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,
#2051
Raymond L. Orbach
#20743
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Raymond Lee Orbach is an American physicist and administrator. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the United States Department of Energy from 2006 until 2009, when he was replaced by Steven E. Koonin. Until his resignation in December 2012, Orbach was director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Orbach continues to do research as a tenured professor in the Cockrell Family Dean's Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of Texas.
Go to Profile#2052
Jean Zinn-Justin
#53086
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jean Zinn-Justin is a French theoretical physicist. Biography Zinn-Justin was educated in physics at the École Polytechnique, and did graduate work in theoretical physics at Orsay, under the supervision of Marcel Froissart.
Go to Profile#2053
Karl Z. Morgan
#19935
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Karl Ziegler Morgan , was an American physicist who was one of the founders of the field of radiation health physics. He was director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the time in the Manhattan Project late 1940s until his retirement in 1972.
Go to Profile#2054
Filippo Giorgi
#63455
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Filippo Giorgi is an Italian physicist and an author of 19 chapters and over 250 peer-reviewed articles which he published in such journals as Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics and many others.
Go to Profile#2055
Andrew Lyne
#49779
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Andrew Geoffrey Lyne is a British physicist. Lyne is Langworthy Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, as well as an ex-director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory. Despite retiring in 2007 he remains an active researcher within the Jodrell Bank Pulsar Group. Lyne was educated at The Portsmouth Grammar School, the Royal Naval School, Tal Handaq, Malta and at St. John's College at the University of Cambridge , continuing to the University of Manchester for a PhD in Radio Astronomy. Lyne writes that he is "mostly interested in finding and understanding radio pulsars in all their various forms and with their various companions.
Go to Profile#2056
Vladimir Shalaev
#46116
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Vladimir M. Shalaev is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Scientific Director for Nanophotonics at Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University. Education and career Shalaev earned a Master of Science Degree in physics in 1979 from Krasnoyarsk State University and a PhD Degree in physics and mathematics in 1983 from the same university. Shalaev received several awards for his research in the fields of nanophotonics and metamaterials, including the Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America , the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Op...
Go to Profile#2057
Eric J. Heller
#50232
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Eric Johnson "Rick" Heller is the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Heller is known for his work on time-dependent quantum mechanics, and also for producing digital art based on the results of his numerical calculations.
Go to Profile#2058
Shengwang Du
#32074
Overall Influence
Shengwang Du is a professor in the department of physics at The University of Texas at Dallas. He is noted for having led a team that performed an experiment showing individual photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, thus apparently removing one approach to time travel.
Go to Profile#2059
Alberto Carpinteri
#65264
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alberto Carpinteri is an Italian professor and engineer. Biography Alberto Carpinteri is professor in science of construction, Visiting Professor at the Shantou University - College of Engineering and former full professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin. Alberto Carpinteri was also director of the National Institute of Metrological Research , member of the New York Academy of Sciences and President of many scientific institutions as the International Congress on Fracture, ICF , the European Structural Integrity Society, ESIS , the International Association of Fracture Mechanics for C...
Go to Profile#2060
Vilen Strutinsky
#69936
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Vilen Mitrofanovich Strutinsky was a Soviet nuclear physicist. Life and career Strutinsky graduated from secondary school in 1946 in Odessa . He graduated in theoretical physics in 1952 from Kharkov University. From 1953 to 1970 he worked at the department of nuclear theory in the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. In 1959 he defended his PhD at the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, and in 1965 he received the habilitation from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. He was a visiting scientist in 1956 in the Netherlands, in 1957–1958 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, in 196...
Go to Profile#2061
Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz
#72772
Overall Influence
#2062
Stefan Rozental
#27008
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Stefan Rozental , was a nuclear physicist, specialising in quantum mechanics. Trapped outside Poland when World War I started, he and his parents ended up in Denmark and spent four years from 1915 there before they returned to their native Poland in 1919 after the war. He received his PhD from the University of Kraków in 1928.
Go to Profile#2063
Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi
#32023
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi is a Turkish-Austrian physicist. He is professor for physical chemistry at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. There, he leads the Institut for Physical Chemistry as well as the Institut for Organic Solar Cells .
Go to Profile#2064
Chia-Hsiung Tze
#45692
Overall Influence
Chia-Hsiung Tze is a professor emeritus at Virginia Tech. He is a theoretical particle physicist focusing on group theory, string theory, supersymmetry, octonions and other topics in theoretical physics.
Go to Profile#2065
Derek M. Yellon
#67093
Overall Influence
Derek Miles Yellon is a South African-British researcher in the biomedical sciences, known for his work in cardiovascular medicine. He is a professor of molecular and cellular cardiology at University College London, and is director of the Hatter Cardiovascular Institute at University College London Hospitals and Medical School.
Go to Profile#2066
Crispin Gardiner
#26440
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Crispin William Gardiner is a New Zealand physicist, who has worked in the fields of quantum optics, ultracold atoms and stochastic processes. He has written about 120 journal articles and several books in the fields of quantum optics, stochastic processes and ultracold atoms
Go to Profile#2067
Raghunathan Srianand
#71146
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Raghunathan Srianand is an Indian cosmologist, astrophysicist and a scientist at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics . Known for his research on redshift evolution on the cosmic microwave background radiation, Srianand is a member of the International Astronomical Union and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#2068
Jean-Loup Puget
#64488
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Loup Puget is a French astrophysicist. His current research interests lie in the Cosmic Microwave Background. Jean-Loup Puget and his collaborators reported the first identification of the Cosmic infrared background using COBE data. He is also, along with Alain Léger, credited with the origin of the hypothesis that the series of infrared lines observed in numerous astrophysical objects are caused by emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. He is currently principal investigator of the HFI module of the Planck space mission.
Go to Profile#2069
Donald Melrose
#69762
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Donald Blair Melrose FAA is an Australian theoretical physicist, Rhodes Scholar and laureate of the Chandrasekhar prize in Plasma Physics. He is Professor of the University, and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sydney, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and Dozor Fellow at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He was the Director of the Research Centre for Theoretical Astrophysics and Head of the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#2070
Gregor Morfill
#66257
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gregor Eugen Morfill is a German physicist who works in basic astrophysical research and deals with complex plasmas and plasma medicine. Early life and career Gregor Morfill moved to England in 1961. There, he completed his school education and began studying physics at Imperial College London in 1964. In 1967, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science. In 1968, he received a diploma from Imperial College London and in 1971 he received a PhD with his work Satellite studies of energetic particles above the atmosphere. He then went to the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching.
Go to Profile#2071
Henry Alfred Schroeder
#72883
Overall Influence
#2072
Stanislav George Djorgovski
#50266
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Stanislav George Djorgovski is an American scientist and scholar. He obtained his B.A. in astrophysics in 1979 at the University of Belgrade. After receiving his PhD in astronomy from U.C. Berkeley in 1985, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow until 1987 when he joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he is currently a professor of astronomy and data science.
Go to Profile#2073
Taekjip Ha
#40093
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Taekjip Ha is a South Korean-born American biophysicist who is currently a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously the Gutgsell Professor of Physics, at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was the principal investigator of Single Molecule Nanometry group. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Go to Profile#2074
Liisi Oterma
#43907
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Liisi Oterma was a Finnish astronomer, the first woman to get a Ph.D. degree in astronomy in Finland. She studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Turku, and soon became Yrjö Väisälä's assistant and worked on the search for minor planets. She obtained her master's degree in 1938. From 1941 to 1965, Oterma worked as an observer at the university's observatory. She obtained her PhD in 1955 with a dissertation on telescope optics. She was the first Finnish woman to obtain a PhD in astronomy.
Go to Profile#2075
Thomas Rockwell Mackie
#20714
Overall Influence
Thomas “Rock” Mackie is a medical physicist. He grew up in Saskatoon and received his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Saskatchewan in 1980. He went on to earn his doctorate in Physics at the University of Alberta in 1984. His expertise is in radiation therapy treatment planning and intensity modulated radiation therapy. He is a primary inventor and algorithm designer of the helical tomotherapy concept. Mackie is a professor in the departments of Medical Physics, Human Oncology, Biomedical Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has ...
Go to Profile#2076
Hans-Walter Rix
#69963
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hans-Walter Rix is a German astronomer and director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. He is the son of the linguist Helmut Rix. Career He was educated at the University of Freiburg, the University of Munich and the University of Arizona, Tucson, where he received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1991. He was Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton 1991–1994, then returned to the University of Arizona, and has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg since 1999.
Go to Profile#2077
Gordon Pettengill
#48840
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Gordon Hemenway Pettengill was an American radio astronomer and planetary physicist. He was one of the first to take radar from its original military application to its use as a tool for astronomy. He was professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2078
Michael Creutz
#38482
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael John Creutz is an American theoretical physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory specializing in lattice gauge theory and computational physics. Background Creutz was born in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. His father, Edward Creutz, was also a physicist and was working on the Manhattan Project to help build the atomic bomb at the time of Michael's birth.
Go to Profile#2079
Ashvin Vishwanath
#56519
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Ashvin Vishwanath is an Indian-American theoretical physicist known for important contributions to condensed matter physics. He is a professor of physics at Harvard University. Vishwanath was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
Go to Profile#2080
Jean Swank
#64271
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jean Hebb Swank is an astrophysicist who is best known for her studies of black holes and neutron stars. Early life and education Swank graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Bryn Mawr College in 1961. Two of her physics professors at Bryn Mawr were alumni of Caltech. They influenced her decision to attend graduate school at the California Institute of Technology. Under the supervision of Steve Frautschi, she was awarded her PhD in physics in 1967. Her thesis was "Radiative Corrections to Neutrino-Electron Interactions".
Go to Profile#2081
Ady Stern
#29837
Overall Influence
Ady Stern is an Israeli physicist. Adiel Stern is a professor at the Condensed Matter Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Stern and fellow researchers claim to have demonstrated the existence of 'quasiparticles' with one quarter the charge of an electron.
Go to Profile#2082
Witold Nazarewicz
#47325
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Witold Nazarewicz is a Polish-American nuclear physicist, researcher, and educator. He is a John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor in Physics and Chief Scientist at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University, and a Professor at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#2083
John C. Browne
#60065
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John C. Browne is an American physicist. Biography He was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania as the fifth child of Charles I. and Mary Agnes Browne. He received a B.S. in physics from Drexel University . He received a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University . His thesis was titled "Fine Structure of Analog States in 61,63,65-Cu".
Go to Profile#2084
Bruce T. Draine
#64507
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Bruce Thomas Draine is an American astrophysicist. He is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He attended Swarthmore College from 1965 to 1969. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ghana from 1969 to 1971, where he taught secondary school physics and mathematics. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1978. From 1979 to 1982 he was in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. He currently teaches in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. His research involves the study of the interstellar medium, especially...
Go to Profile#2085
Yasuo Tanaka
#21567
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
was a Japanese astrophysicist and a member of the Japan Academy. He was professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Kanagawa, Japan and guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
Go to Profile#2086
Sergio Bertolucci
#73376
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sergio Bertolucci is an Italian particle physicist, and a former Director of Research and Scientific Computing at CERN . Early life He was born in La Spezia. He studied Particle Physics at the University of Pisa. He did further research at DESY in Germany.
Go to Profile#2087
Bart De Pontieu
#65595
Overall Influence
Bart De Pontieu is a solar physicist who works at Lockheed Martin's Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory. He is known for his work on the dynamics and heating of the solar chromosphere, transition region and corona, via both wave mechanisms and nanoflares. De Pontieu has had a major role in multiple solar scientific space missions, including TRACE, Hinode, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and IRIS. He is the Principal Investigator of the in-development Multi-Slit Solar Explorer selected by NASA in February 2022.
Go to Profile#2088
Andrea Dupree
#61054
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Andrea Dupree is a senior astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She is a Past-President of the American Astronomical Society, and served as the associate director of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Dupree also served as Head of the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division.
Go to Profile#2089
John D. Strong
#47390
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
John Donovan Strong was an American physicist and astronomer. One of the world's foremost optical scientists of his day, Strong was known for being the first to detect water vapor in the atmosphere of Venus and for developing a number of innovations in optical devices, ranging from improved telescope mirrors to anti-reflective coatings for optical elements and diffraction gratings.
Go to Profile#2090
Herchel Smith
#17241
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Herchel Smith was an Anglo-American organic chemist. His discoveries include the key inventions underlying oral and injectable contraceptives. In later life, he was a major benefactor to university science. In England, the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London have been the major beneficiaries; and in the US, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Williams College. During his lifetime and after his death, Smith donated over US$200 million to Cambridge and US$100 million to Harvard, including endowments to expand student exchange between the two universi...
Go to Profile#2091
János Kertész
#27810
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
János Kertész is a Hungarian physicist. He is one of the pioneers of econophysics, complex networks and application of fractal geometry in physical problems. He is the director of the Institute of Physics in Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary.
Go to Profile#2092
Ruprecht Machleidt
#60342
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ruprecht Machleidt is a German-American theoretical nuclear physicist. Education and CV Machleidt studied physics at the University of Bonn, Germany, where he received his master's degree in 1971 and his doctorate in 1973. As a postdoc, he continued at the Institute for Theoretical Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn until 1975. The years 1976 and 1977 he spent at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with the group of Gerry Brown. From 1978 to 1983 he was a research associate in Bonn. 1983 to 1985 he was a visiting scientist at TRIUMF, University of British Columbia, in Va...
Go to Profile#2093
Icko Iben
#68519
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Icko Iben, Jr. is an American astronomer and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1958 with thesis Higher order effects in beta decay, which was jointly supervised by John David Jackson and Joseph Weneser. Iben served on the MIT Physics Department faculty for some time before moving to Illinois, being promoted to associate professor in 1964. He is best known for his contributions to theoretical star models, stellar evolution theory, concerning the production of planetary nebulae, red giant heavy ele...
Go to Profile#2094
Roman Smoluchowski
#73571
Overall Influence
#2095
Raymond Hide
#37469
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Raymond Hide CBE FRS was a British physicist, who was a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and, since 2000, senior research investigator at Imperial College, London. Life Hide was educated at Percy Jackson Grammar School, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire and the University of Manchester, where he obtained a first-class degree in physics in 1950. He then went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and was awarded a doctorate in 1953.
Go to Profile#2096
Alexander Sergeev
#31162
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Sergeyev is a Russian physicist. In 2017-2022 he was the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Sergeev was born in Buturlino, Gorky Oblast and studied physics at Gorky State University, graduating in 1977. After the graduation, he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Gorky, currently Nizhny Novgorod. He received his PhD in 1982, and spent his whole scientific career at the same institute. In 2015, he became the director of the institute.
Go to Profile#2097
Allan Franklin
#45721
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Allan David Franklin is an American physicist, historian of science, and philosopher of science. Franklin received in 1959 his bachelor's degree from Columbia University and in 1965 his PhD in physics from Cornell University. He was from 1965 to 1966 a postdoc and from 1966 to 1967 an instructor at Princeton University. At the University of Colorado Boulder he became in 1982 a full professor in physics, after having been there from 1967 to 1973 an assistant professor and from 1973 to 1982 an associate professor.
Go to Profile#2098
Guy Consolmagno
#33926
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, SJ , is an American research astronomer, physicist, religious brother, director of the Vatican Observatory, and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Life Consolmagno attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School before he obtained his S.B. and S.M. degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, all in planetary science. After postdoctoral research and teaching from 1978 to 1980 at Harvard College Observatory and from 1980 to 1983 at MIT, in 1983 he joined the US Peace Corps to serve in Kenya for two years, teaching astronomy and physics.
Go to Profile#2099
E. Myles Standish
#47782
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Erland Myles Standish Jr. is a mathematical astronomer largely working in the field of solar system dynamics and celestial mechanics. He is a former professor at Yale University and had worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Go to Profile#2100
Cyril Hilsum
#26366
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Cyril Hilsum is a British physicist and academic. Hilsum was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1983 for the inventiveness and leadership in introducing III-V semiconductors into electronic technology.
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