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,
#1851
Claudia Felser
#42102
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Claudia Felser is a German solid state chemist and materials scientist. She is currently a director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. Felser was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for the prediction and discovery of engineered quantum materials ranging from Heusler compounds to topological insulators.
Go to Profile#1852
James W. York
#24653
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
James W. York Jr. is an American mathematical physicist who contributed to the theory of general relativity. In any physical theory, it is important to understand when solutions to the fundamental field equation exist, and answering this question has been a theme of York's scientific work, with Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, of formulating the Einstein field equation as a well-posed system in the sense of the theory of partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#1853
Eleonore Trefftz
#42679
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Eleonore Trefftz was a German physicist known for her work on molecular and nuclear physics. She was appointed as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in 1971.
Go to Profile#1854
Bruno Leibundgut
#65079
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Bruno Leibundgut is a Swiss astronomer born in Basel. His work focuses on supernovae and cosmology. He was a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team and participated in the planning, development and start of the operations of the Very Large Telescope.
Go to Profile#1855
Jonathan Dowling
#37140
Overall Influence
1955 - 2020 (65 years)
Jonathan P. Dowling was an Irish-American researcher and professor in theoretical physics, known for his work on quantum technology, particularly for exploiting quantum entanglement for applications to quantum metrology, quantum sensing, and quantum imaging.
Go to Profile#1856
Tasneem Zehra Husain
#20049
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Tasneem Zehra Husain is a Pakistani theoretical physicist. She is one of few Pakistani women to obtain a doctorate in physics, and the first Pakistani woman string theorist. An eminent scientist, she has been a guest speaker at a various schools and colleges in an effort to promote science and technology in Pakistan.
Go to Profile#1857
Nikolai Borisovich Delone
#22638
Overall Influence
1926 - 2008 (82 years)
Nikolai Delaunay, Jr. was a Soviet physicist born in Leningrad, USSR . Life Delone was born in Leningrad on 22 May 1926. He was the son of Boris Delone, a mathematician. He graduated from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 1951, and obtained his Ph.D at the Lebedev Physical Institute in the late 1950s.
Go to Profile#1858
Friedrich Beck
#51062
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Friedrich Hans Beck was a German physicist. His research interests were focused on superconductivity, nuclear and elementary particle physics, relativistic quantum field theory, and late in his life, biophysics and theory of consciousness.
Go to Profile#1859
Julio Ángel Fernández
#34544
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Julio Ángel Fernández Alves is a Uruguayan astronomer and teacher, member of the department of astronomy at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo. He is also a member of PEDECIBA, , and the Uruguayan Society of Astronomy. From 2005 to 2010, he was the Dean of the Universidad de la Republica's Faculty of Sciences. The asteroid 5996 Julioangel, discovered in 1983, was named after him.
Go to Profile#1860
Ralph Alger Bagnold
#67997
Overall Influence
#1861
Maria Zuber
#31388
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Maria T. Zuber is an American geophysicist who is the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also holds the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She was the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory Mission, which was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Go to Profile#1862
Raymond E. Goldstein
#21093
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Raymond Ethan Goldstein FRS FInstP is Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#1863
Deepak Dhar
#30126
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Deepak Dhar is an Indian theoretical physicist known for his research on statistical physics and stochastic processes. In 2022, he became the first Indian to be awarded the Boltzmann Medal, the highest recognition in statistical physics awarded once every three years by IUPAP, for exceptional contributions to the subject.
Go to Profile#1864
Gennadi Sardanashvily
#20991
Overall Influence
1950 - 2016 (66 years)
Gennadi Sardanashvily was a theoretical physicist, a principal research scientist of Moscow State University. Biography Gennadi Sardanashvily graduated from Moscow State University in 1973, he was a Ph.D. student of the Department of Theoretical Physics in 1973–76, where he held a position in 1976.
Go to Profile#1865
Roland Benz
#29173
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Roland Benz is a German biophysicist. Early life and education Benz studied mathematics, chemistry, and physics at the University of Würzburg. In 1972, he obtained his Ph.D. in biology, with Peter Läuger at University of Konstanz as his supervisor; and, in 1977, he obtained his Habilitation in Biophysics.
Go to Profile#1866
Lucianne Walkowicz
#47457
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Lucianne Walkowicz is an American astronomer, artist, and activist. They were based at the Adler Planetarium until 2022 and are noted for their research contributions in stellar magnetic activity and its impact on planetary suitability for extraterrestrial life.
Go to Profile#1867
José Onuchic
#39491
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
José Nelson Onuchic is a Brazilian and American physicist, the Harry C & Olga K Wiess Professor of Physics at Rice University. He does research in molecular biophysics, condensed matter chemistry, and genetic networks, and is known for the folding funnel hypothesis stating that the native state of a protein is a deep minimum of free energy for the protein's natural conditions among its possible configurations. He was the college master for Lovett College at Rice University from 2014 to 2019.
Go to Profile#1868
Ramamoorthy Ramesh
#33970
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ramamoorthy Ramesh is an American materials scientist of Indian descent who has contributed to the synthesis, assembly and understanding of complex functional oxides, such as ferroelectric materials. In particular, he has worked on the development of ferroelectric perovskites, manganites with colossal magnetoresistance, and also on multiferroic oxides with potential benefits for modern information technologies.
Go to Profile#1869
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
#9878
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Hans Joachim "John" Schellnhuber is a German atmospheric physicist, climatologist and founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and former chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change .
Go to Profile#1870
Bernard Mills
#31582
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Bernard Yarnton Mills AC, FRS, FAA, DSc was an Australian engineer and a pioneer of radio astronomy in Australia, responsible for the design and implementation of the Mills Cross Telescope and the Molonglo Cross Telescope.
Go to Profile#1871
A. Carl Helmholz
#59573
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
August Carl Helmholz was an American nuclear physicist known for his contributions to high energy particle physics. Early life and education Helmholz was born in Evanston, Illinois on May 24, 1915. He attended the Shattuck School military academy in Faribault, Minnesota, following which he went to Harvard University for his undergraduate education. In 1936, Helmholz won a fellowship to study at the Cambridge University for one year. On the advice of his family neighbour and future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, Helmolz moved to the University of California, Berkeley for his graduate education.
Go to Profile#1872
Chang-Lin Tien
#8090
Overall Influence
1935 - 2002 (67 years)
Chang-lin Tien was a Chinese-American professor of mechanical engineering and university administrator. He was the seventh chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley , and in that capacity was the first person of Asian descent to head a major research university in the United States.
Go to Profile#1873
Marielle Chartier
#36556
Overall Influence
Marielle Chartier is a Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Liverpool in England. Her research investigates the phase diagram of nuclear matter using the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Her past work includes nuclear structure at the frontiers of the valley of stability.
Go to Profile#1874
Roger H. Stuewer
#44344
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Roger Harry Stuewer was an American historian of physics. Education and career Stuewer was born in Shawano, Wisconsin on September 12, 1934. Stuewer received from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1958 a B.S. in physics education, in 1964 an M.S. in physics, and in 1968 a Ph.D. in the history of science and physics. In the 1958–1959 academic year, he taught high school physics and mathematics in Germantown, Wisconsin. From 1960 to 1962 he was an instructor in physics at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio. At the University of Minnesota, he was an assistant professor from 1967 to 1970 and an associate professor in 1970–1971.
Go to Profile#1875
Orfeu Bertolami
#63334
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Orfeu Bertolami is a theoretical physicist who works in problems of astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity and quantum gravity. He worked at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal from 1991 to 2010. He is currently professor at Departamento de Física e Astronomia of the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto.
Go to Profile#1876
Denis Weaire
#21882
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Denis Lawrence Weaire FRS is an Irish physicist and an emeritus professor of Trinity College Dublin . Educated at the Belfast Royal Academy and Clare College, Cambridge he held positions at University of California, University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale, ultimately holding professorships at Heriot-Watt, and University College Dublin before becoming, in 1984, Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at TCD.
Go to Profile#1877
Leonard Mlodinow
#28316
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Leonard Mlodinow is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician, screenwriter and author. In physics, he is known for his work on the large N expansion, a method of approximating the spectrum of atoms based on the consideration of an infinite-dimensional version of the problem, and for his work on the quantum theory of light inside dielectrics.
Go to Profile#1878
Peter Hegemann
#8150
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Peter Hegemann is a Hertie Senior Research Chair for Neurosciences and a Professor of Experimental Biophysics at the Department of Biology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is known for his discovery of channelrhodopsin, a type of ion channels regulated by light, thereby serving as a light sensor. This created the field of optogenetics, a technique that controls the activities of specific neurons by applying light. He has received numerous accolades, including the Rumford Prize, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Albert Lasker Award for Ba...
Go to Profile#1879
Vitaly Efimov
#37108
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Vitaly N. Efimov is a Russian theoretical physicist. He proposed the existence of a novel and exotic state of matter now dubbed the Efimov State as a researcher in A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, USSR Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, USSR in his 1970 paper "Energy levels arising from resonant two-body forces in a three-body system". It was announced in 2006 that the existence of this state of matter had been confirmed.
Go to Profile#1880
Abass Alavi
#14234
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Abass Alavi is an Iranian-American physician-scientist specializing in the field of molecular imaging, most notably in the imaging modality of positron emission tomography . In August 1976, he was part of the team that performed the first human PET studies of the brain and whole body using the radiotracer [18F]Fluorodeoxyglucose . Alavi holds the position of Professor of Radiology and Neurology, as well as Director of Research Education in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Over a career spanning five decades, he has amassed over 2,300 publications and 60,000 citat...
Go to Profile#1881
Misha Tsodyks
#24782
Overall Influence
Misha Tsodyks is a leading theoretical and computational neuroscientist whose research focuses on identifying neural algorithms underlying cortical systems and cognitive behavior. His most notable achievements include demonstrating the importance of sparsity in neural networks, describing the mechanisms of short-term synaptic plasticity and working and associative memory.
Go to Profile#1882
Farhad Ardalan
#18041
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Farhad Ardalan is an Iranian High Energy physicist. He is a professor at Sharif University and the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. He is known for the proposal of the para-string theory, construction of modular invariant partition functionss for WZNW models via the orbifold method, classification of 11-dimensional supergravity solutions with a quotient structure, and discovery of non-commutativity in D-branes of string theory.
Go to Profile#1883
R. Stanley Williams
#13389
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Richard Stanley Williams is a research scientist in the field of nanotechnology and a Senior Fellow and the founding director of the Quantum Science Research Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard. He has over 57 patents, with 40 more patents pending. At HP, he led a group that developed a working solid state version of Leon Chua's memristor.
Go to Profile#1884
Leon Glass
#9368
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Leon Glass is an American scientist who has studied various aspects of the application of mathematical and physical methods to biology, with special interest in vision, cardiac arrhythmia, and genetic networks.
Go to Profile#1885
Günther Landgraf
#10023
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Günther Landgraf was a German physicist and, from 1990 till 1994, President of Technische Universität Dresden. Günther Landgraf was born in Kryry, in Bohemia . He came to Dresden in 1938 and studied physics. Landgraf graduated in fatigue strength science at the Technische Hochschule Dresden in 1952 and received his Ph.D. in 1961 and Habilitation at the renamed Technische Universität Dresden in 1969.
Go to Profile#1886
Richard Lindzen
#10312
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#1887
Izuo Hayashi
#26284
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Izuo Hayashi was a Japanese physicist. Hayashi was born in Tokyo in 1922 and graduated from the faculty of science, University of Tokyo in 1946. He worked as assistant professor at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the same university and defended his PhD in 1962. After the PhD defense, he stayed for a year at MIT, and between 1964 and 1971 worked at Bell Labs on semiconductor lasers. In 1971 he joined the Research Laboratories of NEC where he continued his studies of semiconductor lasers, aiming to improve their reliability and lifetime. Between 1982 and 1987 he was a head scientist at N...
Go to Profile#1888
Richard Green
#53277
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Richard Frederick Green is an American astronomer, former director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, UKIRT and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory. Career He was awarded a bachelor's degree in astronomy by Harvard University in 1971 and a Ph.D. by California Institute of Technology in 1977.
Go to Profile#1889
Hugh Ross
#24029
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Hugh Norman Ross is a Christian apologist, and old-Earth creationist. Ross obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto and his B.Sc. degree in physics from the University of British Columbia. He established his own ministry in 1986, called Reasons to Believe.
Go to Profile#1890
Cathie Clarke
#66731
Overall Influence
Catherine Jane Clarke is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. In 2017 she became the first woman to be awarded the Eddington Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2022 she became the first female director of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#1891
Christine Jones Forman
#37740
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christine Jones Forman is a senior astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She is a past president of the American Astronomical Society, and was the director of the Smithsonian Institution's Consortium for Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe.
Go to Profile#1892
Bhalchandra Udgaonkar
#27470
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Bhalchandra Madhav Udgaonkar, popularly as B.M. Udgaonkar, was an Indian theoretical particle physicist, scientist, educationist and the co-editor of A Nuclear-Weapon-Free World: Desirable?, Feasible?. His contributions have been reported in the development of Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education , Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar and Marathi Vidnyan Parishad . An alumnus of the Raja Shivaji Vidyalaya , he is a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, USA, a scientists' community, and a former president of the Marathi Vidnyan Parishad. He is the author of several books and has contributed content to books written by others.
Go to Profile#1893
Dmitry Zubarev
#37325
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
Dmitry Nikolayevich Zubarev was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist known for his contributions to statistical mechanics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, plasma physics, theory of turbulence, and to the development of the double-time Green function's formalism.
Go to Profile#1894
Gennady Mesyats
#20721
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gennady Andreyevich Mesyats is a Soviet and Russian physicist, founder of several scientific schools — high-current electronics and pulse electrophysics, one of the acknowledged world leaders in these areas.
Go to Profile#1895
Aleksandr Gurevich
#61097
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Aleksandr Viktorovich Gurevich was a Soviet and Russian physicist. In 1992 he proposed the theory of lightning initiation known as the "runaway breakdown". Gurevich was born on 19 September 1930. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1952. In 1984 he became a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences . He was the head of the I. E. Tamm Theoretical Department at the Lebedev Physical Institute. From 2010 he was the head of Academic Department of Physics and Astrophysics Problems in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
Go to Profile#1896
Agnès Barthélémy
#26811
Overall Influence
Agnès Barthélémy is a French physicist. She is an expert on nanostructures. She is a professor at Université Paris-Sud and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Education and career Agnès Barthélémy received her PhD in 1991 from Université Paris-Sud, where she worked under the supervision of Albert Fert.
Go to Profile#1897
Victor Szebehely
#32637
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Victor G. Szebehely was a key figure in the development and success of the Apollo program. In 1956, a dimensionless number used in time-dependent unsteady flows was named "Szebehely's number," . He worked with General Electric, Yale University, the Royal Netherlands Navy, the United States Air Force, NASA, and the University of Texas at Austin. One of his areas of research was orbital debris and planetary defense against meteor impacts
Go to Profile#1898
Ingemar Lundström
#18137
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ingemar Lundström, born 9 May 1941 in Skellefteå, Sweden, is a Swedish professor of applied physics at Linköping University. Professor Lundström received his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1967 at Chalmers University of Technology and his Ph.D. in solid state physics in 1970 from the same university. He worked at Chalmers until 1978, when he was appointed a professor in the chair of applied physics at Linköping University, a position he still holds.
Go to Profile#1899
Matthias Scheffler
#34734
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Matthias Scheffler is a German theoretical physicist whose research focuses on condensed matter theory, materials science, and artificial intelligence. He is particularly known for his contributions to density-functional theory and many-electron quantum mechanics and for his development of multiscale approaches. In the latter, he combines electronic-structure theory with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and also employs numerical methods from engineering. As summarized by his appeal "Get Real!" he introduced environmental factors into ab initio calculations. In recent years, he has ...
Go to Profile#1900
Mamoru Mohri
#4884
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
, AM is a Japanese scientist, a former NASDA astronaut, and a veteran of two NASA Space Shuttle missions. He is the first Japanese astronaut who was part of an official Japanese space program. The first Japanese person in space, Toyohiro Akiyama, was a journalist who was trained in the Soviet Union.
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