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,
#251
Walter Lewin
#6591
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Walter Hendrik Gustav Lewin is a Dutch astrophysicist and retired professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lewin earned his doctorate in nuclear physics in 1965 at the Delft University of Technology and was a member of MIT's physics faculty for 43 years beginning in 1966 until his retirement in 2009.
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John Henry Schwarz
#3770
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Henry Schwarz is an American theoretical physicist. Along with Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Joël Scherk, Gabriele Veneziano, Michael Green, and Leonard Susskind, he is regarded as one of the founders of string theory.
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Lincoln Wolfenstein
#10163
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Lincoln Wolfenstein was an American particle physicist who studied the weak interaction. Wolfenstein was born in 1923 and obtained his PhD in 1949 from the University of Chicago. He retired from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 after being a faculty member for 52 years. Despite being retired, he continued to come into work nearly every day.
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Michael Berry
#2041
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir Michael Victor Berry, , is a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England. He is known for the Berry phase, a phenomenon observed e.g. in quantum mechanics and optics, as well as Berry connection and curvature. He specialises in semiclassical physics , applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics.
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Pierre Ramond
#3710
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Pierre Ramond is distinguished professor of physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He initiated the development of superstring theory. Academic career Ramond completed his BSEE from Newark College of Engineering in 1965 and completed his Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse University in 1969. He was a postdoctoral fellow at NAL from 1969 to 1971. He became instructor at Yale University from 1971 to 1973 and assistant professor at Yale University from 1973 to 1976. He moved to Caltech as an R. A. Millikan Senior Fellow in 1976. He became a professor of physics at University of ...
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Michael Levitt
#877
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#257
Roald Sagdeev
#5139
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Roald Zinnurovich Sagdeev is a Russian expert in plasma physics and a former director of the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was also a science advisor to the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Sagdeev graduated from Moscow State University. He is a member of both the Russian Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has worked at the University of Maryland, College Park since 1989 in the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He is also currently a Senior Advisor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a ...
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Raymond Davis Jr.
#4155
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Raymond Davis Jr. was an American chemist and physicist. He is best known as the leader of the Homestake experiment in the 1960s-1980s, which was the first experiment to detect neutrinos emitted from the Sun; for this he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Ludvig Faddeev
#3107
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Ludvig Dmitrievich Faddeev was a Soviet and Russian mathematical physicist. He is known for the discovery of the Faddeev equations in the theory of the quantum mechanical three-body problem and for the development of path integral methods in the quantization of non-abelian gauge field theories, including the introduction of Faddeev–Popov ghosts. He led the Leningrad School, in which he along with many of his students developed the quantum inverse scattering method for studying quantum integrable systems in one space and one time dimension. This work led to the invention of quantum groups b...
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Aleksander Wolszczan
#5951
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Aleksander Wolszczan is a Polish astronomer. He is the co-discoverer of the first confirmed extrasolar planets and pulsar planets. Early life and education Wolszczan was born on 29 April 1946 in Szczecinek located in present-day West Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland; in the 1950s his family moved to Szczecin. His father Jerzy Wolszczan taught economics at former Szczecin Polytechnic and his mother, Zofia, worked for the Polish Writers' Union. His early interest in astronomy was inspired by his father who told him stories and myths connected with stellar constellations. As a seven-year-old he already learned the basics of astronomy.
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Helen Quinn
#8500
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Helen Rhoda Arnold Quinn is an Australian-born particle physicist and educator who has made major contributions to both fields. Her contributions to theoretical physics include the Peccei–Quinn theory which implies a corresponding symmetry of nature and contributions to the search for a unified theory for the three types of particle interactions . As Chair of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences, Quinn led the effort that produced A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas—the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by many states.
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Robert Herman
#3948
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Robert Herman was an American scientist, best known for his work with Ralph Alpher in 1948–50, on estimating the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang explosion. Biography and career Born in the Bronx, New York City, Herman graduated cum laude with special honors in physics from the City College of New York in 1935, and in 1940 was awarded master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Princeton University in the area of molecular spectroscopy. As a graduate student, Herman already exhibited eclectic tendencies in diverse fields by also working in solid state physics, as well as straddling theory and experiment.
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Andrew Huxley
#366
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley was an English physiologist and biophysicist. He was born into the prominent Huxley family. After leaving Westminster School in central London, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship, after which he joined Alan Lloyd Hodgkin to study nerve impulses. Their eventual discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. They made their discovery from the giant axon of the Atlantic squid. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, Huxley was recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command and later transferred to the Admiralty.
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Yakir Aharonov
#2374
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Yakir Aharonov is an Israeli physicist specializing in quantum physics. He has been a Professor of Theoretical Physics and the James J. Farley Professor of Natural Philosophy at Chapman University in California since 2008. He was a distinguished professor in the Perimeter Institute between 2009-2012 and is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and at University of South Carolina. He is president of the IYAR, The Israeli Institute for Advanced Research.
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Brian Pippard
#4971
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Sir Alfred Brian Pippard, FRS , was a British physicist. He was Cavendish Professor of Physics from 1971 until 1982 and an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, of which he was the first President.
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Arkady Vainshtein
#8044
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Arkady Vainshtein is a Russian and American Professor Emeritus of Theoretical physics who was awarded Pomeranchuk Prize and Sakurai Prize for theoretical physics. Biography Vainshtein was born on 24 February 1942 in Novokuznetsk, Russia. He got his Ph.D. from Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, Russia and master's degree from Novosibirsk University where he became a Professor. He was the director of William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota where he currently serves as the Gloria Becker Lubkin chair and also holds a position as Professor since 1990.
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William Rarita
#13445
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
William Rarità was an American theoretical physicist who mainly worked on nuclear physics, particle physics and relativistic quantum mechanics. He is particularly famous for the formulation of Rarita–Schwinger equation. His famous formula is applicable to spin 3/2 particles as opposed to spin 1/2 particles. Rarita taught physics at Brooklyn College for 32 years before he became a visiting scientist in the theory group at LBNL. At the time of his retirement in 1996, he was doing research at LBNL. In addition to his work with Julian Schwinger, Rarita also collaborated with Herman Feshbach.
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Charles Thorn
#5351
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Charles Thorn is a Professor of Physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He played an important role in the development of dual models and string theory. Among his contributions is the proof of the non-existence of ghosts in string theory. The Goddard–Thorn theorem is a result about certain vector spaces in string theory. Thorn developed it with Peter Goddard.
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Owen Gingerich
#5635
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Owen Jay Gingerich was an American astronomer who had been professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he had written many books on the history of astronomy.
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Craig Hogan
#10063
Overall Influence
Craig Hogan is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics. He is known for his theory of "holographic noise", which holds that holographic principle may imply quantum fluctuations in spatial position that would lead to apparent background noise or holographic noise measurable at gravitational wave detectors, in particular GEO 600.
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H. Eugene Stanley
#2879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Harry Eugene Stanley is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His current research focuses on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water, but he had made fundamental contributions to complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences, interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. He is one of the founding fathers of econ...
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John Hagelin
#2571
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Samuel Hagelin is the leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement in the United States. He is president of Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, and honorary chair of its board of trustees. The university was established in 1973 by the TM movement's founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to deliver a "consciousness-based education".
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John Polkinghorne
#1317
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
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Marcelo Gleiser
#3945
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marcelo Gleiser is a Brazilian physicist and astronomer. He is currently Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College and was the 2019 recipient of the Templeton Prize. Early life and education Gleiser received his bachelor's degree in 1981 from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, his M.Sc. degree in 1982 from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and his Ph.D. in 1986 from King's College London. After this he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab until 1988 and from then until 1991 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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Kazuhiko Nishijima
#6623
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Kazuhiko Nishijima was a Japanese physicist who made significant contributions to particle physics. He was professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University until his death in 2009.
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Russell Alan Hulse
#6247
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Russell Alan Hulse is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation".
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Arthur Ashkin
#2829
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Arthur Ashkin was an American scientist and Nobel laureate who worked at Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. Ashkin has been considered by many as the father of optical tweezers, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 at age 96, becoming the oldest Nobel laureate until 2019 when John B. Goodenough was awarded at 97. He resided in Rumson, New Jersey.
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Mario Bunge
#185
Overall Influence
1919 - 2020 (101 years)
Mario Augusto Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles. He was an advocate of "exact philosophy" and a critic of existentialist, hermeneutical, phenomenological philosophy, and postmodernism. He was popularly known for his opinions against pseudoscience.
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Gerd Binnig
#1329
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gerd Binnig is a German physicist. He is most famous for having won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Heinrich Rohrer in 1986 for the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Early life and education Binnig was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach am Main, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a physicist, but he soon wondered whether he had made the right choice. He concentrated more on music, playing in a band. He also started playi...
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Emil Martinec
#7410
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Emil John Martinec is an American string theorist, a physics professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and director of the Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics. He was part of a group at Princeton University that developed heterotic string theory in 1985.
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James Van Allen
#2724
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
James Alfred Van Allen was an American space scientist at the University of Iowa. He was instrumental in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space. The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following his discovery using Geiger–Müller tube instruments on the 1958 satellites during the International Geophysical Year. Van Allen led the scientific community in putting scientific research instruments on space satellites.
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Stuart Kauffman
#800
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Areas of Specialization: Biochemistry Stuart Kauffman is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, an affiliate faculty member for the Institute of Systems Biology, a medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and researcher of complex systems. He earned his BA at University of Oxford and an MD at the University of California, San Francisco. Among his best-known work has been his exploration of the complexity of biological systems and the origins of the Earth. He built the N-K fitness landscapes model, which expanded upon the spin glass physics models. His N-K fitness landscapes have since been used by biologists and economists to understand systems behaviors.
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Giorgi Dvali
#10909
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Georgi Dvali is a Georgian theoretical physicist. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, and holds a Silver Professorship Chair at the New York University. His research interests include String theory, Extra dimensions, Quantum gravity, and the Early universe.
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Arieh Warshel
#734
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and holds the Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
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David Spergel
#8015
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David Nathaniel Spergel is an American theoretical astrophysicist and the Emeritus Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation at Princeton University. Since 2021, he has been the President of the Simons Foundation. He is known for his work on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe project. In 2022, Spergel accepted the chair of NASA's UAP independent study team.
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Curtis Callan
#6847
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Curtis Gove Callan Jr. is an American theoretical physicist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He has conducted research in gauge theory, string theory, instantons, black holes, strong interactions, and many other topics. He was awarded the Sakurai Prize in 2000 and the Dirac Medal in 2004.
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Yuri Oganessian
#1887
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Yuri Tsolakovich Oganessian is a Russian-Armenian nuclear physicist who is best known as a researcher of superheavy chemical elementss. He participated with the discovery of multiple elements of the periodic table. He succeeded Georgy Flyorov as director of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in 1989 and is now its scientific director. The heaviest element known of the periodic table, oganesson, is named after him, only the second time that an element was named after a living person .
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Leo Kadanoff
#2971
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Leo Philip Kadanoff was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society . He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.
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Yoji Totsuka
#7804
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Yoji Totsuka was a Japanese physicist and Special University Professor, Emeritus, University of Tokyo. A leader in the study of solar and atmospheric neutrinos, he was a scientist and director at Kamioka Observatory, Super-Kamiokande and the High Energy Physics Laboratory in Japan.
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Gerald Hawkins
#8306
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Gerald Stanley Hawkins was a British-born American astronomer and author noted for his work in the field of archaeoastronomy. A professor and chair of the astronomy department at Boston University in the United States, he published in 1963 an analysis of Stonehenge in which he was the first to propose that it was an ancient astronomical observatory used to predict movements of the sun and moon, and that it was used as a computer. Archaeologists and other scholars have since demonstrated such sophisticated, complex planning and construction at other prehistoric earthwork sites, such as Cahok...
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Don Page
#5888
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Don Nelson Page, , is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada. Work Page's work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him. Page got his BA at William Jewell College in the United States in 1971, attaining an MS in 1972 and a PhD in 1976 at Caltech.
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Serge Haroche
#2216
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Serge Haroche is a French physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with David J. Wineland for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems", a study of the particle of light, the photon. This and his other works developed laser spectroscopy. Since 2001, Haroche is a professor at the Collège de France and holds the chair of quantum physics.
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Giuseppe Occhialini
#5592
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao "Beppo" Occhialini ForMemRS was an Italian physicist who contributed to the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947 with César Lattes and Cecil Frank Powell, the latter winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. At the time of this discovery, they were all working at the H. H. Wills Laboratory of the University of Bristol.
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Fang Lizhi
#2914
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist whose liberal ideas inspired the pro-democracy student movement of 1986–87 and, finally, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Because of his activism, he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in January 1987. For his work, Fang was a recipient of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1989, given each year. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, but his position was revoked after 1989.
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Anthony James Leggett
#4199
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sir Anthony James Leggett is a British–American theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Leggett is widely recognised as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognised by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mecha...
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Dmitry Shirkov
#4704
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Dmitry Vasil'evich Shirkov was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for his contribution to quantum field theory and to the development of the renormalization group method. Biography Dmitry Shirkov graduated from the Faculty of Physics at Moscow State University in 1949. In 1954 he obtained PhD degree in the area of theory of neutron diffusion. In 1958 he defended his doctoral dissertation "Renormalization group method in quantum field theory" and obtained the Doktor nauk degree.
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Guido Altarelli
#10109
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Guido Altarelli was an Italian theoretical physicist. Biography Altarelli graduated in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1963 with Raoul Gatto whom he followed to the University of Florence . He held positions at New York University , the Rockefeller University , the École Normale Superieure in Paris and Boston University . In 1970-92 he held a faculty position at the Sapienza University of Rome . He was Director of the Rome Section of the INFN . In 1992 he moved to the newly established University of Roma Tre.
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Martin Schwarzschild
#9492
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Martin Schwarzschild was a German-American astrophysicist. Biography Schwarzschild was born in Potsdam into a distinguished German Jewish academic family. His father was the physicist Karl Schwarzschild and his uncle the astrophysicist Robert Emden. His sister, Agathe Thornton, became a classics scholar in New Zealand.
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Otto Haxel
#7997
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Otto Haxel was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project. After the war, he was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. From 1950 to 1974, he was an ordinarius professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, where he fostered the use of nuclear physics in environmental physics; this led to the founding of the Institute of Environmental Physics in 1975. During 1956 and 1957, he was a member of the Nuclear Physics Working Group of the German Atomic Energy Commission. From 1970 to 1975, he was the Scientific a...
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Donna Strickland
#1937
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Areas of Specialization: Intense Laser-Matter Interactions, Nonlinear Optics, Chirped Pulse Amplification Donna Theo Strickland was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Waterloo. She is the first woman to hold this position at the University. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1981 from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. At McMaster, she specialized in lasers and electro-optics. She then received her PhD in physics in 1989 from University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, where she worked at the Institute of Optics and the Institute for Laser Optics.
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