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,
#201
John Clauser
#3023
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Francis Clauser is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
Go to Profile#202
Wilhelm Hanle
#4490
Overall Influence
1901 - 1993 (92 years)
Wilhelm Hanle was a German experimental physicist. He is known for the Hanle effect. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. From 1941 until emeritus status in 1969, he was an ordinarius professor of experimental physics and held the chair of physics at the University of Giessen.
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Owen Chamberlain
#2934
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Owen Chamberlain was an American physicist who shared with Emilio Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the antiproton, a sub-atomic antiparticle. Biography Born in San Francisco, California, Chamberlain graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1937. He studied physics at Dartmouth College, where he was a member of Alpha Theta chapter of Theta Chi fraternity, and at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in school until the start of World War II, and joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, where he worked with Segrè, both at Berkeley and in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
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Frank Close
#5785
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Francis Edwin Close, is a particle physicist who is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Education Close was a pupil at King's School, Peterborough , where he was taught Latin by John Dexter, brother of author Colin Dexter. He took a BSc in physics at St Andrews University graduating in 1967, before researching for a DPhil in theoretical physics at Magdalen College, Oxford, under the supervision of Richard Dalitz, which he was awarded in 1970. He is an atheist.
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Roman Jackiw
#3085
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
Roman Wladimir Jackiw was a Polish-born American theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallistlist. Biography Born in Lubliniec, Poland in 1939 to a Ukrainian family, the family later moved to Austria and Germany before settling in New York City when Jackiw was about 10.
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Theodor W. Hänsch
#1799
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Theodor Wolfgang Hänsch is a German physicist. He received one-third of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.
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Rudolf Mössbauer
#2549
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was a German physicist best known for his 1957 discovery of 'recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence', for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics. This effect, called the Mössbauer effect, is the basis for Mössbauer spectroscopy.
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Nathan Seiberg
#2250
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nathan "Nati" Seiberg is an Israeli American theoretical physicist who works on quantum field theory and string theory. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
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Melvin Schwartz
#4387
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Melvin Schwartz was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.
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Rashid Sunyaev
#5198
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his MS degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1966. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences ...
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George Smoot
#5253
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
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Tom Banks
#5306
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Israel Banks is a theoretical physicist and professor at Rutgers University and University of California, Santa Cruz. Work Banks' work centers around string theory and its applications to high energy particle physics and cosmology. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. In 1973-86 he was appointed at the Tel Aviv University, he was several times a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton .
Go to Profile#213
Wolfgang Ketterle
#2865
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose–Einstein condensation in these systems in 1995. For this achievement, as well as early fundamental studies of condensates, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman.
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G. N. Ramachandran
#2356
Overall Influence
1922 - 2001 (79 years)
Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran, or G.N. Ramachandran, FRS was an Indian physicist who was known for his work that led to his creation of the Ramachandran plot for understanding peptide structure. He was the first to propose a triple-helical model for the structure of collagen. He subsequently went on to make other major contributions in biology and physics.
Go to Profile#215
Mikhail Shifman
#5846
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#216
Aage Bohr
#2805
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Aage Niels Bohr was a Danish nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 with Ben Roy Mottelson and James Rainwater "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection". His father was Niels Bohr.
Go to Profile#217
Hirosi Ooguri
#4464
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hirosi Ooguri is a theoretical physicist working on quantum field theory, quantum gravity, superstring theory, and their interfaces with mathematics. He is Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and the Founding Director of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at California Institute of Technology. He is also the director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics at the University of Tokyo and is the chair of the board of trustees of the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado.
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Dimitri Nanopoulos
#5274
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Dimitri V. Nanopoulos is a Greek physicist. He is one of the most regularly cited researchers in the world, cited more than 48,500 times across a number of separate branches of science. Biography Dimitri Nanopoulos was born and raised in Athens. His grandfather, Dimitris Nakas, was an Aromanian and an ardent Greek nationalist who had migrated at the beginning of the 20th century to New York, but in March 1914 traveled back to his native land in order to participate in the Greek struggle for northern Epirus, and died in 1916; Nanopoulos' father was born nine months prior. His father's name was Vaios.
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Albert Fert
#1832
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Albert Fert is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, scientific director of a joint laboratory between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Thales Group, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.
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Gregory Benford
#1138
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is professor emeritus at the department of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a contributing editor of Reason magazine.
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Polykarp Kusch
#2873
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Polykarp Kusch was a German-born American physicist. In 1955, the Nobel Committee gave a divided Nobel Prize for Physics, with one half going to Kusch for his accurate determination that the magnetic moment of the electron was greater than its theoretical value, thus leading to reconsideration of—and innovations in—quantum electrodynamics.
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Lu Jeu Sham
#2512
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lu Jeu Sham is an American physicist. He is best known for his work with Walter Kohn on the Kohn–Sham equations. Biography Lu Jeu Sham's family was from Fuzhou, Fujian, but he was born in British Hong Kong on April 28, 1938. He was graduated from the Pui Ching Middle School in 1955 and then traveled to England for his higher education. He received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Imperial College, University of London in 1960 and his PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1963. In 1963–1966, he worked with Prof. W. Kohn as a postdoctoral fellow in University of California, San Diego.
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Joseph Silk
#8468
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Joseph Ivor Silk FRS is a British-American astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011. He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society . He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe. Silk has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.
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David Olive
#3365
Overall Influence
1937 - 2012 (75 years)
David Ian Olive was a British theoretical physicist. Olive made fundamental contributions to string theory and duality theory, he is particularly known for his work on the GSO projection and Montonen–Olive duality.
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César Lattes
#5532
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes , also known as César Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.
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Haim Harari
#4050
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Haim Harari is an Israeli theoretical physicist who has made contributions in particle physics, science education, and other fields. He was the President of the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1988 to 2001.
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Frederick Seitz
#3065
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Frederick Seitz was an American physicist, tobacco industry lobbyist, climate change denier and former head of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Seitz was the 4th president of Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1978, and the 17th president of the United States National Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1969. Seitz was the recipient of the National Medal of Science, NASA's Distinguished Public Service Award, and other honors. He founded the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and several other material research laboratories across the United States.
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John Ellis
#4890
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Ellis is a theoretical physicist who currently holds the title of Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London. He has also worked with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) since 1978, and held post doctoral positions at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and California Institute of Technology in the early 1970s. Ellis earned his PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1971 from King’s College Cambridge. Ellis’ work has mostly focused on the phenomena of particle physics, with experiments and studies including using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to test theories.
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Werner Israel
#5001
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Werner Israel, OC FRSC FRS was a distinguished theoretical physicist best known for his contributions to gravitational theory, and especially to the understanding of black holes. Biography Israel was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931. His family fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was raised. He was interested in astronomy and cosmology from a young age. For four years, when his parents were seriously ill, Israel and his brother lived in an orphanage. Israel received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Cape Town, and his Ph.D. from Trinity Co...
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Dmitri Ivanenko
#4668
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Dmitri Dmitrievich Ivanenko was a Soviet theoretical physicist of Ukrainian origin who made great contributions to the physical science of the twentieth century, especially to nuclear physics, field theory, and gravitation theory. He worked in the Poltava Gravimetric Observatory of the Institute of Geophysics of NAS of Ukraine, was the head of the Theoretical Department Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkiv, Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Kharkiv Institute of Mechanical Engineering. Professor of University of Kharkiv, Professor of Moscow State University .
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Michael Duff
#5007
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael James Duff FRS, FRSA is a British theoretical physicist and pioneering theorist of supergravity who is the Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.
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Mario Livio
#3487
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Mario Livio is an Israeli-American astrophysicist and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics. For 24 years he was an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope. He has published more than 400 scientific articles on topics including cosmology, supernova explosions, black holes, extrasolar planets, and the emergence of life in the universe. His book on the irrational number phi, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number , won the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popul...
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Bernard Lovell
#2820
Overall Influence
1913 - 2012 (99 years)
Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell was an English physicist and radio astronomer. He was the first director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, from 1945 to 1980. Early life and education Lovell was born at Oldland Common, Bristol, in 1913, the son of local tradesman and Methodist preacher Gilbert Lovell and Emily Laura, née Adams. Gilbert Lovell was an "authority on the Bible" and, having "studied English literature and grammar", was still "bombarding his son with complaints on points of grammar, punctuation and method of speaking" when Lovell was in his forties. Lovell's childhood hobbies and interests included cricket and music, mainly the piano.
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Moisey Markov
#11285
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Moisey Alexandrovich Markov was a Soviet physicist-theorist who mostly worked in the area of quantum mechanics, nuclear physics and particle physics. He is particularly known for having proposed the idea of underwater neutrino telescopes in 1960 that was originally developed in the master thesis of his student Igor Mikhailovich Zheleznykh.
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George B. Field
#6824
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
George B. Field is an American astrophysicist. Early life, family and education Field was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His father Winthrop Brooks Field and mother Pauline Woodworth Field were Harvard and Radcliffe graduates, respectively. He became interested in astronomy at an early age, but at the urging of his father he studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Disliking engineering, he later switched to astrophysics. After MIT, he attended the graduate school at Princeton University. When working at Princeton he had his first child, Christopher Field in 1957.
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Richard A. Muller
#5279
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard A. Muller is an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In early 2010, Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller founded the group Berkeley Earth, an independent 501 non-profit aimed at addressing some of the major concerns of the climate change skeptics, in particular the global surface temperature record. In 2016, Richard and Elizabeth Muller co-founded Deep Isolation, a private company seeking to dispose of nuclear waste in deep boreholes.
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Mordehai Milgrom
#7165
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mordehai "Moti" Milgrom is an Israeli physicist and professor in the department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Biography He received his B.Sc. degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1966. Later he studied at the Weizmann Institute of Science and completed his doctorate in 1972. Before 1980 he worked primarily on high-energy astrophysics and became well-known for his kinematical model of the star system SS 433. In the academic years 1980–1981 and 1985–1986 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1983, he propose...
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Phil Plait
#3856
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Philip Cary Plait , also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions. He has written three books, Bad Astronomy, Death from the Skies, and Under Alien Skies. He has also appeared in several science documentaries, including How the Universe Works on the Discovery Channel. From August 2008 through 2009, he served as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Additional...
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Simon White
#9435
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Simon David Manton White , FRS, is a British astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019. Life White studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge in the University of Cambridge and Astronomy at the University of Toronto . In 1977 he obtained a doctorate in Astronomy under Donald Lynden-Bell entitled "The Clustering of Galaxies" at the University of Cambridge. After a few years at the University of California, Berkeley, the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona and the University of Cambridge he was appoi...
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Manfred Eigen
#653
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Manfred Eigen was a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions. Eigen's research helped solve major problems in physical chemistry and aided in the understanding of chemical processes that occur in living organisms.
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Herbert Kroemer
#1624
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Herbert Kroemer is a German-American physicist who, along with Zhores Alferov, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for "developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". Kroemer is professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, having received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor. His research into transistors was a stepping stone to the later development of mobile phone techn...
Go to Profile#242
Clarence Zener
#4034
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Clarence Melvin Zener was the American physicist who first described the property concerning the breakdown of electrical insulators. These findings were later exploited by Bell Labs in the development of the Zener diode, which was duly named after him. Zener was a theoretical physicist with a background in mathematics who conducted research in a wide range of subjects including: superconductivity, metallurgy, ferromagnetism, elasticity, fracture mechanics, diffusion, and geometric programming.
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Elliott H. Lieb
#2331
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Elliott Hershel Lieb is an American mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics and physics at Princeton University who specializes in statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, and functional analysis.
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John Clive Ward
#4026
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
John Clive Ward, was a Anglo-Australian physicist who made significant contributions to quantum field theory, condensed-matter physics, and statistical mechanics. Andrei Sakharov called Ward one of the titans of quantum electrodynamics.
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Carl Wieman
#2369
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Carl Edwin Wieman is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University, and currently the A.D White Professor at Large at Cornell University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric Allin Cornell produced the first true Bose–Einstein condensate and, in 2001, they and Wolfgang Ketterle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Wieman currently holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, as well as the DRC Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering. In 2020, Wieman was awarde...
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Jamal Nazrul Islam
#3003
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Jamal Nazrul Islam was a Bangladeshi mathematical physicist and cosmologist. He was a professor at University of Chittagong, served as a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and member of the syndicate at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology until his death. He also served as the director of the Research Center for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Chittagong. He was awarded Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh.
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Arthur Leonard Schawlow
#3830
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Arthur Leonard Schawlow was an American physicist and co-inventor of the laser with Charles Townes. His central insight, which Townes overlooked, was the use of two mirrors as the resonant cavity to take maser action from microwaves to visible wavelengths. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work using lasers to determine atomic energy levels with great precision.
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Robert R. Wilson
#3772
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Robert Rathbun Wilson was an American physicist known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, as a sculptor, and as an architect of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , where he was the first director from 1967 to 1978.
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Gerhard Ertl
#1120
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
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Louis Néel
#1835
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Louis Eugène Félix Néel was a French physicist born in Lyon who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his studies of the magnetic properties of solids. Biography Néel studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Strasbourg. He was corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his pioneering studies of the magnetic properties of solids. His contributions to solid state physics have found numerous useful applications, particularly in the development of improved computer memory units.
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