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 …
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#1551
Anatol Zhabotinsky
#12413
Overall Influence
1938 - 2008 (70 years)
Anatol Markovich Zhabotinsky was a Soviet biophysicist who created a theory of the chemical clock known as Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction in the 1960s and published a comprehensive body of experimental data on chemical wave propagation and pattern formation in nonuniform media. The reaction had been discovered by Boris Pavlovich Belousov in the early 1950s. From 1991 until his death, Zhabotinsky was an adjunct professor of chemistry at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#1552
Roberto Battiston
#55237
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Roberto Battiston is an Italian physicist, specialized in the field of fundamental physics and elementary particles, and leading experts in the physics of cosmic rays. He was the president of the Italian Space Agency from 2014 to 2018 and president of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics Committee on Astroparticle Physics from 2009 to 2014.
Go to Profile#1553
Chris Impey
#34240
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christopher David Impey is a British astronomer, educator, and author. He has been a faculty member at the University of Arizona since 1986. Impey has done research on observational cosmology, in particular low surface brightness galaxies, the intergalactic medium, and surveys of active galaxies and quasars. As an educator, he has pioneered the use of instructional technology for teaching science to undergraduate non-science majors. He has written many technical articles and a series of popular science books including The Living Cosmos, How It Began, How It Ends: From You to the Universe, Dreams of Other Worlds, and Humble Before the Void.
Go to Profile#1554
Brian C J Moore
#59099
Overall Influence
#1555
Ian Ward
#49855
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Ian Macmillan Ward was a British physicist specialising in polymer science. He was Cavendish Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds where he was also chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy and first director of the Polymer Interdisciplinary Research Centre.
Go to Profile#1556
Hendrik C. van de Hulst
#35744
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Hendrik Christoffel "Henk" van de Hulst was a Dutch astronomer. In 1944, while a student in Utrecht, he predicted the existence of the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral interstellar hydrogen. After this line was discovered, he participated, with Jan Oort and C.A. Muller, in the effort to use radio astronomy to map out the neutral hydrogen in our galaxy, which first revealed its spiral structure. Motivated by the scattering in cosmic dust, he studied light scattering by spherical particles and wrote his doctoral thesis on the topic, subsequently formulating the anomalous diffraction theory.
Go to Profile#1557
Sarah Lee Lippincott
#25101
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Sarah Lee Lippincott , also known as Sarah Lee Lippincott Zimmerman, was an American astronomer. She was professor emerita of astronomy at Swarthmore College and director emerita of the college's Sproul Observatory. She was a pioneer in the use of astrometry to determine the character of binary stars and search for extrasolar planets.
Go to Profile#1558
José Maza Sancho
#39916
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
José María Maza Sancho is a Chilean astronomer and astrophysicist. His work has focused on the study of supernovas, the execution of a search for objects with emission lines, dark energy, and quasars with an objective prism, which led him to be awarded the National Prize for Exact Sciences in 1999. Since 2017 he gained popular following with books aimed to the general public and podcasts.
Go to Profile#1559
Karl Jakobs
#55990
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Karl Jakobs is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He was the Spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN from 2017 to 2021. Education Jakobs studied at the University of Bonn and received his Diplom in 1984. He went to the Heidelberg University to study the properties of the production of W and Z bosons in proton-proton collisions and received his PhD in 1988.
Go to Profile#1560
Sergio Focardi
#41785
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Sergio Focardi was an Italian physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Bologna. He led the Department of Bologna of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences at the University of Bologna.
Go to Profile#1561
Hubert Curien
#7883
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Hubert Curien was a French physicist and a key figure in European science politics, as the President of CERN Council , the first chairman of the European Space Agency , and second President of the Academia Europæa and a President of Fondation de France.
Go to Profile#1562
Cécile DeWitt-Morette
#26906
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Cécile Andrée Paule DeWitt-Morette was a French mathematician and physicist. She founded a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps. For this and her publications, she was awarded the American Society of the French Legion of Honour 2007 Medal for Distinguished Achievement. Attendees at the summer school included over twenty students who would go on to be Nobel Prize winners, including Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Georges Charpak, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who identify the school for assisting in their success.
Go to Profile#1563
Frank Steglich
#23429
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Frank Steglich is a German physicist and the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. Education and career Steglich was born in Dresden and studied physics in the University of Münster and the University of Göttingen, where he received his PhD under Rudolf Hilsch.
Go to Profile#1564
Ralph Lorenz
#35257
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ralph D. Lorenz is a planetary scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. whose research focuses on understanding surfaces, atmospheres, and their interactions on planetary bodies, especially Titan, Venus, Mars, and Earth. He currently serves as Mission Architect of Dragonfly, NASA's fourth selected New Frontiers mission, and as participating scientist on Akatsuki and InSight. He is a Co-Investigator on the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover, responsible for interpreting data from its microphone. He leads the Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation on the DAVINCI Discovery mission to Venus.
Go to Profile#1565
Glen Cowan
#50176
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Glen Cowan is a professor of Particle Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has made a considerable contribution to the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Education Cowan obtained a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1981 from UCLA. In 1988 he completed his PhD at UC Berkeley where he focused his research on the TPC/Two-Gamma Experiment.
Go to Profile#1566
Margaret Murnane
#22911
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Margaret Mary Murnane NAS AAA&S is an Irish physicist, who served as a distinguished professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, having moved there in 1999, with past positions at the University of Michigan and Washington State University. She is currently Director of the STROBE NSF Science and Technology Center, and is among the foremost active researchers in laser science and technology. Her interests and research contributions span topics including atomic, molecular, and optical physics, nanoscience, laser technology, materials and chemical dynamics, plasma physics, and imaging science.
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Johanna Stachel
#33298
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Johanna Barbara Stachel is a German nuclear physicist. She is a professor in experimental physics at the University of Heidelberg . Stachel is a former president of the German Physical Society . Early life and education Johanna Stachel completed secondary education in 1972 at the Spohn Gymnasium in Ravensburg. She studied physics and chemistry at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and received a degree from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 1978. In 1982 she obtained a doctorate in physics from the same university.
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Steven Girvin
#24746
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Steven M. Girvin is an American physicist who is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University and who served as deputy provost for research at Yale from 2007 to 2017. Girvin is noted for his theoretical work on quantum many body systemss such as the fractional quantum Hall effect, and as co-developer of circuit QED, the application of the ideas of quantum optics to superconducting microwave circuits. Circuit QED is now the leading architecture for construction of quantum computers based on superconducting qubits.
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Serge Rudaz
#38887
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Serge Rudaz is a Canadian theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. He previously served as the director of undergraduate studies of the University of Minnesota's physics department, and is now the director of undergraduate honors at the University of Minnesota. Rudaz received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Cornell University and his undergraduate degree from McGill University.
Go to Profile#1570
James Ross MacDonald
#32713
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
James Ross Macdonald is an American physicist, who was instrumental in building up the Central Research laboratories of Texas Instruments . Biography He received a B.A. in physics from Williams College and an S.B. and SM in E.E. from MIT in 1944 and 1947. Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. in 1950 and a D.Sc. degree in 1967.
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David R. Smith
#35008
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
David R. Smith is an American physicist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. Smith's research focuses on electromagnetic metamaterials, or materials with a negative index of refraction.
Go to Profile#1572
Tejinder Virdee
#21723
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee, , is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
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Lloyd Motz
#33429
Overall Influence
1909 - 2004 (95 years)
Lloyd Motz was an American astronomer. Biography Born in Pennsylvania, Motz graduated from the City College of New York 1930 and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1936. Motz began teaching at Columbia the same year he completed his Ph.D., but over the years also taught courses at the City College of New York, Queens College, Polytechnic University, and The New School. From 1959 to 1992 he mentored in a program he initiated, the Columbia University Science Honors Program for high school students. College courses he taught included introductory astronomy, astronomical physics, and celestial mechanics.
Go to Profile#1574
Zia Mian
#17108
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Zia Mian is a Pakistani-American physicist, nuclear expert, nuclear policy maker and research scientist at Princeton University. Currently, he is the director of the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia, at the Program on Science and Global Security. He is the editor of several books, his books heavily focus on the issues concerning nuclear science, nuclear technology, and Science and technology in Pakistan. Zia Mian has played a pivotal role in Pakistan's peaceful use of nuclear technology and helped make two documentary films on peace and security in South Asia. Mian has been listed as one of the 15 Asian Scientists To Watch by Asian Scientist Magazine on 15 May 2011.
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Martin Harwit
#40888
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Martin Otto Harwit is a Czech-American astronomer and author known for his scientific work on infrared astronomy as a professor at Cornell University. He was later director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. from 1987 to 1995.
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Thomas Allibone
#34572
Overall Influence
1903 - 2003 (100 years)
Thomas Edward Allibone, CBE, FRS was an English physicist. His work included important research into particle physics, X-rays, high voltage equipment, and electron microscopes. Early life Thomas Edward Allibone was born at Nether Hallam, Sheffield in 1903, son of Henry James Allibone, a schoolteacher, and Eliza , a farmer's daughter. He was educated at the Central School in Sheffield followed by a Pass degree in physics at Sheffield University. In 1925, Allibone was awarded a scholarship by the Metropolitan-Vickers company to study the properties of zirconium. He left Sheffield in 1926 to continue his postgraduate studies at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#1577
Basanti Dulal Nagchaudhuri
#20334
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Basanti Dulal Nagchaudhuri was an Indian physicist and academic, and a scientific advisor to the Government of India. He is known as one of the pioneers of nuclear physics in India and for building the nation's first cyclotron at the University of Calcutta.
Go to Profile#1578
Karl Leo
#27478
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Karl Leo is a German physicist. Career Leo studied physics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and obtained the Diplomphysiker degree with a thesis on solar cells under supervision of Adolf Goetzberger at the Fraunhofer-Institut für Solare Energiesysteme. In 1986 he joined the Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung in Stuttgart for a PhD under the guidance of Hans Queisser. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel as a postdoctoral research associate. In 1991 he joined the RWTH Aachen as an assistant professor and obtained the Habilitation degree. In 1993 he joined the Technische Universitaet Dresden as a professor of optoelectronics.
Go to Profile#1579
Stephen E. Harris
#34546
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Stephen Ernest Harris is an American physicist known for his contributions to electromagnetically induced transparency , modulation of single photons, and x-ray emission. In a diverse career, he has collaborated with others to produce results in many areas, including the 1999 paper titled “Light speed reduction to 17 metres per second in an ultracold gas,” in which Lene Hau and Harris, Cyrus Behroozi and Zachary Dutton describe how they used EIT to slow optical pulses to the speed of a bicycle. He has also contributed to developments in the use of the laser, generating paired photons with si...
Go to Profile#1580
David Allen Shirley
#59817
Overall Influence
#1581
Vernon W. Hughes
#47661
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Vernon Willard Hughes was an American physicist specializing in research of subatomic particles. Hughes was born in Kankakee, Illinois. During World War II, he worked at the M.I.T. Radiation Lab. He earned his PhD under I. I. Rabi at Columbia University in 1950. Hughes was notable for his research of muons which showed the existence of previously undetected matter. He was also noted for research that showed that protons have gluons and quarks. Hughes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Sterling Professor at Yale University, and a recipient of Rumford Prize, and a recipient of Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic Physics and the Tom W.
Go to Profile#1582
John A. Peacock
#46141
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
John Andrew Peacock, FRS, FRSE is a British cosmologist, astronomer, and academic. He has been Professor of Cosmology at the University of Edinburgh since 1998. He was joint-winner of the 2014 Shaw Prize.
Go to Profile#1583
Ernest C. Pollard
#31412
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Ernest Charles "Ernie" Pollard was a British professor of physics and biophysics and an author, who worked on the development of radar systems in World War II, worked on the physics of living cells, and wrote textbooks and approximately 200 papers on nuclear physics and radiation biophysics.
Go to Profile#1584
Heinz Oberhummer
#27685
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Heinz Oberhummer was an Austrian physicist and skeptic. Biography Heinz Oberhummer was born in Bischofshofen and grew up in Obertauern, Austria. He studied physics at the University of Graz and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He lived in the village of Oberwölbling in the Dunkelsteinerwald, Lower Austria. Heinz Oberhummer was married and had two children.
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Norman Henry March
#60044
Overall Influence
#1586
Peter van de Kamp
#42206
Overall Influence
1901 - 1995 (94 years)
Piet van de Kamp , known as Peter van de Kamp in the United States, was a Dutch astronomer who lived in the United States most of his life. He was professor of astronomy at Swarthmore College and director of the college's Sproul Observatory from 1937 until 1972. He specialized in astrometry, studying parallax and proper motions of stars. He came to public attention in the 1960s when he announced that Barnard's star had a planetary system based on observed "wobbles" in its motion, but this is now known to be false. On November 14, 2018, the Red Dots project announced that Barnard's star hosts ...
Go to Profile#1587
Thomas F Krauss
#21551
Overall Influence
Thomas F Krauss is a physics researcher at the University of York, where he is the head of the photonics group and of the nanocentre cleanroom. Before he was head of the school of physics and astronomy at the University of St Andrews. He has several research interests, but is mostly known for his work in the field of photonic crystals, where he made the first demonstration of two-dimensional photonic band-gap effects at optical wavelengths. More recently, his research has been to use slow-light in photonic crystal waveguides in order to improve the performance of optoelectronic components.
Go to Profile#1588
Jun Kondō
#31029
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Jun Kondō was a Japanese theoretical physicist. His research is noted for the Kondo effect. He was an emeritus fellow of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology . Kondō died from pneumonia on 11 March 2022, at the age of 92.
Go to Profile#1589
John S. Lewis
#22880
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John S. Lewis is a Professor Emeritus of planetary science at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. His interests in the chemistry and formation of the Solar System and the economic development of space have made him a leading proponent of turning potentially hazardous near-Earth objects into attractive space resources.
Go to Profile#1590
George Blumenthal
#31097
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
George R. Blumenthal is an American astrophysicist, astronomer, professor, and academic administrator. He was the tenth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Biography Blumenthal was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 20, 1945, to Lillian and Marcel Blumenthal, the owners of a small Venetian blinds operation. He was interested in science at a very early age and recalls the launch of the Soviet Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Blumenthal holds a B.S. in physics from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#1591
Yasaman Farzan
#18286
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Yasaman Farzan is an Iranian researcher. She is a faculty member of Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences. Awards The Kharazmi young scientist Award in 2006Young Scientist Prize of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in 2008International Centre for Theoretical Physics Prize in 2013
Go to Profile#1592
Joanne Cohn
#37001
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joanne Cohn is an American astrophysicist known for her work in cosmology and particle physics. She is also known for her role in the creation of the ArXiv.org e-print archive. Cohn is a Senior Space Fellow and Full Researcher in the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1593
Ian Crawford
#36444
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ian Andrew Crawford is a British professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom. Education and early life Born in Warrington, Cheshire, Crawford was educated at North Cestrian Grammar School in Greater Manchester from 1972 to 1979. Crawford studied Astronomy at University College London followed by Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Newcastle University . He was awarded a PhD in Astrophysics from University College London in 1988 for research on the interstellar medium.
Go to Profile#1594
Peter Meyer
#46131
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Peter Meyer was a German-born American astrophysicist notable for his research of cosmic rays. The University of Chicago said that Meyer "conducted pioneering studies on cosmic rays". The American Astronomical Society said that Meyer was "a distinguished astrophysicist and pioneer in cosmic-ray observations". Meyer was director of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, was a chairman of the University of Chicago's physics department, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also chair of the Cosmic Ray Physics Division of the American Physical Society, a...
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Ian Hutchinson
#23175
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ian Horner Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and physicist who is currently Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has made a number of important contributions to the fields of nuclear engineering and nuclear physics and has also written about the philosophy of science and the relationship between religion and science.
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Hermann A. Haus
#48915
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Hermann Anton Haus was a Slovene-American physicist, electrical engineer, and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Haus' research and teaching ranged from fundamental investigations of quantum uncertainty as manifested in optical communications to the practical generation of ultra-short optical pulses. In 1994, the Optical Society of America recognized Dr. Haus' contributions with its Frederic Ives Medal, the society's highest award. Haus authored or co-authored eight books , published nearly 300 articles, and presented his work at virtually every major conference and symposium on laser and quantum electronics and quantum optics around the world.
Go to Profile#1597
Chiara Rizzi
#60491
Overall Influence
#1598
Reinhold Bertlmann
#30072
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Reinhold Anton Bertlmann is an Austrian-born physicist and professor of physics at the University of Vienna. He is known for his research in particle physics, where he wrote the standard textbook Anomalies in Quantum Field Theory, and in the field of Bell inequalities, in particular from the quantum comparison Bertlmann’s Socks of John Bell.
Go to Profile#1599
Philip Burton Moon
#32974
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Philip Burton Moon FRS was a British nuclear physicist. He is most remembered for his research work in atomic physics and nuclear physics. He is one of the British scientists who participated in the United States' Manhattan Project, Britain's Tube Alloys, and was involved in nuclear weapon development. Moon made outstanding and original experimental contributions which stimulated the development of whole fields of research involving neutrons, gamma rays and novel methods of studying chemical reactions .
Go to Profile#1600
Robert L. Byer
#33680
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Louis Byer is a physicist. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1994 and of the American Physical Society in 2012. He currently is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He has conducted research and taught classes in lasers and nonlinear optics at Stanford University since 1969. He has made numerous contributions to laser science and technology including the demonstration of the first tunable visible parametric oscillator, the development of the Q-switched unstable resonator Nd:YAG laser, remote sensing using tunable infrared sources and precision spectroscopy using Coherent Anti Stokes Raman Scattering .
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