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,
#1601
David Awschalom
#32265
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David D. Awschalom is an American condensed matter experimental physicist. He is best known for his work in spintronics in semiconductors. Awschalom graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a B.Sc. in physics. He received a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Cornell University. He is the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and a Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering . He previously served as the director of the California Nanosystems Institute and was a professor in the physics depa...
Go to Profile#1602
Steven Kivelson
#45567
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Steven Allan Kivelson is an American theoretical physicist known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics. He is currently the Prabhu Goel Family Professor at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford in 2004, he was a professor of physics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is a son of Margaret Kivelson, and his father, Daniel Kivelson, was a professor of chemistry in UCLA.
Go to Profile#1603
Nick Herbert
#24278
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Nick Herbert is an American physicist and author, best known for his book Quantum Reality. Biography Herbert studied engineering physics at The Ohio State University, graduating in 1959. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1967 for work on nuclear scattering experiments. After a one-year teaching job at Monmouth College in Illinois, Herbert held a number of posts in industry. The most illustrious of these was senior physicist at Memorex Corporation in Santa Clara, California, where he developed new magnetic materials, as well as magnetic, electrostatic and optical measuring devices, and carried out theoretical work on Lorentz microscopy.
Go to Profile#1604
Ziya Burhanettin Güvenç
#60845
Overall Influence
Ziya Burhanettin Güvenç is professor of physics. Güvenç graduated from Department of Physics of Ankara University in 1981 and he finished his master's degree at the Ankara University in 1984, too. He completed his doctorate degree at University of California and he began to work at METU. Güvenç became a professor in 2001. In 2011, he was elected The rector of the year by Educators Association of Volunteer Organizations of Turkey.
Go to Profile#1605
Alberto Conti
#25830
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alberto Conti , is an astrophysicist and the Vice President and General Manager of the Civil Space Strategic Business Unit at Ball Aerospace. He is one of the creators of the GoogleSky concept, of the idea of astronomical outreach at South by SouthWest 2013 and of the James Webb Space Telescope iBook. He is also the Executive Producer of the Emmy Winning CNN Films The Hunt for Planet B.
Go to Profile#1606
Kevin Schawinski
#37713
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Kevin Schawinski is a Swiss astrophysicist. He was a professor at ETH Zurich in Zürich. Early life Kevin Schawinski grew up in both Switzerland and Germany. His father is Swiss media entrepreneur Roger Schawinski.
Go to Profile#1607
Graham Ross
#59380
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Graham Garland Ross was a Scottish theoretical physicist who was the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. Career Ross was known for constructing models of fundamental interactions and verifying them by experimentation. With others, while at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, he predicted that gluon radiation would generate collimated jets of particles in electron–positron annihilation, which subsequently established the existence of the gluon. He made contributions to the foundation of the perturbative treatm...
Go to Profile#1608
Jakob Yngvason
#17589
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jakob Yngvason is an Icelandic/Austrian physicist and emeritus professor of mathematical physics at the University of Vienna. He has made important contributions to local quantum field theory, thermodynamics, and the quantum theory of many-body systems, in particular cold atomic gases and Bose–Einstein condensation. He is co-author, together with Elliott H. Lieb, Jan Philip Solovej and Robert Seiringer, of a monograph on Bose gases.
Go to Profile#1609
Rodney Cotterill
#29339
Overall Influence
1933 - 2007 (74 years)
Rodney Michael John Cotterill Order of the Dannebrog was an English-Danish physicist, and neuroscientist, who was educated at University College London , Yale and Cambridge University . He spent most of his career as a professor at the Technical University of Denmark, Denmark, after having spent five years as a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#1610
Konrad Bleuler
#49525
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Konrad Bleuler was a Swiss physicist who worked in the field of theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. He is known for his work on the quantisation of the photon, the Gupta–Bleuler formalism.
Go to Profile#1611
David A. Weitz
#31428
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David A. Weitz is a Canadian/American physicist and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics & Applied Physics at Harvard University. He is the former co-director of the BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard, former co-director of the Harvard Kavli Institute for Bionano Science & Technology , and former director of the Harvard Materials Research Science & Engineering Center . He is known for his work in the areas of diffusing-wave spectroscopy, microrheology, microfluidics, rheology, fluid mechanics, interface and colloid science, colloid chemistry, biophysics, complex fluids, soft condensed ...
Go to Profile#1612
Richard M. Weiner
#45632
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Richard M. Weiner was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Marburg in Marburg, Germany and an associate of the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at Paris-Sud 11 University in Orsay, France.
Go to Profile#1613
Andrey Rostovtsev
#53402
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrey Afrikanovich Rostovtsev is a Soviet and Russian physicist and political activist. One of the founders of the volunteer community network Dissernet. Biography In 1983 graduated from the MEFI. After graduation worked with ITEPh: until 2013 - as Head of the Laboratory of Physics of Elementary Particles.
Go to Profile#1614
Sidney Redner
#26177
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sidney Redner is a Canadian-born physicist, professor, and a resident faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. He was formerly department chair of physics at Boston University. Redner has published over 200 journal articles, authored a book titled A Guide to First-Passage Processes , and coauthored a book titled A Kinetic View of Statistical Physics with Pavel L. Krapivsky and Eli Ben-Naim. His research focuses mainly on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and network structure. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977 under Gene Stanley, ...
Go to Profile#1615
Debra Fischer
#41831
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Debra Ann Fischer is a professor of astronomy at Yale University researching detection and characterization of exoplanets. She was part of the team to discover the first known multiple-planet system.
Go to Profile#1616
A. E. J. Wilson
#61182
Overall Influence
#1617
Wu Zhongchao
#55516
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Wu Zhongchao is a Chinese theoretical physicist and professor at Zhejiang University of Technology. Career In 1963, Wu Zhongchao enrolled in the University of Science and Technology of China. In 1968, as part of a Cultural Revolution program, he was sent to work in a factory for five years. In 1971, he returned to the university as a teacher. In 1979, recommended by physicist Qian Linzhao, he went to Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to study theoretical physics with theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. He mainly studied the very early universe. He received a doctorate from Cambrid...
Go to Profile#1618
Umesh Waghmare
#20832
Overall Influence
Umesh Waghmare is an Indian physicist, and presently a Professor in the Theoretical Sciences Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Research in his Materials Theory Group is fundamentally based on computer simulations of electronic motion governed by quantum physics and resulting electron-mediated inter-atomic interactions which are responsible for multi-scale behaviour of materials. Deriving material-specific information on chemical bonding and microscopic couplings that are essential to the specific properties of a material, they develop fundamental understanding of a material in terms of its atomic structure and electronic structure.
Go to Profile#1619
Ariel Fernandez
#16970
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ariel Fernandez is an Argentinian–American physical chemist and pharmaceutical researcher. Education and early career Fernandez received Licentiate degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina. He then earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984 with a thesis entitled Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes
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Samuel L. Braunstein
#20629
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Samuel Leon Braunstein is a professor at the University of York, UK. He is a member of a research group in non-standard computation, and has a particular interest in quantum information, quantum computation and black hole thermodynamics.
Go to Profile#1621
Joseph Jacobson
#7026
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Joseph Jacobson , is a tenured professor and head of the Molecular Machines group at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab, and is one of the inventors of microencapsulated electrophoretic display commonly used in electronic devices such as e-readers. He is the founder of several companies including E Ink Corporation, Gen9, Inc., and Kovio, is on the scientific board of several more companies .
Go to Profile#1622
Yoshihisa Yamamoto
#35490
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yoshihisa Yamamoto is the director of Physics & Informatics Laboratories , NTT Research, Inc. He is also Professor at Stanford University and National Institute of Informatics . Biography Yamamoto was born in Tokyo on November 21, 1950. In 1973 he received his B.S. degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology. He continued his studies at the University of Tokyo where he received his M.S. in 1975 and Ph.D. in 1978. From 1978 to 1992, he worked at NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Tokyo. Since 1992, he has been a professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Stanford University in the United States and currently a professor .
Go to Profile#1623
David Elbaz
#52834
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David Elbaz is a French observational astrophysicist specialising in galaxy formation and evolution. He is Research Director at the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives , where he has been a researcher in the Astrophysics Division since 1994. There, he was in charge of directing the "Cosmology and Evolution of Galaxies" laboratory for about a decade. He is the managing editor of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2018.
Go to Profile#1624
Anatol Roshko
#27573
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Anatol Roshko was a Canadian-born physicist and engineer. He was the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. Roshko is known for his contributions to gas dynamics. He along with H. W. Liepmann is the co-author of the widely used textbook Elements of Gasdynamics. He has made research contributions to problems of separated flow; bluff-body aerodynamics; structure of turbulent shear flow.
Go to Profile#1625
Francis O. Schmitt
#6905
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Francis Otto Schmitt was an American biologist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Schmitt was born November 23, 1903, to Otto and Clara Schmitt, in South St. Louis, Missouri. He had two siblings, Otto and Viola. Schmitt's father owned and operated a paint and wallpaper supply store that he established with his father in-law. The store was located on the first floor of the three story family home. The family rented out the second floor apartments and lived in the eight rooms on the third floor .
Go to Profile#1626
Jerzy Lewandowski
#29811
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jerzy Lewandowski is a Polish theoretical physicist who studies quantum gravity. He is a professor of physics at the University of Warsaw. Lewandowski received his doctorate in Warsaw under Andrzej Trautman. He worked closely with Abhay Ashtekar at Pennsylvania State University in the 1990s on the mathematical justification of Loop Quantum Gravity . Among other things, he was at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna and at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm near Potsdam.
Go to Profile#1627
Richard Bolt
#30927
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Richard Henry Bolt was an American physics professor at MIT with an interest in acoustics. He was one of the founders of the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which built the ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet.
Go to Profile#1628
Francis Everitt
#36846
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Charles William Francis Everitt is a US-based English physicist working on experimental testing of general relativity. Everitt was educated at Imperial College London and the University of Pennsylvania in low-temperature physics. He is Professor at the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory of Stanford University and is also an Associate Member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology .
Go to Profile#1629
Matthew P. A. Fisher
#23982
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Matthew P. A. Fisher is an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics. He completed his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1981 and earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986 with Anthony Leggett as his advisor, with part of his work done under the supervision of Eduardo Fradkin. He went on to become first a visiting scientist and then a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center .
Go to Profile#1630
Predrag Cvitanović
#10620
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Predrag Cvitanović is a theoretical physicist regarded for his work in nonlinear dynamics, particularly his contributions to periodic orbit theory. Life Cvitanović earned his B.S. from MIT in 1969 and his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1973. Before joining the physics department at the Georgia Institute of Technology he was the director of the Center for Chaos and Turbulence Studies of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
Go to Profile#1631
Tamás Vicsek
#22764
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Tamás Vicsek is a Hungarian scientist with research interests in numerical studies of dense liquids, percolation theory, Monte Carlo simulation of cluster models, aggregation phenomena, fractal growth, pattern formation , collective phenomena in biological systems , molecular motors, cell locomotion in vitro. He held the position of professor of physics at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, and was visiting scientists in various academia.
Go to Profile#1632
Dorit Aharonov
#14786
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Dorit Aharonov is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. Aharonov was born in Washington and grew up in Haifa, the daughter of the mathematician Dov Aharonov and the niece of the physicist Yakir Aharonov.
Go to Profile#1633
Liz MacDonald
#45651
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Elizabeth MacDonald is a space weather scientist who works at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is a co-investigator on the Helium, Oxygen, Proton, and Electron Spectrometer on the NASA Radiation Belts Storm Probe mission.
Go to Profile#1634
Venedikt Dzhelepov
#47923
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Venedikt Petrovich Dzhelepov was a Soviet physicist. Biography He educated at Leningrad Industrial Institute. A couple of years upon graduation in 1937 he began in 1939 working with I. V. Kurchatov on the first in Europe cyclotron in the Radium Institute. The joint researches with Kurchatov determined Dzhelepov's entire further career.
Go to Profile#1635
Jan van Paradijs
#54794
Overall Influence
1946 - 1999 (53 years)
Johannes A. van Paradijs was a Dutch high-energy astrophysicist. He is best known for discovering the first optical afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, GRB 970228, in February 1997, together with two of his students, and for establishing that gamma-ray bursts are extragalactic events. He was married to the astrophysicist Chryssa Kouveliotou.
Go to Profile#1636
William Allis
#33425
Overall Influence
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
William Phelps Allis was an American theoretical physicist specializing in electrical discharges in gases. He was the grandson of Edward P. Allis, founder of the E.P. Allis Company, which became Allis-Chalmers.
Go to Profile#1637
Noah Brosch
#32718
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Noah Brosch is an Israeli astronomer, astrophysicist and space researcher. Biography Noah Brosch was born in Bucharest in 1948 and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1963. Brosch studied at Tel Aviv University and at the Leiden University . He is a tenured Principal Research Associate at Tel Aviv University and served as Director of the Wise Observatory from 2000 to 2006 and again from 2007 to 2010. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union and from 2009 to 2012 served as the Vice-President of its Division XI of the IAU.
Go to Profile#1638
Ernesto Sabato
#5394
Overall Influence
1911 - 2011 (100 years)
Ernesto Sabato was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter, and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".
Go to Profile#1639
Alwyn Van der Merwe
#42268
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Alwyn van der Merwe is an American theoretical physicist. He is Emeritus Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Denver. Life and career As a young man, Alwyn van der Merwe graduated at the top of his class every year throughout his high school and university studies.
Go to Profile#1640
Kenneth Greisen
#55995
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Kenneth Ingvard Greisen was an American physicist who worked on nuclear physics and the astrophysics of cosmic rays and gamma radiation. "He will be most remembered for his realization that the cosmic microwave background limits the high-energy end of the spectrum of cosmic ray protons."
Go to Profile#1641
David Joseph Singh
#56145
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Joseph Singh is a theoretical physicist who is a curators' professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He was previously a corporate fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory .
Go to Profile#1642
Carolyn Porco
#17046
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus.
Go to Profile#1643
Rudolph Schild
#35483
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Rudolph E. Schild is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has been active since the mid-1960s. He has authored or contributed to over 250 papers, of which 150 are in refereed journals.
Go to Profile#1644
José Luis Ortiz Moreno
#47212
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
José Luis Ortiz Moreno is a Spanish astronomer, and former vice director of Technology at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía , Spain. He leads a team working on minor planets at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Granada, Spain. The main-belt asteroid 4436 Ortizmoreno was named in his honor.
Go to Profile#1645
Xiang Zhang
#10341
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Zhang Xiang is a Chinese-American academic administrator, material scientist, optical engineer and physicist. He is the current vice-chancellor and president of the University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as professor.
Go to Profile#1646
John M. Cowley
#43446
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
John Maxwell Cowley was an American Regents Professor at Arizona State University. The John M. Cowley Center for High-Resolution Electron Microscopy at Arizona State is named in his honor. Selected publications
Go to Profile#1647
Dimitri Mihalas
#41353
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Dimitri Manuel Mihalas was a laboratory fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the field of astronomy, astrophysics, and stellar atmospheres. He was born in Los Angeles, California and was of Greek origin.
Go to Profile#1648
Vsevolod Gantmakher
#26462
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Vsevolod Feliksovich Gantmakher , was a prominent Russian experimental physicist of Jewish origin, was born in Moscow as son of Felix Gantmacher, a prominent mathematician. He was a full Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is known for his fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics especially for the Gantmakher effect and Gantmakher–Kaner oscillations.
Go to Profile#1649
Antoni Stawikowski
#43366
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Antoni Stawikowski , first leader of the Polish illegal Solidarity union in Toruń. Career Stawikowski was the president of the then-illegal Solidarity union in Toruń from 1981–89, when the union has been proclaimed legal. Together with Ryszard Musielak, Andrzej Tyc, Stanisław Dembiński, Jarosław Zaremba, and others, Stawikowski was one of the crucial activists fighting with the communists regime in the region of Toruń. During the martial law held in prison.
Go to Profile#1650
Ed van den Heuvel
#50492
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Edward Peter Jacobus van den Heuvel is a Dutch astronomer and emeritus professor at the Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek of the University of Amsterdam. Van den Heuvel is well known for his work on the formation and evolution of compact astrophysical objects such as neutron stars, black holes, and white dwarfs in binary systems, and for his investigation of gamma ray bursts.
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