi
#21827
Overall Influence
Nandini Trivedi is an Indian-American physicist and Professor of Physics at Ohio State University. Her research is on the emergence of new states of matter arising from strong interactions between electrons in quantum materials. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020.
Go to Profile#1506
Takafumi Matsui
#57081
Overall Influence
1946 - 2023 (77 years)
Takafumi Matsui was a Japanese planetary scientist, geophysicist, science communicator and academic. He was professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. Life and career Born in Shizuoka, Matsui graduated from the Faculty of Science of the University of Tokyo, and after a stage as a visiting researcher at NASA he became professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences of his alma mater. He was specialized in astrobiology and comparative planetary science. He served as president of the Chiba Institute of Technology from June 2020 till his death. He authored numerous scientific articles a...
Go to Profile#1507
Supriyo Datta
#16833
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Supriyo Datta is an Indian–American researcher and author. A leading figure in the modeling and understanding of nano-scale electronic conduction, he has been called "one of the most original thinkers in the field of nanoscale electronics."
Go to Profile#1508
Daniel Amit
#21809
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Daniel J. Amit was an Israeli physicist and pacifist, who was one of the pioneers in the field of computational neuroscience. Amit, Hanoch Gutfreund and Haim Sompolinsky, in a set of papers referred to as the ASG papers, were the first to demonstrate the utility of statistical mechanics in neural network research and helped establish theoretical and computational neuroscience as a novel approach that brings into brain research unique powerful sets of concepts, models, and standards of rigour.
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Stefan H. E. Kaufmann
#35993
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stefan Hugo Ernst Kaufmann is a German immunologist and microbiologist and is one of the highly cited immunologists worldwide for the decade 1990 to 2000. He is amongst the 0.01% most cited scientists of ca. 7 million scientists in 22 major scientific fields globally.
Go to Profile#1510
Setsuro Ebashi
#21712
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
was a prominent Japanese physiologist who uncovered the regulatory role of calcium in cells. He is famous for the discovery of Troponin in 1965, which is integral to muscle contraction, as well as for the contribution of diagnosis of muscular dystrophy.
Go to Profile#1511
Lisa Kewley
#53100
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Lisa Jennifer Kewley is an Australian Astrophysicist and current Director of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Previously, Kewley was Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3-D and ARC Laureate Fellow at the Australian National University College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, where she was also a Professor. Specialising in galaxy evolution, she won the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2005 for her studies of oxygen in galaxies, and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 2008. In 2014 she was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
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Carl E. Heiles
#46427
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Carl Eugene Heiles is an American astrophysicist noted for his contribution to the understanding of diffuse interstellar matter through observational radio astronomy. Biography Heiles was born in Toledo, Ohio. He did his undergraduate work at Cornell University, receiving a degree in engineering physics, and then received his doctorate under George B. Field in 1966 from Princeton University in astrophysical sciences. He has worked at the University of California, Berkeley since, and is currently a professor of astronomy.
Go to Profile#1513
Jacqueline Hewitt
#34851
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jacqueline Nina Hewitt is an American astrophysicist. She was the first person to discover an Einstein ring. She is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. Early life and education Hewitt was born in Washington, D.C., on September 4, 1958, to parents Warren E. Hewitt, a retired international lawyer from the State Department, and Gertrud Hewitt. She attended Bryn Mawr College where she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics in 1980. Hewitt took an astronomy class at Haverford College her sophomore year, which sparked her interest in science. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate school.
Go to Profile#1514
K. R. Sreenivasan
#11387
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Katepalli Raju Sreenivasan is an aerospace scientist, fluid dynamicist, and applied physicist whose research includes physics and applied mathematics. He studies turbulence, nonlinear and statistical physics, astrophysical fluid mechanics, and cryogenic helium. He was the dean of engineering and executive vice provost for science and technology of New York University. Sreenivasan is also the Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in Mechanical Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and a professor of physics and mathematics professor at the New York University Graduat...
Go to Profile#1515
Paskal Sotirovski
#34363
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Paskal Sotirovski, was a Macedonian astrophysicist, specializing in solar physics. Education Paskal finished primary school in Macedonia. He continued his education in Gornji Milanovac where he finished three grades of the high school. Eventually, he graduated from the Educational School in Belgrade.
Go to Profile#1516
Hasan Abdullayev
#27228
Overall Influence
1918 - 1993 (75 years)
Hasan Abdullayev was a leading Soviet and Azerbaijani physicist, scientist and public official, who served as President of the National Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR. He was a Doctor of Sciences in physics and mathematics, Professor of physics and mathematics, Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR, full Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR, corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 1970-1983 was the longest-serving President of the National Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR.
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Harry Lehmann
#35345
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Harry Lehmann was a German physicist. Biography Lehmann studied physics at Rostock and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 1952 he worked at the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen, and spent a year in Copenhagen and from 1956 worked in Hamburg.
Go to Profile#1518
Marc Henneaux
#29651
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marc, Baron Henneaux is a Belgian theoretical physicist and professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles who was born in Brussels on 5 March 1955. Education and career Henneaux studied physics at ULB and received his doctoral degree in 1980 under the supervision of Jules Géhéniau. He was a visiting fellow at Princeton University for the academic year 1978-1979 where a long-term collaboration with Claudio Bunster was initiated. He was then postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin from 1981 to 1984, to continue working with Claudio Bunster. From there,...
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Christoph Gerber
#13886
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christoph Gerber is a titular professor at the Department of Physics, University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the co-inventor of the atomic force microscope . He was a founding member and director for scientific communication of the NCCR . He was formerly a research staff member in nanoscale science at the IBM Research Laboratory in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, and has served as a project leader in various programs of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#1520
R. Obert Huber
#58129
Overall Influence
#1521
Franco Piperno
#14809
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Franco Piperno is a former communist militant from Italy. He is an associate professor of Condensed Matter Physics in the University of Calabria. Biography Piperno was born in Catanzaro. He graduated in physics at the University of Pisa and was member of the FGCI . After his expulsion, in 1969 he was suspected of having sabotaged a Boston Chemical plant, which produced defoliant used in the Vietnam War, but he was immediately released. In Rome he was an activist in the 1968 movement and in the summer 1969 he took part in the demonstration against Fiat in Turin.
Go to Profile#1522
Vijay Raghunath Pandharipande
#23846
Overall Influence
1940 - 2006 (66 years)
Vijay Raghunath Pandharipande was an Indian-American physicist, who played a leading role in the development of the nuclear many-body problem. Biography Pandharipande obtained his bachelor's and master's degree from Nagpur University in 1959 and 1961 respectively. He earned his PhD degree from University of Bombay in 1969.
Go to Profile#1523
Masao Kotani
#21136
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for molecular physics and biophysics. Kotani was born in Kyoto and spent his primary and middle school days in Osaka. He moved to Tokyo to enter the First Higher School and then the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1929, he received his BSc degree in physics and was appointed as a lecturer at the faculty of engineering in the Imperial University of Tokyo. Three years later, he became an associate professor in the physics department. In 1943, he received the degree of DSc and was promoted to a full professor. In 1965, he moved to Osaka University as a professor in the faculty of engineering science.
Go to Profile#1524
Joshua N. Goldberg
#35901
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Joshua N. Goldberg was an American physicist and educator who was particularly noted for his research on general relativity. Early life and education Goldberg was born in Rochester, New York, and received a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester in 1947. He received a doctorate in physics from Syracuse University in 1952. His thesis advisor was Peter Bergmann.
Go to Profile#1525
John E. Baldwin
#41485
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
John Evan Baldwin FRS was a British astronomer who worked at the Cavendish Astrophysics Group from 1954. He played a role in the development of interferometry in Radio Astronomy, and later astronomical optical interferometry and lucky imaging. He made the first maps of the radio emission from the Andromeda Galaxy and the Perseus Cluster, and measured the properties of many active galaxies. In 1985 he performed the first Aperture Masking Interferometry observations, and then led the construction and operation of the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope, and helped develop the lucky imaging method.
Go to Profile#1526
Suraj N. Gupta
#27362
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Suraj Narayan Gupta was an Indian-born American theoretical physicist, notable for his contributions to quantum field theory. Early life and career was born on 1 December 1924 in Punjab, British India. He received his M.Sc. from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and worked at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies from 1948 to 1949. From 1951 to 1953 he served as ICI Fellow at the University of Manchester. In 1953 Gupta joined as a visiting professor at Purdue University and remained there until 1956. From 1956, he served as a professor at Wayne St...
Go to Profile#1527
Péter Mészáros
#53743
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Péter István Mészáros is a Hungarian-American theoretical astrophysicist, best known for the Mészáros effect in cosmology and for his work on gamma-ray bursts. Life Péter Mészáros was born in 1943 in Budapest, Hungary, and grew up in Liège, Belgium and Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he did his undergraduate studies. He received his PhD in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley, and after postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and Cambridge University he became a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He joined the Pennsylvania State University in 198...
Go to Profile#1528
Peter A. Carruthers
#28594
Overall Influence
1935 - 1997 (62 years)
Peter Carruthers was an American physicist best known for leading the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1973 until 1980. Early life and education Peter Carruthers was born in Lafayette, Indiana, United States. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology graduating in 1957. He then studied at Cornell University where in 1961 he gained a PhD in theoretical physics. His doctoral advisor was Hans Bethe.
Go to Profile#1529
Martin Tajmar
#31683
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Martin Tajmar is a physicist and professor for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology. He has research interests in advanced space propulsion systems, FEEP thrusters, breakthrough propulsion physics and possible connections between gravity and superconductivity.
Go to Profile#1530
Tom Wigley
#20898
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Tom Michael Lampe Wigley is a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide. He is also affiliated with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research . He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his major contributions to climate and carbon cycle modeling and to climate data analysis, and because he is "one of the world's foremost experts on climate change and one of the most highly cited scientists in the discipline." His Web of Science h-index is 75, and his Google Scholar h-index is 114 . He has contributed to many of the reports publishe...
Go to Profile#1531
Nick Scoville
#52017
Overall Influence
Nicholas Zabriskie "Nick" Scoville is the Francis L. Moseley Professor of Astronomy at Caltech. Education Scoville earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Research Scoville's research interests include interstellar molecular clouds and star formation activity within these clouds, interacting ultraluminous-infrared galaxies and active galactic nuclei. He led the Cosmic Evolution Survey that is among the best studied fields in extragalactic astronomy and one of the largest galaxy surveys executed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Go to Profile#1532
Teresa Lago
#41962
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Maria Teresa Vaz Torrão Lago is a Portuguese astronomer who founded the Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Porto and created the first astronomy degree program in Portugal. Lago is currently the General Secretary of the International Astronomical Union. Her research focuses on the evolution of young stars and she is active in the promotion of astronomy and scientific culture to the public.
Go to Profile#1533
Yuri Golfand
#25193
Overall Influence
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
Yuri Abramovich Golfand was a Russian and Israeli physicist known, in particular, for his 1971 paper where they proposed supersymmetry between bosonic and fermionic particles by extending the Poincaré algebra with anticommuting spinor generators. The algebra they constructed is also called a Super-Poincaré algebra. In the very same paper they presented the first four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge field theory – supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics with the mass term of the photon/photino fields, plus two chiral matter supermultiplets .
Go to Profile#1534
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud
#12544
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud is a French physicist. He is co-founder and chairman of Capital Fund Management , adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure and co-director of the CFM-Imperial Institute of Quantitative Finance at Imperial College London. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and held the Bettencourt Innovation Chair at Collège de France in 2020.
Go to Profile#1535
Rebecca Oppenheimer
#33104
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of four curator/professors in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist. She investigates planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Her optics laboratory is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle the problem of directly seeing and taking spectra of nearby solar systems with exoplanets and studying their composition, with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.
Go to Profile#1536
Kazumi Maki
#48709
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Kazumi Maki was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for his research in "superconductivity, superfluid ³He, and quasi‑one‑dimensional materials." Biography Kazumi Maki spent most of his childhood in Kyoto. During WW II he with his family moved to a rural area because of a scarcity of food and the danger of aerial attack. At Kyoto University he received his Ph.D. in 1964 with a thesis on theoretical particle physics, written under the supervision of Hideki Yukawa. Maki was a postdoc at the University of Chicago for the academic year 1964–1965 and an assistant professor from 1965 to 1967 at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#1537
Sunil Mukhi
#35872
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sunil Mukhi is an Indian theoretical physicist working in the areas of string theory, quantum field theory and particle physics. Currently he is Adjunct Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Honorary Professor Emeritus at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune.
Go to Profile#1538
Roman Stanisław Ingarden
#21327
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Roman Stanisław Ingarden was a Polish physicist, specialised mainly in optics and statistical mechanics, son of the Polish philosopher Roman Witold Ingarden. In 1938 he began his physics studies at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów as student of professors Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Banach and Hugo Steinhaus and Stanisław Loria and Wojciech Rubinowicz .
Go to Profile#1539
Paul McEuen
#24193
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Paul McEuen is an American physicist. He received his B.S. in engineering physics at the University of Oklahoma , and his Ph.D. in applied physics at Yale University . After postdoctoral work at MIT , he became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He moved to Cornell University in 2001, where he is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics. He is one of the experts on the electrical property of carbon nanotubes and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1540
John Campbell Brown
#36947
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
John Campbell Brown was a Scottish astronomer who worked primarily in solar physics. He held the posts of Astronomer Royal for Scotland, the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, and honorary professorships at both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen.
Go to Profile#1541
Hiroomi Umezawa
#26752
Overall Influence
1924 - 1995 (71 years)
Hiroomi Umezawa was a physicist and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and later at the University of Alberta. He is known for his fundamental contributions to quantum field theory and for his work on quantum phenomena in relation to the mind.
Go to Profile#1542
Glennys Farrar
#51827
Overall Influence
Glennys Reynolds Farrar is a professor of physics at New York University who specializes in particle physics, cosmology and the study of dark matter. She has made several significant contributions to the fields of hadron and dark matter phenomenology, helping to develop the working "Standard Cosmological Model". Farrar is a figure in developing many modern particle-search techniques, achieving numerous recognitions including as the Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences and Sloan Fellowship. She holds a faculty position at New York University , where she has been since 1998.
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Uri Sivan
#7175
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Uri Sivan , an Israeli physicist, is the 17th President of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He is also the holder of the Bertoldo Badler Chair in the Technion's Faculty of Physics. Biography Uri Sivan's parents immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland in 1936. They studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology after being banned from European universities because they were Jewish.
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George H. Rieke
#46168
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
George Henry Rieke , a noted American infrared astronomer, is former Deputy Director of the Steward Observatory and Regents Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He led the experiment design and development team for the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer instrument on NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, and currently chairs the science team of the Mid-Infrared Instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope.
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Fiodar Fiodaraŭ
#27216
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Fiodar Fiodaraŭ, , was a Soviet and Belarusian physicist, whose scientific interests ranged from optics and spectroscopy to the theory of elementary particles. Biography He was born in the village Turets in Karelichy Raion, Hrodna Voblast, Belarus. He was a son of village school teachers, but his father, Ivan Michaiłavič Fiodaraŭ, later became a famous Belarusian writer.
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Daniel Eisenstein
#40255
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Daniel Eisenstein is an American cosmologist and academic. Eisenstein's Ph.D. is from Harvard University under the supervision of Abraham Loeb. He held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Chicago before moving to the University of Arizona as a professor in 2001. He moved to his current position as a professor of astronomy at Harvard University in 2010. He was joint-winner of the 2014 Shaw Prize. An Asteroid was named in his honor. He graduated from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1547
Tord Ekelöf
#51260
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Tord Johan Carl Ekelöf is a Swedish professor of particle physics at Uppsala University. Biography Ekelöf is the son of Per Olof Ekelöf and Marianne Ekelöf. He graduated in 1964 from the Cathedral School in Uppsala. Ekelöf became a bachelor of philosophy in 1966, a master's engineer in 1968 and obtained his PhD in 1972, all at Uppsala University.
Go to Profile#1548
Boris Arbuzov
#45711
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Boris Andreevich Arbuzov is a Russian physicist known for his contribution to theoretical elementary particle physics and quantum field theory. Biography Boris Arbuzov was born on 12 May 1938 in Moscow. His father was Major General Andrei Ivanovich Arbuzov , known expert in the precision-bombing theory.
Go to Profile#1549
Anna N. Żytkow
#29621
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Anna N. Żytkow is a Polish astrophysicist working at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge. Żytkow and Kip Thorne proposed a model for what is called the Thorne–Żytkow object, which is a star within another star. Żytkow in 2014 was part of the team led by Emily M. Levesque which discovered the first candidate for such an object.
Go to Profile#1550
Martin Asplund
#53933
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Professor Martin Asplund is a Swedish-Australian astrophysicist and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He has made credible and sometimes controversial contributions in the field of astronomy. His models of the levels of the heavy elements, oxygen, carbon, neon and nitrogen in the solar spectrum have challenged scientific understanding of the sun and the rest of the cosmos.
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