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,
#1701
Mark Van Raamsdonk
#34030
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Mark Van Raamsdonk is a professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia since 2002. Before that, he was a postdoc at Stanford University from 2000 until 2002 and studied as a graduate student at Princeton University from 1995 until 2000 when he received his PhD under the supervision of Washington Taylor. Before that, he did a combined mathematics/physics undergraduate degree at University of British Columbia where he graduated with what is believed to be the highest GPA in the university's prior history.
Go to Profile#1702
Douglas Stanford
#30303
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Douglas Stanford is an American theoretical physicist. He is an associate professor of physics at Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics of Stanford University. His research interests include quantum gravity, quantum field theory and string theory. Stanford was awarded the 2018 New Horizons in Physics Prize by Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation for his work on improving the understanding of quantum mechanics of black holes via chaos theory.
Go to Profile#1703
Dirk Ter Haar
#63580
Overall Influence
#1704
Hanoch Gutfreund
#20460
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Hanoch Gutfreund is the Andre Aisenstadt Chair in theoretical physics and was the president at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to his presidency, he was a professor at the university. Biography Gutfreund received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1966.
Go to Profile#1705
Miranda Cheng
#29542
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Miranda Chih-Ning Cheng is a Taiwanese-born and Dutch-educated mathematician and theoretical physicist who works as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is known for formulating the umbral moonshine conjectures and for her work on the connections between K3 surfaces and string theory.
Go to Profile#1706
Richard M. Friedberg
#31871
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Richard M. Friedberg is a theoretical physicist who has contributed to a wide variety of problems in mathematics and physics. These include mathematical logic, number theory, solid state physics, general relativity, particle physics, quantum optics, genome research, and the foundations of quantum physics.
Go to Profile#1707
Siegfried Grossmann
#34329
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Siegfried Grossmann is a German theoretical physicist who has been awarded the Max Planck Medal, the major prize for achievements in theoretical physics. Biography He was born near Königsberg in Prussia and educated at the Pedagogical High School in Berlin, where he graduated in teaching. Whilst training to be a teacher he studied physics, mathematics and chemistry at the Free University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#1708
Christopher McKay
#23858
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dr Christopher P. McKay is an American planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, studying planetary atmospheres, astrobiology, and terraforming. McKay majored in physics at Florida Atlantic University, where he also studied mechanical engineering, graduating in 1975, and received his PhD in astrogeophysics from the University of Colorado in 1982.
Go to Profile#1709
Shmuel Shtrikman
#42293
Overall Influence
1930 - 2003 (73 years)
Shmuel Shtrikman was an Israeli physicist, and a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Winner of the Israel Prize for Research in Physics in 2003. Biography Born in Brest, Belarus to Abraham and Esther Shtrikman, sister of Sapir and brother of biochemist Nathan Sharon. Shtrikman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1934. In the first year the family lived in Kfar Saba; a year later they moved to Tel Aviv. In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War he served in the Air Force.
Go to Profile#1710
A. S. Rao
#17012
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Ayyagari Sambasiva Rao was an Indian scientist and founder of Electronics Corporation of India Limited , Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He completed his M.Sc in physics from Banaras Hindu University and then Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#1711
Martha P. Haynes
#51836
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Martha Patricia Haynes is an American astronomer who specializes in radio astronomy and extragalactic astronomy. She is the distinguished professor of arts and sciences in astronomy at Cornell University. She has been on a number of high-level committees within the US and International Astronomical Community, including advisory committee for the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences of the National Academies and Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Review . She was a vice-president of the executive committee of the International Astronomical Union from 2006–2012, and was on the board o...
Go to Profile#1712
Jun-ichi Nishizawa
#7989
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Jun-ichi Nishizawa was a Japanese engineer and inventor. He is known for his electronic inventions since the 1950s, including the PIN diode, static induction transistor, static induction thyristor, SIT/SITh. His inventions contributed to the development of internet technology and the information age.
Go to Profile#1713
David A. B. Miller
#19696
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David A. B. Miller is the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he is also a professor of Applied Physics by courtesy. His research interests include the use of optics in switching, interconnection, communications, computing, and sensing systems, physics and applications of quantum well optics and optoelectronics, and fundamental features and limits for optics and nanophotonics in communications and information processing.
Go to Profile#1714
Carolyn S. Shoemaker
#17579
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker was an American astronomer and a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She discovered 32 comets and more than 500 asteroids. Having earned degrees in history, political science, and English literature, she had little interest in science until she met and married geologist Eugene Merle Shoemaker. Her career in astronomy began when she demonstrated good stereoscopic vision, a particularly valuable quality for looking for objects in near-Earth space. Despite the fact that her degrees were not in science, having that visual ability motivated the California Institute of Technology to hire her as a research assistant on a team led by her husband.
Go to Profile#1715
Yevgeny Avrorin
#43516
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Yevgeny Nikolayevich Avrorin , , was a Russian physicist whose career was spent in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. Biography Avrorin was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union , on 11 July 1932. In 1949, he went to study physics at the Leningrad University and later the University of Kharkiv in Ukraine. In 1952, his family return to Moscow and he went to attend the Moscow State University, and graduate with specialist degree in physics in 1954–55. In 1956, he began preparing his thesis based on RDS-37 studies and was awarded the Doktor Nauk on 7 March 1974.
Go to Profile#1716
Olivier Costa de Beauregard
#32610
Overall Influence
1911 - 2007 (96 years)
Olivier Costa de Beauregard was a French engineer, physicist and philosopher. He spent much of his career studying quantum physics and relativity. From the early 1950s, he also wrote extensively about his belief in parapsychology.
Go to Profile#1717
Herman Branson
#10799
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Herman Russell Branson was an American physicist, chemist, best known for his research on the alpha helix protein structure, and was also the president of two colleges. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation.
Go to Profile#1718
Peter Knight
#45003
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sir Peter Leonard Knight is a British physicist, professor of quantum optics and senior research investigator at Imperial College London, and principal of the Kavli Royal Society International Centre. He is a leading academic in the field of quantum optics and is the recipient of several major awards including the Royal Medal from the Royal Society and the Thomas Young Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics. He is a former president of the Institute of Physics and the Optical Society of America, the first non North American-based person to take the position.
Go to Profile#1719
Robert Alfano
#26276
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Alfano is an Italian-American experimental physicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at the City College and Graduate School of New York of the City University of New York, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers . He is a pioneer in the fields of Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy, Ultrafast lasers and optics, tunable lasers, semiconductor materials and devices, optical materials, biophysics, nonlinear optics and photonics; he has also worked extensively in nanotechnology and coherent backscattering. H...
Go to Profile#1720
Robert Blinc
#46717
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Robert Blinc was a prominent Slovene physicist a full professor of physics and, with more than 650 articles in prestigious international journals and two extensive monographs published abroad, a highly regarded and quoted researcher in condensed matter physics.
Go to Profile#1721
G. Scott Hubbard
#24249
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
G. Scott Hubbard is a physicist who has been engaged in space-related research as well as program, project and executive management for more than 45 years including 20 years with NASA, culminating as director of NASA's Ames Research Center. As of 2012, Hubbard chairs SpaceX Safety Advisory Panel, he previously served as the NASA representative on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, was NASA's first Mars program director and restructured the Mars program in the wake of mission failures.
Go to Profile#1722
Malcolm Beasley
#23868
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Malcolm Roy Beasley is an American physicist. He is Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He is known for his research related to superconductivity. Early life and education Beasley was born at Stanford hospital, moving to Hawaii during World War II with his parents, who were social scientists. He was a high school and college basketball player, earning All-Metropolitan honors at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, and playing for the Cornell Big Red in 1958-59.
Go to Profile#1723
Peter Littlewood
#27062
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Brent Littlewood is a British physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He was the 12th Director of Argonne National Laboratory. He previously headed the Cavendish Laboratory as well as the Theory of Condensed Matter group and the Theoretical Physics Research department at Bell Laboratories. Littlewood serves as the founding chair of the board of trustees of the Faraday Institution.
Go to Profile#1724
George Siscoe
#45821
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George L. Siscoe was an American physicist and professor emeritus of space physics at Boston University. He made major contributions to the understanding of the Earth's magnetosphere and the heliosphere, particularly in helping to establishing the field of space weather and the term heliophysics - a term which is now standard use.
Go to Profile#1725
Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld
#16377
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld was a Dutch astronomer. Background In a jointly credited trio with Tom Gehrels and her husband Cornelis Johannes van Houten, she was the discoverer of many thousands of asteroids . In the Palomar–Leiden survey, Gehrels took the images using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory and shipped the photographic plates to the van Houtens at Leiden Observatory, who analyzed them for new asteroids. The trio are jointly credited with several thousand asteroid discoveries. Van Houten-Groeneveld died on 30 March 2015, at the age of 93, in Oegstgeest, Netherlan...
Go to Profile#1726
Alyssa A. Goodman
#42191
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Alyssa Ann Goodman is the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard University, co-director for Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution, and the founding director of the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing.
Go to Profile#1727
Alejandro Corichi
#16197
Overall Influence
Alejandro Corichi is a theoretical physicist working at the Quantum Gravity group of the National Autonomous University of Mexico . He obtained his bachelor's degree at UNAM and his PhD at Pennsylvania State University . His field of study is General Relativity and Quantum Gravity, where he has contributed to the understanding of classical aspects of black holes, to the non-commutativity and black holes within the approach known as Loop quantum gravity and to loop quantum cosmology.
Go to Profile#1728
Marshall Stoneham
#49159
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Arthur Marshall Stoneham, FRS , known as Marshall Stoneham, was a British physicist who worked for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and from 1995 was Massey professor of physics at University College London.
Go to Profile#1729
William McCrea
#34131
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Sir William Hunter McCrea FRS FRSE FRAS was an English astronomer and mathematician. Biography He was born in Dublin in Ireland on 13 December 1904. His family moved to Kent in 1906 and then to Derbyshire where he attended Chesterfield Grammar School. His father was a school master at Netherthorpe Grammar School in Staveley. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1923 where he studied Mathematics, later gaining a PhD in 1929 under Ralph H. Fowler.
Go to Profile#1730
Shaun Cole
#48376
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Shaun Malcolm Cole is a British cosmologist. Cole has been Professor of Physics at Durham University since 2005 and is the current director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology. He was joint-winner of the 2014 Shaw Prize with Daniel Eisenstein and John A. Peacock.
Go to Profile#1731
Dieter B. Herrmann
#51163
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Dieter Bernhard Herrmann was a German historian of astronomy and author of numerous popular science books on astronomy. He was director of the Zeiss Major Planetarium in Berlin from 1987 to 2004. In his scientific work he dealt with the early development of astrophysics and the application of quantitative methods in the history of science.
Go to Profile#1732
Hume Feldman
#26051
Overall Influence
Hume A. Feldman is a physicist specializing in cosmology and astrophysics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kansas.
Go to Profile#1733
Joseph Incandela
#58869
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Joseph Incandela currently holds the title of Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and also works at CERN. Incandela earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1986. A particle physicist, much of Incandela’s work has focused on boson particles, especially the Higgs Boson. Incandela has worked at CERN on the Large Hadron Collider since 1997. In particular, Incandela was the spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, and in 2012 announced that they had finally discovered the Higgs Boson particle (which had previously only been theorized about). ...
Go to Profile#1734
Tabetha S. Boyajian
#56051
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Tabetha "Tabby" Suzanne Boyajian is an American astronomer of Armenian descent and astrophysicist on faculty at Louisiana State University. She was a post-doctoral fellow 2012–16 at Yale University, working with Debra Fischer. Boyajian is active in the astronomical fields of stellar interferometry, stellar spectroscopy, exoplanet research, and high angular resolution astronomy, all particularly at optical and infrared wavelengths. She was the lead author of the September 2015 paper "Where's the Flux?", which investigated the highly unusual light curve of KIC 8462852; the star is colloquially k...
Go to Profile#1735
James F. Scott
#41470
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
James Floyd Scott was an American physicist and research director at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is considered one of the pioneers of ferroelectric memory devices. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2008.
Go to Profile#1736
Jainendra K. Jain
#27614
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jainendra K. Jain is an Indian-American physicist and the Evan Pugh University Professor and Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University. He is also Infosys Chair Visiting Professor at IISc, Bangalore. Jain is known for his theoretical work on quantum many body systemss, most notably for postulating particles known as Composite Fermions.
Go to Profile#1737
Silvia Torres-Peimbert
#57919
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Silvia Torres-Peimbert is a Mexican astronomer. She won the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2011 for Latin America for her work determining the chemical composition of nebulae. Life Torres-Peimbert was born in Mexico City in 1940. She studied Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before going to the University of California in Berkeley. She returned to Mexico to conduct post-doctoral research at her alma mater. She studied star formation and the mass thrown out by mid-size stars. She has studied the distribution of the primordial helium abundance. In 1973 she ...
Go to Profile#1738
David Bates
#20384
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Sir David Robert Bates was a Northern Irish mathematician and physicist. Born in Omagh, County Tyrone, Ireland, he moved to Belfast with his family in 1925, attending the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He enrolled with the Queen's University of Belfast in 1934. In 1939 he became a research student under Harrie Massey.
Go to Profile#1739
Andrew R. Liddle
#60276
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Andrew R. Liddle is a Principal Investigator at the University of Lisbon. From 2018 to 2020 he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Waterloo. From 2013 to 2017 he was Professor of astrophysics at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Publications include books and over 260 papers. He is a theoretical cosmologist and is interested in understanding the properties of the Universe and how these relate to fundamental physical laws.
Go to Profile#1740
Berndt Müller
#51119
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Berndt O. Mueller is a German-born theoretical physicist who specializes in nuclear physics. He is a professor at Duke University. Life Müller moved with his mother to Frankfurt am Main in 1953 , where they joined his father. He enrolled as a student at the Goethe University Frankfurt in 1968 and graduated in 1972. Müller received his doctorate, with Walter Greiner as his doctoral advisor, in 1973. In 1974, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and then Research Associate at the University of Washington. From 1976 he was a professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He has been a professor at Duke University since 1990 .
Go to Profile#1741
Ana Maria Rey
#23890
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ana Maria Rey is a Colombian theoretical physicist, professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, a JILA fellow, a fellow at National Institute of Standards and Technology and a fellow of the American Physical Society. Rey was the first Hispanic woman to win the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in 2019. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She is currently the chair of DAMOP, the American Physical Society's division in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics .
Go to Profile#1742
Frank J. Low
#50303
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Frank James Low was a solid state physicist who became a leader in the new field of infrared astronomy, after inventing the gallium doped germanium bolometer in 1961. This detector extended the range of the observable spectrum to much longer wavelengths.
Go to Profile#1743
Taner Edis
#13384
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Taner Edis is a Turkish American physicist and skeptic. He is a professor of physics at Truman State University. He received his B.S. from Boğaziçi University in Turkey and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Edis is the author of several books on creationism, religion and science. He is a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Go to Profile#1744
John Wilfrid Linnett
#64964
Overall Influence
#1745
Martin Zirnbauer
#28445
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Martin R. Zirnbauer is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cologne. Zirnbauer studied at the Technical University of Munich and Oxford University, where he earned his PhD. In 1987 he was appointed at age 29 to Cologne. In 1996 he acquired his professorial chair. Among his foreign research sabbaticals, he visited the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. His research specialty is the mathematical physics of mesoscopic systems.
Go to Profile#1746
Rupert Dipl Chem Dr Timpl
#64981
Overall Influence
#1747
Joseph C. Hafele
#43514
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Joseph Carl Hafele was an American physicist best known for the Hafele–Keating experiment, a test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Hafele was an apprentice welder when he was drafted to serve in the army during the Korean War. After the war, he obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his PhD in 1962 with a thesis on a topic in nuclear physics. He married Carol Hessling in 1958, and they had four daughters. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and then Washington University in St. Louis from 1966 to 1972. In 1971 he performed the Hafele-Keating experiment along with astronomer Richard E.
Go to Profile#1748
Ning Li
#34412
Overall Influence
Ning Li was a Chinese American scientist. In 1983 she emigrated with her family from China to the USA. She is known for her physics and anti-gravity research. In the 1990s, Li worked as a research scientist at the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research, University of Alabama in Huntsville. In 1999, she left the university to form a company, AC Gravity, LLC, to continue anti-gravity research.
Go to Profile#1749
Max Pettini
#63981
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Max Pettini is a professor of observational astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Pettini was born in Rome but studied for a BSc in physics then a PhD in astrophysics at University College London. He has worked in the UK ever since, apart from four years at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Epping, New South Wales from 1987 to 1991, and has British citizenship.
Go to Profile#1750
Eduardo Fradkin
#44518
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eduardo Hector Fradkin is an Argentinian theoretical physicist known for working in various areas of condensed matter physics, primarily using quantum field theoretical approaches. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he is the director of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, and is the author of the books Quantum Field Theory: An Integrated Approach and Field Theories of Condensed Matter Physics.
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