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,
#2351
Jens Eisert
#29871
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Jens Eisert is a German physicist, ERC fellow, and professor at the Free University of Berlin. He is also affiliated with the Helmholtz Association and the Fraunhofer Society. Scientific work He is known for his research in quantum information science and quantum many-body theory in condensed matter physics. He has made significant contributions to entanglement theory and the study of quantum computing, as well as to the development of protocols in the quantum technologies and to the study of complex quantum systems. Work on compressed sensing quantum state tomography he has contributed to ha...
Go to Profile#2352
David K. Ferry
#34499
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
David Keane Ferry is the Regents' Professor of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University , notable for his research in semiconductor devices. Education He received his BSEE, 1962, and MSEE, 1963, both from Texas Technical College. Ferry obtained his PhD under Arwin A. Dougal, 1966, from the University of Texas at Austin with a thesis entitled Anomalous Microwave Emission from Bulk Semiconductors.
Go to Profile#2353
Bengt Edlén
#48140
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Bengt Edlén was a Swedish professor of physics and astronomer who specialized in spectroscopy. He was the first who identified the unknown coronal spectral lines in the Corona, which was used to calculate the temperature of the corona.
Go to Profile#2354
William Cochran
#22048
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
William Cochran was a Scottish physicist. Biography Bill Cochran was born in Scotland and educated at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh. He studied physics at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD under Arnold Beevers in the Chemistry Department in X-ray crystallography of sucrose using isomorphous replacement. He moved to the University of Cambridge to work with Lawrence Bragg, and obtained tenure in 1951. He realised that isomorphous replacement was the key to solving protein structures. With Francis Crick, he invented methods for deducing helical patterns from crystallogr...
Go to Profile#2355
Georges Lochak
#64059
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Georges Lochak is a French physicist known for his work on magnetic monopoles. Biography Lochak was born in 1930 to a Russian family exiled in France due to the Russian revolution and civil war. Lochak studied physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne and the Institut Henri Poincaré from 1950 to 1954.
Go to Profile#2356
Richard Conn Henry
#69887
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Richard Conn Henry is an Academy Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, author of one book and over 200 publications on the topics of astrophysics and various forms of astronomy including optical, radio, ultraviolet, and X-ray. He reports being part of a team that discovered "vastly more baryons than had ever before been found in the universe". He is also cited in the effort to recategorize Pluto as a dwarf planet.
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Sharon Glotzer
#23548
Overall Influence
Sharon C. Glotzer is an American scientist and "digital alchemist", the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she is also professor of materials science and engineering, professor of physics, professor of macromolecular science and engineering, and professor of applied physics. She is recognized for her contributions to the fields of soft matter and computational science, most notably on probl...
Go to Profile#2358
Victor Emery
#39123
Overall Influence
1934 - 2002 (68 years)
Victor John Emery was a British specialist on superconductors and superfluidity. His model for the electronic structure of the copper-oxide planes is the starting point for many analyses of high-temperature superconductors and is commonly known as the Emery model.
Go to Profile#2359
Bikas Chakrabarti
#64265
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Bikas Kanta Chakrabarti Biography Chakrabarti received his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University in 1979. Following post-doctoral work at the University of Oxford and the University of Cologne, he joined the faculty of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1983. He is S. S. Bhatnagar Prize awardee and former J. C. Bose National Fellow . He is a former director of SINP. At present he is INSA Senior Scientist at SINP and also Honorary Visiting Professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. He was Emeritus Professor of SINP and of S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. M...
Go to Profile#2360
Luciano Rezzolla
#38798
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Luciano Rezzolla is an Italian professor of relativistic astrophysics and numerical relativity at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His main field of study is the physics and astrophysics of compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. It was announced in 2019 that he had been appointed honorary Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin .
Go to Profile#2361
Lucien Hardy
#42407
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Lucien Hardy is a British-Canadian theoretical physicist currently based at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Hardy is best known for his work on the foundation of quantum physics, including the Hardy's paradox thought experiment, and his influential work in quantum field theory, which seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics to general relativity.
Go to Profile#2362
Frederik Belinfante
#62991
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Frederik Jozef Belinfante was a Dutch physicist and a professor at Purdue University. He was a proponent of the hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics. Belinfante was born in the Hague and was a student of H. A. Kramers at Leiden University. His Ph.D. thesis, published in 1939, is called 'Theory of Heavy Quanta'. Belinfante emigrated to Vancouver in 1946 and became an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. Two years later, in 1948, he moved to the United States and became a professor at Purdue. There, he studied quantum theory and cosmology.
Go to Profile#2363
Chris G. Van de Walle
#67006
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Chris G. Van de Walle is a Professor in the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986. Prior to joining UCSB in 2004, he was a Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center . His research interests include first-principles calculations for materials, defects and doping in semiconductors and oxides, surfaces and interfaces, and the physics of hydrogen in materials. Van de Walle is a Fellow of the APS, MRS, AAAS, AVS, and IEEE. He is the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award for Senior US Scientist, the Medard W.
Go to Profile#2364
Maximilian Haider
#26473
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Maximilian Haider is an Austrian physicist. He studied Physics at the University of Kiel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he received his doctoral degree with a thesis entitled "Design, construction and testing of a corrected electron energy loss spectrometer with large dispersion and a large acceptance angle" . In 1989 he became Group Leader within the Physical Instrumentation Program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory where he had already performed some experiments during his doctoral studies.
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Kurt Kremer
#54921
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kurt Kremer is a German physicist. Career Kremer studied physics from 1974 to 1980 at the University of Cologne, where he also did his PhD in 1983 under supervision of Kurt Binder. From 1982 to 1984 he was part of the scientific staff at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Following this work he worked as a postdoc at Exxon Research and Engineering Co., Annandale, New Jersey and returned to Jülich after his Habilitation at the University of Mainz in 1988. After several research visits he left the research center when he became director and scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Res...
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Jeremy Baumberg
#43308
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jeremy John Baumberg, is a British physicist who is Professor of Nanoscience in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Director of the NanoPhotonics Centre.
Go to Profile#2367
Alexander Patashinski
#67168
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Alexander Zakharovich Patashinski was a Soviet and Russian physicist. He is a professor for Materials Research Scientist and professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He died February 22, 2020, of heart failure near his home in Seattle.
Go to Profile#2368
Ethan Vishniac
#59002
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ethan Tecumseh Vishniac is an American astrophysicist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal and a professor of Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, after holding positions at University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and University of Texas in Austin.
Go to Profile#2369
Alexandre Lazarian
#80228
Overall Influence
Alexandre Lazarian is an astrophysicist. He is a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a joint appointment at the Department of Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#2370
Dirk Dubbers
#80236
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Dirk Dubbers is a German physicist. Biography Dubbers studied physics at the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg, received his doctorate in 1972 in Heidelberg, then worked from 1972 to 1975 at the European neutron source of the Institut Laue–Langevin, Grenoble, France in the field of nuclear condensed matter physics, and habilitated 1978 in Heidelberg. From 1985 to 1990 he was senior scientist at ILL and investigated the role of neutrons in particle physics and cosmology. 1991 followed a professorship at the Technical University of Munich. In 1993 he became full professor for experimental physics at Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile#2371
Kohei Miyazono
#80238
Overall Influence
#2372
Dipankar Home
#53010
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Dipankar Home is an Indian theoretical physicist at Bose Institute, Kolkata. He works on the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, including quantum entanglement and Quantum communication. He is co-author with Partha Ghose of the popular book Riddles in your Teacup - Fun with Everyday Scientific Puzzles.
Go to Profile#2373
Paola Caselli
#74620
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Paola Caselli is an Italian astronomer and astrochemist known for her research on molecular clouds, star formation and planet formation, and the astrochemistry behind the materials found within the Solar System. She is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics near Munich in Germany. She also holds an honorary professorship at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Go to Profile#2374
John Slonczewski
#76064
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
John Slonczewski was an American physicist known for his work on spin dynamics in magnetic systems. Biography Slonczewski did his undergraduate education at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1950 and started his PhD on "Band structure of Graphite" at Rutgers University in 1958. He then joined the IBM Research center in Yorktown, New York as a staff researcher, where he stayed till his retirement in 2002. Slonczewski is known for his extensive theoretical study of magnetic system, in particular his applications of magnetic tunnel junctions s.
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Michael J. Welsh
#69017
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael James Welsh is an American pulmonologist. He is the current Roy J. Carver Chair in Biomedical Research, the Professor of Internal Medicine in Pulmonary, Critical Care and Occupational Medicine at the Department of Internal Medicine, and the Director of Pappajohn Biomedical Institute, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa. He is also a professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, Department of Neurology, and Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics. He received the 2022 Shaw Prize in Life science and Medicine, together with Paul A. Negulescu, for ...
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Mark Bowick
#67628
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Mark John Bowick is a theoretical physicist in condensed matter theory and high energy physics. He is the deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Physics in UCSB's Physics Department.
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Brian D. Warner
#9472
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Brian Dale Warner is an American amateur astronomer and computer programmer. In 2006 he was awarded the inaugural Chambliss Amateur Achievement Award by the American Astronomical Society. From the 1990s to 2011 Warner operated from the Palmer Divide Observatory at his home near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Since 2011 he has operated from the Palmer Divide Station at the Center for Solar System Studies in Landers, California.
Go to Profile#2378
Lindy Elkins-Tanton
#36425
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist and professor whose research concerns terrestrial planetary evolution. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.
Go to Profile#2379
James Lattimer
#76677
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
James Michael Lattimer is a nuclear astrophysicist who works on the dense nuclear matter equation of state and neutron stars. Career Lattimer completed his BSc in 1972 at the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in 1976 at the University of Texas at Austin. After postdocs at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1979 he became a professor at Stony Brook University and in 2013 became a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He is an American Physical Society Fellow , and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship , a Sloan Fellowship , and the Fullam Award from Dudley Observatory .
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Anders Flodström
#15333
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sven Anders Flodström is a Swedish professor of materials physics at the Royal Institute of Technology. Flodström was born in Söderhamn, Sweden. He studied engineering physics and electrical engineering in Linköping. In 1975, he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in Linköping with the thesis "Electronic structure of clean and oxygen covered aluminium and magnesium surfaces studied by photoelectron spectroscopy". Flodström was also one of the initiators of the synchrotron facility MAX-Lab in Lund, where he served as a coordinator until 1985. In 1985 he was appointed professor of materials physics ...
Go to Profile#2381
Morinobu Endo
#12733
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Morinobu Endo is a Japanese physicist and chemist, often cited as one of the pioneers of carbon nanofibers and carbon nanotubes synthesis at the beginning of the 1970s. He demonstrated carbon fibers can be grown by gas pyrolysis and traveled to Orléans, France in 1974 working with Madame Agnès Oberlin at CNRS in her laboratory. He discovered carbon nanotubes in 1976 as part of his studies at University of Orleans in France. He has been awarded the Charles E. Pettinos Award from the American Carbon Society in 2001, "For his pioneering work and applications of carbon nanotubes", Medal of Achiev...
Go to Profile#2382
Øyvind Grøn
#41535
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Øyvind Grøn is a Norwegian physicist. Biography Grøn was born in Oslo, and is a twin. He took the cand. real. degree at the University of Oslo in 1973, majoring in meteorology. He followed up with the PhD degree in 1990 with a thesis on repulsive gravitation. He started his academic career as a research assistant at the University of Oslo, and has also been a lecturer there. He was appointed as a professor at Oslo University College in 1994, having been an associate professor since 1985. He has also been professor II at the University of Oslo since 1994.
Go to Profile#2383
Edward P. Ney
#44288
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Edward Purdy Ney was an American physicist who made major contributions to cosmic ray research, atmospheric physics, heliophysics, and infrared astronomy. He was a discoverer of cosmic ray heavy nuclei and of solar proton events. He pioneered the use of high-altitude balloons for scientific investigations and helped to develop procedures and equipment that underlie modern scientific ballooning. He was one of the first researchers to put experiments aboard spacecraft.
Go to Profile#2384
Michael J Keating
#80557
Overall Influence
#2385
Radu Grigorovici
#32061
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Radu Grigorovici was a Romanian physicist. Biography Radu Grigorovici was born on November 20, 1911, in Chernivtsi, being the only son of the Bucovina Social Democrats Gheorghe and Tatiana Grigorovici. After graduating from Aron Pumnul High School he studied at the Chernivtsi University, and in 1931 he got a degree in chemical sciences and in 1934 a degree in physical sciences. At the same university, he was then a trainer at the Experimental Physics Laboratory of Professor Eugen Bădărău.
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Lee Spetner
#27583
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Dr Lee M. Spetner is an American and Israeli creationist author, mechanical engineer, applied biophysicist, and physicist, known best for his disagreements with the modern synthesis. In spite of his opposition to neo-Darwinism, Spetner accepts a form of non-random evolution outlined in his 1996 book "Not By Chance! Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution".
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Herbert Wagner
#70697
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Herbert Wagner is a German theoretical physicist, who mainly works in statistical mechanics. He is a professor emeritus of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Biography Wagner was one of the last students of German theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner Werner Heisenberg, with whom he worked on magnetism.
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Boris Shraiman
#72386
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Boris Shraiman is a theoretical physicist working on statistical physics and biology. He is a Permanent Member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Susan F Gurley Professor of Theoretical Physics and Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Philippe Nozières
#32461
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Philippe Pierre Gaston François Nozières was a French physicist working at Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France. He was born on 12 April 1932 in Paris and died on 15 June 2022, aged 90. Education In 1952, Nozières began his scientific career working on semiconductor experiments in the group of Pierre Aigrain at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He wrote a master's thesis on the point-contact transistor. In 1955, received a fellowship study with David Pines at Princeton University, working on many-body theory. He spent the summer of 1956 at Bell Labs, where he exchanged ideas with a variety of condensed matter theorists, including Philip W.
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Ulrich Walter
#20380
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ulrich Hans Walter is a German physicist, engineer and former DFVLR astronaut. Education Walter was born in Iserlohn. After finishing secondary school there and two years in the Bundeswehr, he studied physics at the University of Cologne. In 1980, he was awarded a diploma degree, and five years later a doctorate, both in the field of solid-state physics.
Go to Profile#2391
Charles Antzelevitch
#52572
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Charles Antzelevitch is an American cardiovascular research scientist in the fields of cardiac electrophysiology and cardiac arrhythmia syndromes. Education Antzelevitch graduated from Queens College, City University of New York with a BA in biology. He earned a PhD in pharmacology from State University of New York Upstate Medical University in 1978. From 1977 to 1980, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of experimental cardiology at the Masonic Medical Research Laboratory in Utica, New York.
Go to Profile#2392
Károly Simonyi
#17286
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Károly Simonyi was a Hungarian physicist and writer. He was professor of electrical engineering at Technical University of Budapest and the author of the popular tabletop book A Cultural History of Physics .
Go to Profile#2393
Thomas Spencer
#26479
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Thomas C. Spencer is an American mathematical physicist, known in particular for important contributions to constructive quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and spectral theory of random operators. He is an emeritus faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#2394
Nigel Glover
#74481
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Edward William Nigel Glover FRS is a British particle physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Durham. He graduated from Downing College, Cambridge, with a first in Natural Sciences, and went on to complete a doctorate at Hatfield College, Durham.
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Laura Ferrarese
#55648
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
Go to Profile#2396
Yasuhiko Arakawa
#69636
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Yasuhiko Arakawa is a Japanese physicist. His research focuses on semiconductor physics, including growth of nanostructures and their optoelectronic applications. Among his main achievements are the proposal of the concept of quantum dots and their application to quantum dot lasers, the observation of exciton-polariton Rabi-splitting in a semiconductor microcavity, or, recently, the first 3D photonic crystal nanocavity lasers with quantum dot gain.
Go to Profile#2397
Demetri Psaltis
#34704
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Demetri Psaltis is a Greek-American electrical engineer who was the Dean of the School of Engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne from 2007 to 2017. He is a professor in Bioengineering and Director of the Optics Laboratory of the EPFL. He is one of the founders of the term and the field of optofluidics. He is also well known for his past work in holography, especially with regards to optical computing, holographic data storage, and neural networks. He is an author of over 1100 publications, contributed more than 20 book chapters, invented more than 50 patents, and currently ha...
Go to Profile#2398
Pyotr Ufimtsev
#15865
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev is a Soviet/Russian physicist and mathematician, considered the seminal force behind modern stealth aircraft technology. In the 1960s he began developing equations for predicting the reflection of electromagnetic waves from simple two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects.
Go to Profile#2399
Gillian R. Knapp
#70557
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gillian Knapp is a professor of astronomical sciences at Princeton University. She is a faculty fellow at Whitman College. She has been involved in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and she is an active member of the International Astronomical Union.
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Steven H. Simon
#33611
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Steven H. Simon is an American theoretical physics professor at Oxford University and professorial fellow of Somerville College, Oxford . From 2000 to 2008 he was the director of theoretical physics research at Bell Laboratories. He has served on the UK EPSRC Physical Sciences Strategic Advisory Board. He is known for his work on topological phases of matter, topological quantum computing, and fractional quantum Hall effect. He is a co-author of a highly cited review on these subjects. He has also written many papers in the field of information theory. He is the author of a popular i...
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