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,
#1951
Paul Benioff
#8942
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Paul Anthony Benioff was an American physicist who helped pioneer the field of quantum computing. Benioff was best known for his research in quantum information theory during the 1970s and 80s that demonstrated the theoretical possibility of quantum computers by describing the first quantum mechanical model of a computer. In this work, Benioff showed that a computer could operate under the laws of quantum mechanics by describing a Schrödinger equation description of Turing machines. Benioff's body of work in quantum information theory encompassed quantum computers, quantum robots, and the re...
Go to Profile#1952
David Tong
#24974
Overall Influence
David Tong is a British professor of theoretical physics at Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and joint recipient of the 2008 Adams Prize. He was a postdoc at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics and an adjunct professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . He is currently also a Simons Investigator. His main research interest is in quantum field theory.
Go to Profile#1953
Donald Gurnett
#63515
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Donald Alfred Gurnett was an American physicist and professor at the University of Iowa who specialized in plasma physics. Early life and education Gurnett grew up in Fairfax, Iowa. In his spare time he built and flew model airplanes with a club at the airport in Cedar Rapids. There he met the German expatriate scientist Alexander Lippisch.
Go to Profile#1954
Ashutosh Kotwal
#62919
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ashutosh Vijay Kotwal is an American particle physicist of Indian origin. He is the Fritz London Professor of Physics at Duke University, and conducts research in particle physics related to W bosons and the Higgs boson and searches for new particles and forces.
Go to Profile#1955
Munir Nayfeh
#36856
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Munir Hasan Nayfeh is a Palestinian-American particle physicist, renowned for his pioneering work in nanotechnology. Nayfeh was born in December 1945, in the neighborhood of Shweikeh in Tulkarem city, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. Following the 1948 Palestine war and Palestinian exodus, Nayfeh's family was compelled to settle in Jordan, where he received his Thanaweyeh Ammeh . He received his bachelor's degree in 1968, and his master's in physics in 1970 from the American University of Beirut, after which he won a scholarship to pursue his PhD at Stanford University in the US, which he...
Go to Profile#1956
Lucio Rossi
#61894
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lucio Rossi is an Italian physicist who is working in the field of superconductivity. He has been working since 2001 at CERN, on leave from the University of Milan, where he directed the Magnets & Superconductors for the LHC project, worth €1.7 billion, half of the machine's entire budget. He was the project leader of the HL-LHC project.
Go to Profile#1957
Andrew Siemion
#48792
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Andrew Patrick Vincent Siemion is an astrophysicist and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center. His research interests include high energy time-variable celestial phenomena, astronomical instrumentation and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . Andrew Siemion is the Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen program.
Go to Profile#1958
Emily Lakdawalla
#43387
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Emily Stewart Lakdawalla is an American planetary geologist and former Senior Editor of The Planetary Society, contributing as both a science writer and a blogger. She has also worked as a teacher and as an environmental consultant. She has performed research work in geology, Mars topography, and science communication and education. Lakdawalla is a science advocate on various social media platforms, interacting with space professionals and enthusiasts on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. She has appeared on such media outlets as NPR, BBC and BBC America.
Go to Profile#1959
Eleanor F. Helin
#17976
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Eleanor Francis "Glo" Helin was an American astronomer. She was principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Helin was a prolific discoverer of minor planets and several comets, including periodic comets 111P/Helin–Roman–Crockett, 117P/Helin–Roman–Alu and 132P/Helin–Roman–Alu. She is credited as the discoverer of the object now known as both asteroid 4015 Wilson–Harrington and comet 107P/Wilson–Harrington. Although Wilson and Harrington preceded her by some decades, their observations did not establish an orbit for the object, while her rediscovery did.
Go to Profile#1960
Francis Allotey
#13968
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Francis Kofi Ampenyin Allotey was a Ghanaian mathematical physicist. Together with Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong, he became the first Ghanaian to obtain a doctorate in mathematical sciences, earned in 1966.
Go to Profile#1961
Myriam Sarachik
#20117
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Myriam Paula Sarachik was a Belgian-born American experimental physicist who specialized in low-temperature solid state physics. From 1996, she was a distinguished professor of physics at the City College of New York. She is known for the first experimental confirmation of the Kondo effect in the 1960s.
Go to Profile#1962
Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya
#27777
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya , was an Indian physicist and mathematician, renowned for his instrumental work in the general theory of relativity. Apart from his scientific career, he was also an educationist and a follower of Gandhian philosophy in post-independence India, specifically in his domicile state Gujarat.
Go to Profile#1963
Rudolf Muradyan
#35932
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Rudolf Muradovich Muradyan is an Armenian theoretical physicist. Rudolf Muradyan's main research relate to theoretical physics, elementary-particle physics, cosmology and the origin of the Universe. Considering the properties of the interaction of elementary particles, he proposed the possibility of large-scale invariance in high-energy physics, from which the "Matveev-Muradyan-Tavkhelidze quark counting rule" is derived especially. He also researched the connection between the appearance of the Universe's rotation and magnetic fields and the cosmological constant. He is the recipient of the ...
Go to Profile#1964
Alejandro Jenkins
#51938
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Alejandro Jenkins is a Costa Rican theoretical physicist. He is currently a professor at the University of Costa Rica and a member of Costa Rica's National Academy of Sciences. He has worked on applications of quantum field theory to particle physics and cosmology, as well as on self-oscillating dynamical systems and quantum thermodynamics.
Go to Profile#1965
Louis Sokoloff
#70525
Overall Influence
#1966
Markku Kulmala
#70537
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#1967
Willie Soon
#11103
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Willie Wei-Hock Soon is a Malaysian astrophysicist and aerospace engineer who was long employed as a part-time externally funded researcher at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian.
Go to Profile#1968
Isabella Karle
#10834
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Isabella Karle was an American chemist who was instrumental in developing techniques to extract plutonium chloride from a mixture containing plutonium oxide. For her scientific work, Karle received the Garvan–Olin Medal, Gregori Aminoff Prize, Bower Award, National Medal of Science, and the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award .
Go to Profile#1969
George Samuel Hurst
#33827
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
George Samuel Hurst was a health physicist and professor of Physics at the University of Kentucky. He was known for patent hoarding and in his later years, was involved in several patent disputes through his company, Elographics.
Go to Profile#1970
Philip Moriarty
#51850
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Philip Moriarty is an Irish physicist and professor of physics at the University of Nottingham. He is known for his work on nanostructures and his collaboration with Brady Haran on the YouTube video series Sixty Symbols.
Go to Profile#1971
Francis Graham-Smith
#24438
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Sir Francis Graham-Smith is a British astronomer. He was the thirteenth Astronomer Royal from 1982 to 1990 and was knighted in 1986. Biography Education He was educated at Rossall School, Lancashire, England, and attended Downing College, Cambridge from 1941.
Go to Profile#1972
Francesca Vidotto
#34089
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Francesca Vidotto is an Italian theoretical physicist. Biography She earned her UG/MA in theoretical physics at the University of Padova and the PhD as double-degree at the University of Pavia and the Aix-Marseille Université. Afterwards she was a postdoc researcher at the universities of Grenoble, Nijmegen and Bilbao. She was awarded a Rubicon and a Veni fellowship by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
Go to Profile#1973
Phaedon Avouris
#28211
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Phaedon Avouris is a Greek chemical physicist and materials scientist. He is an IBM Fellow and was formerly the group leader for Nanometer Scale Science and Technology at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
Go to Profile#1974
Samir D. Mathur
#59918
Overall Influence
Samir Dayal Mathur is a theoretical physicist who specializes in string theory and black hole physics. Career Teaching Mathur is a professor in the Department of Physics at Ohio State University and a member of the University's High Energy Theory Group. He was a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1991–99 and held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Go to Profile#1975
Robert Kraft
#43723
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Robert Paul Kraft was an American astronomer. He performed pioneering work on Cepheid variables, stellar rotation, novae, and the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. His name is also associated with the Kraft break: the abrupt change in the average rotation rate of main sequence stars around spectral type F8.
Go to Profile#1976
Giulio Magli
#43916
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Giulio Magli is an Italian astrophysicist and archaeo-astronomer working primarily on the relationship between the architecture of ancient cultures and the sky. Biography After receiving a PhD in Mathematical Physics at the University of Milan, Magli developed his academic career at the Politecnico of Milan, where he became full professor of Mathematical Physics in 2005. Since 2009, he has taught a course on archaeoastronomy, first ever such course offered in an Italian University.
Go to Profile#1977
Jack Wisdom
#13641
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jack Wisdom is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. from Rice University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1981. His research interests are the dynamics of the Solar System.
Go to Profile#1978
Jani Radebaugh
#27834
Overall Influence
Jani Radebaugh is an American planetary scientist and professor of geology at Brigham Young University who specializes in field studies of planets. Radebaugh's research focuses on Saturn's moon Titan, Jupiter's moon Io, the Earth's Moon, Mars and Pluto. Radebaugh is a Science Team member of the Dragonfly mission to Titan, the IVO Io mission proposal, and the Mars Median project. She was an Associate Team Member of the Cassini-Huygens RADAR instrument from 2008 to 2017, and was a graduate student scientist for Io for the Galileo mission. She does science outreach through her work as an expert ...
Go to Profile#1979
Tie Jun Cui
#70858
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
#1980
Niel Brandt
#63187
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
William Nielsen Brandt is the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and a professor of physics at the Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for his work on active galaxies, cosmological X-ray surveys, starburst galaxies, normal galaxies, and X-ray binaries.
Go to Profile#1981
Claudia Maraston
#37708
Overall Influence
Claudia Maraston is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth. She designs models for the calculation of spectro-photometric evolution of stellar populations. She is the winner of the 2018 Royal Astronomical Society Eddington Medal.
Go to Profile#1982
James C. Mcwilliams
#70990
Overall Influence
#1983
Alex Grossmann
#13053
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Alexander Grossmann was a French-American physicist of Croatian origin. Career He travelled to the United States in 1955, working in the physics departments of the Institute for Advanced Study , Princeton, Brandeis University, and the Courant Institute, NYU, then again at the IAS until 1963.
Go to Profile#1984
Duane D. Johnson
#71056
Overall Influence
#1985
Hung Cheng
#18943
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Hung Cheng , also known as Hong Zheng,is an American mathematician, novelist, and physicist teaching at MIT. Education Cheng received his B.Sc and the Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, in 1959 and 1961. He had post-doctorate research appointments at Caltech, Princeton University and Harvard University before joining the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 1965. His doctoral advisor was Leverett Davis, Jr., and his thesis was on spin absorption lines of solids.
Go to Profile#1986
Marvin Chester
#30213
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Marvin Chester was a UCLA emeritus professor of Physics who specialized in quantum mechanics. After receiving his B.S. undergraduate degree from the City College of New York in 1952, he studied under Richard Feynman and John R. Pellam at California Institute of Technology where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1961. Thereafter he spent the following 31 years as a faculty member in the Physics department at UCLA.
Go to Profile#1987
Maury Tigner
#44901
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Maury Tigner is an American physicist working on particle accelerators and experimental particle physics. Tigner studied physics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute until 1958 and received a PhD degree from Cornell University in 1964. He stayed there and became a professor of physics from 1977 to 1994. After a stay at DESY he led the development and construction of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, which started operation in 1979. From 1994 to 2000 Tigner worked at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, contributing to the development of BEPC II.
Go to Profile#1988
Werner E. Reichardt
#16600
Overall Influence
1924 - 1992 (68 years)
Werner E. Reichardt was a German physicist and biologist who helped to establish the field of biological cybernetics. He co-founded the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, and the Journal of Biological Cybernetics.
Go to Profile#1989
Rolf Hagedorn
#61642
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Rolf Hagedorn was a German theoretical physicist who worked at CERN. He is known for the idea that hadronic matter has a "melting point". The Hagedorn temperature is named in his honor. Early life Hagedorn's younger life was deeply marked by the upheavals of World War II in Europe. He graduated from high school in 1937 and was drafted into the German Army. After the war began, he was shipped off into North Africa as an officer in the Rommel Afrika Korps. He was captured in 1943, and spent the rest of the war in an officer prison camp in the United States. Most of the prisoners were young and ...
Go to Profile#1990
Roberto Car
#22943
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roberto Car is an Italian physicist and the Ralph W. Dornte *31 Professor in Chemistry at Princeton University, where he is also a faculty member in the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. He conducts research on the simulation of molecular dynamics phenomena.
Go to Profile#1991
Evry Schatzman
#36870
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Evry Léon Schatzman was a French scientist hailed as "the father of modern French astrophysics". Background His father, Benjamin Schatzman, was a dentist born in Tulcea, Romania, and emigrated at a young age with his family to Palestine. Schatzman began his studies at the École normale supérieure in November 1939. After the German invasion of France, Schatzman, who was Jewish, fled occupied France, arriving in Lyon in January 1942. He worked there for a year and then moved to Haute-Provence Observatory where he hid under the pseudonym Antoine Emile Louis Sellier.
Go to Profile#1992
Norman Margolus
#19538
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Norman H. Margolus is a Canadian-American physicist and computer scientist, known for his work on cellular automata and reversible computing. He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1993
Pierre Jacquinot
#26470
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Pierre Jacquinot was a French physicist. Jacquinot was a PhD student of Aimé Cotton. He was director of Laboratoire Aimé-Cotton during almost 20 years . From 1962 to 1969 he was appointed director general of CNRS.
Go to Profile#1994
Olle Inganäs
#30857
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Olle Inganäs , is a Swedish Professor of Biomolecular and Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden. Professor Inganäs received his doctorate in 1984 from Linköping University. His research interests are in polymer optoelectronics and bioelectronics, conjugated polymer physics and polymer electrochemistry.
Go to Profile#1995
Igor Dzyaloshinskii
#47334
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Igor Ekhielevich Dzyaloshinskii, was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for his research on "magnetism, multiferroics, one-dimensional conductors, liquid crystals, van der Waals forces, and applications of methods of quantum field theory". In particular he is known for the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction.
Go to Profile#1996
Robert M Hoffman
#71362
Overall Influence
#1997
Ned Wingreen
#36125
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ned S. Wingreen is a theoretical physicist and the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences at Princeton University. He is a member of the Department of Molecular Biology and of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, where he is currently director of graduate studies. He is the associate director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, and is also associated faculty in the department of physics. Working with Yigal Meir, Wingreen formulated the Meir-Wingreen Formula which describes the electric current through an arbitrary mesoscopic system.
Go to Profile#1998
David Faiman
#24120
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Faiman is a British and Israeli physicist. Background Faiman was educated at Willesden County Grammar School and the University of London, and received his Ph.D from the University of Illinois in 1969. After post-doctoral appointments in Oxford and CERN he arrived in Israel in September 1973, to take up an appointment in theoretical physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. However, as a result of the energy crisis that followed the Yom Kippur War, he re-directed his research interests from elementary particles into solar energy. In 1976 he was recruited by Amos Richmond to assist i...
Go to Profile#1999
Peter Alan Sweet
#28568
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Peter Alan Sweet was an English astronomer. He was Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow from 1959 until his retirement in 1982. He was also Dean of the Faculty of Science 1973–1975.
Go to Profile#2000
John Dobson
#31735
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
John Lowry Dobson was an American amateur astronomer and is best known for the Dobsonian telescope, a portable, low-cost Newtonian reflector telescope. He was also known for his efforts to promote awareness of astronomy through public lectures including his performances of "sidewalk astronomy". Dobson was also the co-founder of the amateur astronomical group, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers.
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