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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#2001
Jorge Wagensberg Lubinski
#24745
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Jorge Wagensberg Lubinski , was a Spanish professor, researcher and writer. Graduate and PhD in Physics with extraordinary prize from the University of Barcelona, where he was Professor of Theory of Irreversible Processes and Statistical mechanics in the Faculty of Physics from 1981 to 2016. He was also a visiting professor at Danube University Krems .
Go to Profile#2002
Jay Hauser
#71494
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#2003
G. Marius Clore
#30287
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
G. Marius Clore MAE, FRSC, FRS is a British-born, Anglo-American molecular biophysicist and structural biologist. He was born in London, U.K. and is a dual U.S./U.K. Citizen. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a NIH Distinguished Investigator, and the Chief of the Molecular and Structural Biophysics Section in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is known for his foundational work in three-dimensional protein and nucleic acid stru...
Go to Profile#2004
Vladimir Korepin
#22080
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#2005
Norman Sperling
#56650
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Norman Sperling is an author, editor, publisher, teacher, and telescope designer living in San Mateo, California. Sperling received a BA from Michigan State University after graduating from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. He followed that with an MA in History of Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught astronomy and related courses at Sonoma State University, California State University, Hayward, UC Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.
Go to Profile#2006
Jean Ginibre
#23854
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Jean Ginibre was a French mathematical physicist. He is known for his contributions to random matrix theory , statistical mechanics , and partial differential equations. With Martine Le Berre and Yves Pomeau, he provided a kinetic theory for the emission of photons by an atom maintained in an excited state by an intense field that creates Rabi oscillations. He received the Paul Langevin Prize in 1969.
Go to Profile#2007
Charles Kennel
#42882
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Charles F. Kennel is an American plasma physicist and former Associate Administrator of NASA. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 1997. In 2009, he was advertised by NASA Watch as a potential pick by Barack Obama as the next NASA Administrator.
Go to Profile#2008
Charles V. Shank
#31307
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Charles Vernon Shank is an American physicist, best known as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1989 to 2004. Early life and education Charles Vernon Shank was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, on July 12, 1943. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1965, his Master of Science in 1966, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1969, all in electrical engineering, writing his doctoral thesis on "Nonlinear Wave Interaction Spectroscopy", under the supervision of Steven E. Schwartz.
Go to Profile#2009
Penny Sackett
#26567
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Penny Diane Sackett is an American-born Australian astronomer and former director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University . Professor Sackett was the Chief Scientist of Australia from November 2008 until March 2011.
Go to Profile#2010
Carlos Bustamante
#31494
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Carlos José Bustamante is a Peruvian-American scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Biography Carlos Bustamante is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, professor of molecular and cell biology, physics, and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and Biophysicist Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Bustamante studied medicine at National University of San Marcos before discovering his true interest in biochemistry. He received his BSc from Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, his MSc in biochemistry from National Uni...
Go to Profile#2011
Peter C. Aichelburg
#67165
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Peter C. Aichelburg is an Austrian physicist well known for his contributions to general relativity, particularly for his joint work with Roman Sexl on the Aichelburg–Sexl ultraboost of the Schwarzschild vacuum.
Go to Profile#2012
Wolfgang Kundt
#56551
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Wolfgang Kundt is a German astrophysicist. He studied Theoretical Physics in Hamburg, centered on general relativity, and got his diploma in 1956 and his PhD in 1959, advised by Pascual Jordan. With Jürgen Ehlers and Engelbert Schücking, Kundt collaborated in a joint seminar, known as Hamburg's "Jordan Seminar" on general relativity. In 1965, he habilitated at Hamburg on "Canonical Quantisation of gauge-invariant Field Theories", and was subsequently Lecturer and, since 1971, Scientific Adviser and Professor at the University of Hamburg. When Jordan had reached retirement age in 1977, Wolfgan...
Go to Profile#2013
T. Bill Sutherland
#27508
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
T. Bill Sutherland is an American theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utah. He received his BA from Washington University in St. Louis and his PhD in 1968 while studying under Nobel laureate C. N. Yang at Stony Brook. He is best known for his work in statistical mechanics and quantum many body theory. Early in his career he solved the six vertex model and developed an exact solution in 1967, which he then followed with the eight vertex model in 1970. He completed his postdoctoral work at Berkeley in the 1969-1971 time frame where he became interested in inverse square potential many body interactions.
Go to Profile#2014
Ray Streater
#29917
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Raymond Frederick Streater is a British physicist, and professor emeritus of Applied Mathematics at King's College London. He is best known for co-authoring a text on quantum field theory, the 1964 PCT, Spin and Statistics and All That.
Go to Profile#2015
Michel Della Negra
#68148
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michel Della Negra is a French experimental particle physicist known for his role in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson. Career Della Negra studied mathematics and theoretical physics for his doctorate at the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics of the College de France in Paris, defending his thesis on the experimental study of proton-antiproton annihilation in 1967. In the 1970s, following post-doctoral work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California, he involved himself on high-energy physics projects at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked initially as a member of the Intersecting Storage Rings group.
Go to Profile#2016
Christopher H. Scholz
#68402
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Christopher H. Scholz is an American geologist and physicist. He is Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences and of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.
Go to Profile#2017
Rachel Webster
#59207
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Rachel Lindsey Webster , is an Australian astrophysicist who became the second female professor of physics in Australia. Her main focus areas are extragalactic astronomy and cosmology; she researches black holes and the first stars of the universe. Webster has a doctoral degree from Cambridge University and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto and University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#2018
Neil Gehrels
#63749
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
Cornelis A. "Neil" Gehrels was an American astrophysicist specializing in the field of gamma-ray astronomy. He was Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center from 1995 until his death, and was best known for his work developing the field from early balloon instruments to today's space observatories such as the NASA Swift mission, for which he was the principal investigator. He was leading the WFIRST wide-field infrared telescope forward toward a launch in the mid-2020s. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of A...
Go to Profile#2019
Ralf Metzler
#65639
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ralf Metzler is a physicist that focuses on nonequilibrium statistical physics and anomalous stochastic processes, with applications to biological and soft matter systems. He currently is chair professor for theoretical physics at the University of Potsdam and is an Alexander von Humboldt Polish Honorary Research Fellow.
Go to Profile#2020
Brett J. Gladman
#40219
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Brett James Gladman is a Canadian astronomer and a full professor at the University of British Columbia's Department of Physics and Astronomy in Vancouver, British Columbia. He holds the Canada Research Chair in planetary astronomy. He does both theoretical work and observational optical astronomy .
Go to Profile#2021
Volodymyr Semynozhenko
#23753
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Volodymyr Petrovych Semynozhenko is a Ukrainian politician and scientist. Semynozhenko is a former Vice Premier Minister of Ukraine and head of the Association of Ukrainian Scientists, and is now a member of the Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and served as the Chair of the Parliament Committee on Sciences and Technology. He is also the author of Ukrainian Legislation on Technology Parks. Semynozhenko was the party leader of the Party of Regions from late 2001 until early 2003. Since March 2009 Semynozhenko is party leader of the party New Politics. In addition, he created and se...
Go to Profile#2022
Valentin Fabrikant
#37682
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Valentin Aleksandrovich Fabrikant was a Soviet scientist in the field of electromagnetic radiation. He is a laureate of the Stalin Prize . Biography Fabrikant was born in 1907 in Moscow. In 1930 he graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University. After graduation, he moved to work at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. In 1932, Fabrikant began working on the issue of gas-discharge optics. In 1938 he proposed a method of direct experimental proof of the existence of stimulated emission.
Go to Profile#2023
John George Simmons
#71958
Overall Influence
#2024
James Stirling
#45580
Overall Influence
1953 - 2018 (65 years)
William James Stirling was a physicist who served as the first Provost of Imperial College London. He was appointed to this role in August 2013 and retired in August 2018. Biography He was born in Belfast and grew up in Glengormley, County Antrim, attending first Glengormley Primary School and then Belfast Royal Academy. He was admitted as an undergraduate to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1972, taking a First in Part IB and Part II of the Mathematical Tripos and a Distinction in Part III. He graduated BA in 1975, and continued at Peterhouse to take a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#2025
Alice E. Shapley
#56567
Overall Influence
Alice Eve Shapley is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She was one of the discoverers of the spiral galaxy BX442. Through her time at University of California, Los Angeles she has taught Nature of the Universe, Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes, Cosmology: Our Changing Concepts of the Universe, Galaxies, Scientific Writing, AGNs, Galaxies, *and* Writing, and The Formation and Evolution of Galaxies and the IGM. Shapley has committed herself to over a two decades of research and publication in the interest of physics and ast...
Go to Profile#2026
Patrick Thaddeus
#45115
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Patrick Thaddeus was an American professor and finished his career as the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy Emeritus at Harvard University. He is best known for mapping carbon monoxide in the Milky Way galaxy and was responsible for the construction of the CfA 1.2 m Millimeter-Wave Telescope.
Go to Profile#2027
Dieter Lüst
#30132
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Dieter Lüst is a German physicist, full professor for mathematical physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich since 2004 and a director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich. His research focusses on string theory. In 2000, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.
Go to Profile#2028
Jacques Lewiner
#26210
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jacques Lewiner is a French physicist and inventor. He is Professor and Honorary Scientific Director of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris , and dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at PSL Research University.
Go to Profile#2029
Wladek Minor
#70060
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Władysław Minor also known as Wladek Minor is a Polish-American biophysicist, a specialist in structural biology and protein crystallography. He is a Harrison Distinguished Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at the University of Virginia. Minor is a co-author of HKL2000/HKL3000 – crystallographic data processing and structure solution software used to process data and solve structures of macromolecules, as well as small molecules. He is a co-founder of HKL Research, a company that distributes the software. He is also a co-author of a public repository of diffraction im...
Go to Profile#2030
Lawrence W. Jones
#32780
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Lawrence William Jones was an American academic and professor emeritus in the physics department at the University of Michigan. His field of interest was high energy particle physics. Early life and education Lawrence W. Jones was born in Evanston, Illinois, on November 16, 1925.
Go to Profile#2031
Wilbur Norman Christiansen
#42740
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Wilbur Norman "Chris" Christiansen was a pioneer Australian radio astronomer and electrical engineer. Family The son of Wilhelm Christiansen , and Ilma Clarice Christiansen , née Jones, Wilbur Norman Christiansen was born in Elsternwick, Victoria on 9 August 1913.
Go to Profile#2032
Harry Jeannot Lipkin
#72160
Overall Influence
#2033
Lennox Cowie
#67943
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lennox Lauchlan Cowie FRS is a British astronomer, and professor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaiʻi. Biography In 1970, Cowie graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a BSc with First Class Honours. He then graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D in theoretical physics in 1976. As a post-doc, he was at Princeton University, where he became an associate professor in 1979. In 1980, he was a Fairchild Scholar at California Institute of Technology. Beginning in 1980, he was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1983 at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Go to Profile#2034
Jonathan Tennyson
#63997
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Charles Jonathan Penrose Tennyson is a British physicist. He is the Massey Professor of Physics and Head of department at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London . Chief Scientist Quantemol Ltd and chair, Blue Skies Space Ltd.
Go to Profile#2035
Herbert Gleiter
#15871
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Herbert Gleiter is a German researcher in physics and nanotechnology. In 1966, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. He received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1988 for contributions to the field of nanotechnology. He became the Chair Professor of the Institute of Material Science at Saarland University, Germany in 1979. He has also held positions at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Bochum.
Go to Profile#2036
Bruce Winstein
#65223
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Bruce Winstein was an experimental physicist and cosmologist noted for his early work in elementary particle physics, particularly work toward demonstrating a serious asymmetry between particles and their anti-particles . Later in his career, he worked in experimental cosmology, measuring polarization in the microwave background radiation whose properties date back to the early universe.
Go to Profile#2037
Walter McAfee
#35528
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Walter Samuel McAfee was an American scientist and astronomer, notable for participating in the world's first lunar radar echo experiments with Project Diana. Personal life McAfee was born in Ore City, Texas to African-American parents Luther F. McAfee and Susie A. Johnson; he was the second of their nine children. At three months old, the family moved to Marshall, Texas, where McAfee would grow up and attend undergraduate school. He graduated high school in Marshall in 1930, and later noted that his high school physics and chemistry teacher, Freeman Prince Hodge, was a great influence of his.
Go to Profile#2038
William A. Edelstein
#39338
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
William A. Edelstein was an American physicist. One of the key developers of magnetic resonance imaging , he was part of the team that developed the first full-body MRI scanner at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and was the primary inventor of spin-warp imaging, which is still used in all commercial MRI systems.
Go to Profile#2039
Adam Cohen
#30175
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Adam Ezra Cohen is a Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Physics at Harvard University. He has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and been selected by MIT Technology Review to the TR35 list of the world's top innovators under 35.
Go to Profile#2040
Bernard T. Feld
#26679
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Bernard Taub Feld was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped develop the atomic bomb, and later led an international movement among scientists to banish nuclear weapons.
Go to Profile#2041
Satosi Watanabe
#15601
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Satosi Watanabe was a theoretical physicist. He studied various topics, such as the time reversal of quantum mechanics, pattern recognition, cognitive science, and the concept of time. He was the first physicist who claimed that quantum probability theory is time-asymmetric , and reject the conventional analysis of the time reversal of probability laws. He developed the Double Inferential Vector Formalism , later known as the Two-state vector formalism , which is sometimes interpreted as contradicting his claim of time-asymmetry, but this is a misunderstanding. He also proposed the Ugly duckli...
Go to Profile#2042
Matjaž Perc
#41653
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Matjaž Perc is Professor of Physics at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, and director of the Complex Systems Center Maribor. He is member of Academia Europaea and among top 1% most cited physicists according to Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers. He is Outstanding Referee of the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters journals, and Distinguished Referee of EPL. He received the Young Scientist Award for Socio-and Econophysics in 2015. His research has been widely reported in the media and professional literature.
Go to Profile#2043
Walter Selke
#39044
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Walter Selke is a German retired professor for Theoretical Physics at the RWTH Aachen. After having received his doctoral degree at the Leibniz University Hannover, followed by postdoctoral positions at the Saarland University, Cornell University, and Boston University, he became in 1981 a permanent scientific staff member of Forschungszentrum Jülich. He held a similar position at the IBM Research Center in 1985/1986. Since 1996 he is a university professor at the RWTH Aachen, and he is also, since 2008, engaged in the "Jülich Aachen Research Alliance" . In 2012, he retired from his teaching...
Go to Profile#2044
Martin Breidenbach
#70434
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Martin Breidenbach is an American professor of particle physics and astrophysics, emeritus, at Stanford University. His research interests have included e+e- colliding beam physics, detector optimization, and electromagnetic calorimeters.
Go to Profile#2045
Jerry Nelson
#46456
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Jerry Earl Nelson was an American astronomer known for his pioneering work designing segmented mirror telescopes, which led to him sharing the 2010 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. He was the principal designer and project scientist for the Keck telescopes.
Go to Profile#2046
Brian Ridley
#48818
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Brian Kidd Ridley is a British solid-state physicist specialising in semiconductor theory. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Essex. Education Ridley was educated at the University of Durham. He received a BSc degree in physics in 1953 and completed his doctoral studies in 1957.
Go to Profile#2047
Ernst Messerschmid
#25906
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ernst Willi Messerschmid is a German physicist and former astronaut. Born in Reutlingen, Germany, Messerschmid finished the Technisches Gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1965. After two years of military service he studied physics at the University of Tübingen and Bonn, receiving a Diplom degree in 1972 and doctorate in 1976. From 1970 to 1975 he was also a visiting scientist at the CERN in Geneva, working on proton beams in accelerators and plasmas. From 1975 to 1976 he worked at the University of Freiburg and the Brookhaven National Laboratory , In 1977, he joined DESY in Hamburg to work on the bea...
Go to Profile#2048
Ana María Cetto
#25094
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ana María Cetto Kramis is a Mexican physicist and professor. She is known for her contributions to quantum mechanics, stochastic, electrodynamics, and biophysics of light, and for her work as a pacifist. From 2003 to 2010 she was Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency . She is also professor at the Faculty of Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico , of which she was also director. Cetto is responsible for several scientific literature programs in Latin America and for several international programs on the promotion and participation of women in sci...
Go to Profile#2049
Howard M. Wiseman
#32506
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Howard Mark Wiseman is an Australian theoretical and quantum physicist, who notable for his work on quantum feedback control, quantum measurements, quantum information , open quantum systems, the many interacting worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and other topics in quantum foundations.
Go to Profile#2050
Fazle Hussain
#17179
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
A. K. M. Fazle Hussain is a professor of mechanical engineering at Texas Tech University. Education Hussain graduated with a BS in mechanical engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 1963. He went on to attend Stanford University, where he studied under William Craig Reynolds, and received his MS and PhD in mechanical engineering in 1966 and 1969.
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