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,
#2801
Manohar M. Panjabi
#88842
Overall Influence
#2802
Klim Churyumov
#50379
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Klim Ivanovich Churyumov was a Soviet and Ukrainian astronomer. He was the director of the Kyiv Planetarium, a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the International Astronomical Union, of the New York Academy of Sciences, the editor of the magazine "Our Skies" in 2006–2009, the president of the Ukrainian Society of amateur astronomy and the author of books for children.
Go to Profile#2803
Laura Kreidberg
#81775
Overall Influence
Laura Kreidberg is an American astronomer who primarily studies exoplanets. Since 2020, she has been director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, where she is leading the Atmospheric Physics of Exoplanets department.
Go to Profile#2804
Andy Parker
#65683
Overall Influence
Michael Andrew Parker is a British physicist and is professor of high energy physics at the University of Cambridge. He is the incumbent Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, having succeeded Bridget Kendall in 2023.
Go to Profile#2805
Colin Pillinger
#12657
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Colin Trevor Pillinger, was an English planetary scientist. He was a founding member of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at Open University in Milton Keynes, he was also the principal investigator for the British Beagle 2 Mars lander project, and worked on a group of Martian meteorites.
Go to Profile#2806
William H. Matthaeus
#88010
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
William Henry Matthaeus is an American astrophysicist and plasma physicist. He is known for his research on turbulence in magnetohydrodynamics and astrophysical plasmas , for which he was awarded the 2019 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics.
Go to Profile#2807
Selma de Mink
#82415
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Selma de Mink is a Dutch astrophysicist specializing in evolution of stars, stellar binary systems and compact objects, including black holes. She is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching near Munich, Germany.
Go to Profile#2808
Abdul Hameed Nayyar
#15603
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Abdul Hameed Nayyar , also known as A.H. Nayyar, is a Pakistani physicist, author, and a freelance consultant on the issues of education, nuclear safety, and energy. His field of specialization is in the physics of condensed matter, and served in the faculties of the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad from 1973 till 2005 and the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Nayyar is known for voicing for education reforms and military arms control, which he directed research programs at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad.
Go to Profile#2809
Sébastien Candel
#23541
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sébastien Candel is a French physicist, Emeritus Professor of École Centrale Paris. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for significant contributions to solving multidisciplinary problems in the fields of combustion, fluid mechanics, aeroacoustics, and propulsion.
Go to Profile#2810
Eric Walter Elst
#21682
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Eric Walter Elst was a Belgian astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Uccle and a prolific discoverer of asteroids. The Minor Planet Center ranks him among the top 10 discoverers of minor planets with thousands of discoveries made at ESO's La Silla Observatory in northern Chile and at the Rozhen Observatory in Bulgaria during 1986–2009.
Go to Profile#2811
Kenneth Franklin
#57515
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Kenneth Linn Franklin was an American astronomer and educator. Franklin was the chief scientist at the Hayden Planetarium from 1956 to 1984 and was co-credited with discovering radio waves originating on Jupiter, the first detection of signals from another planet. He was often a local and national media figure including during Apollo 11, the first human mission to the moon, when Franklin was an on-camera astronomy expert for NBC.
Go to Profile#2812
Xiangdong Ji
#89081
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Xiangdong Ji is a Chinese theoretical nuclear and elementary particle physicist. Xiangdong Ji received his bachelor's degree from Tongji University in 1982 and his PhD from Drexel University in 1987. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and MIT. In 1991, he became Assistant Professor at the MIT, and in 1996 he moved to the University of Maryland, where he was the chair of the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics from 2007 to 2009. He is also professor and chair of the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Since 2005, he has also been a visiting...
Go to Profile#2813
Eugene P. Gross
#62661
Overall Influence
1926 - 1991 (65 years)
Eugene Paul Gross was a theoretical physicist and Edward and Gertrude Swartz professor at Brandeis University, known for his contribution to the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision model used in the Boltzmann equation and in lattice Boltzmann methods and to the Gross–Pitaevskii equation which describes the ground state of a quantum system of identical bosons.
Go to Profile#2814
Roger Ian Tanner
#89119
Overall Influence
#2815
Harry Suhl
#62832
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Harry Suhl was a German-American physicist who specialized in statistical mechanics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and solid-state physics, and in particular superconductivity. Various phenomena in his field of work have been named after him, such as the Suhl instability, Suhl–Nakamura interaction and Abrikosov–Suhl resonance. He died in March 2020 at the age of 97.
Go to Profile#2816
James Gimzewski
#49806
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
James Kazimierz Gimzewski FRS FREng FInstP is a Scottish physicist of Polish descent who pioneered research on electrical contacts with single atoms and molecules and light emission using scanning tunneling microscopy .
Go to Profile#2817
Norman Myles Kroll
#43448
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Norman Myles Kroll was an American theoretical physicist, known for his pioneering work in QED. Kroll received in 1942 his bachelor's degree from Columbia University after 2 years of study, having studied from 1938 to 1940 at Rice University in Houston. During WW II he did theoretical radar research , during 1943–1945, at Columbia under the supervision of Willis Lamb and I. I. Rabi. In 1943 Kroll received his master's degree and in 1948 his PhD from Columbia University with Lamb as thesis advisor.
Go to Profile#2818
Stephen G. Brush
#46408
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Stephen George Brush is a scholar in the field of history of science whose career spanned the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. His research resulted in hundreds of journal articles and over a dozen books.
Go to Profile#2819
Shekhar C. Mande
#23521
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Shekhar C. Mande is Structural and Computational Biologist. He was the Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research , India, and the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research , Ministry of Science and Technology. Prior to this, he was the Director of National Centre for Cell Science, Pune.
Go to Profile#2820
William W. Mullins
#86261
Overall Influence
1927 - 2001 (74 years)
William Wilson Mullins was an American physicist and materials scientist who worked for many years as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Mullins was born on March 5, 1927, in Boonville, Indiana, where his father was an industrialist and mayor; his uncle, George W. Mullins, was a mathematician at Columbia University. He was raised in Chicago after the family moved there in 1930. He was educated at the Lab School of the University of Chicago, served two years in the U.S. Navy, and then earned a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, all in physics, in 1949, 1951, and 1955 respectively.
Go to Profile#2821
Piers Forster
#27349
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Piers Forster is a Professor of Physical Climate Change and Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds. A physicist by training, his research focuses on quantifying the different human causes of climate change and the way the Earth responds. He is best known for his work on radiative forcing, climate sensitivity, contrails and Climate engineering. He has contributed heavily to the writing of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, including acting as a Lead Author for the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, and a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the Sixth Report.
Go to Profile#2822
Bernard Pagel
#76826
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Bernard Ephraim Julius Pagel FRS was a British astrophysicist who worked on the measurement and interpretation of elemental abundances in stars and galaxies. The son of physician and medical historian Walter Pagel and grandson of German physician Julius Leopold Pagel, he was born in Berlin in 1930, but moved with his family to Britain in 1933 to avoid the growing Jewish persecution in Germany at that time. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School in Northwood and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with first-class honours in Physics in 1950. He remained in Cambridge to pursue his doctoral studies, obtaining his PhD in 1955.
Go to Profile#2823
George Sawatzky
#63647
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
George Albert Sawatzky is a Canadian physicist, known for his research in solid state physics and strongly correlated electron systems. He has co-developed the Cini-Sawatzky theory of the Auger effect and the ZSA classification of bandgaps in solids.
Go to Profile#2824
Daniel E. Reichart
#79752
Overall Influence
Daniel E. Reichart is an American astronomer. Reichart’s dissertation research on distant, cosmic explosions called gamma-ray bursts was ranked by Science Magazine as one of the top ten discoveries in science in 1999, and in 2003 earned him the Robert J. Trumpler Award, for top astrophysics dissertation research in North America. In 2005, he and his students discovered the most distant explosion in the universe yet known, a gamma-ray burst that occurred 12.9 billion years ago, when the universe was only 6% its current age.
Go to Profile#2825
Kōichirō Tomita
#79433
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
was a Japanese astronomer, discoverer of minor planets and comets. The fireball passed over west Japan and was recorded by photos and a sketch. Kōichirō Tomita identified that it was the Kosmos 133 spacecraft .
Go to Profile#2826
Mariano Artigas
#31237
Overall Influence
1938 - 2006 (68 years)
Mariano Artigas was a Spanish physicist, philosopher, and theologian. He wrote The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion and fifteen other books on science and religion. He was a member of the European Association for the Study of Science and Theology and the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. He was Consultor of the Pontifical Council for the Dialogue with Non-believers.
Go to Profile#2827
Karol Życzkowski
#79461
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Karol Życzkowski is a Polish physicist and mathematician. He is a professor of physics at the Atomic Physics Department, Institute of Physics, of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and also at the Center for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He worked as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Essen and as senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park . In 2005/06 visiting scientist at the Perimeter Institute, Waterloo .
Go to Profile#2828
Antonio H. Castro Neto
#82611
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Antonio Helio de Castro Neto is a Brazilian-born physicist. He is the founder and director of the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials at the National University of Singapore. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work in the theory of metals, magnets, superconductors, graphene and two-dimensional materials. He is a distinguished professor in the Departments of Materials Science Engineering, and Physics and a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003. In 2011 he was elected as a fellow of the A...
Go to Profile#2829
John R. Winckler
#69867
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
John Randolph Winckler was an American experimental physicist notable for his discovery of sprites in 1989 and other discoveries in the fields of solar, magnetospheric, auroral, and atmospheric physics. He was also notable for designing new methods and apparatus to collect scientific data from high altitude flying objects such as balloons, rockets, and spacecraft. This data collection led Winckler and his staff to major discoveries, such as: discovering that high-energy electrons accompany auroras. Winckler was an advisor to NASA, and a member of the National Academy of Scien...
Go to Profile#2830
Frank R. Noyes
#89447
Overall Influence
#2831
Roger Cashmore
#45929
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Roger John Cashmore is the chair of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. Previously he was principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, and professor of experimental physics at the University of Oxford. His interests include the origin of the masses of particles and the Higgs boson.
Go to Profile#2832
Francis Farley
#83887
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Francis James Macdonald Farley FRS was a British scientist. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society on 16 March 1972 earning the designation FRS. He was also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He was educated at Clifton College and at Clare College, Cambridge. Farley obtained his PhD from Cambridge in 1950.
Go to Profile#2833
Åke Wallenquist
#78807
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Åke Anders Edvard Wallenquist was a Swedish astronomer. He worked at the Dutch Bosscha Observatory in Indonesia between 1928 and 1935, and became assistant professor at Uppsala's Kvistabergs Observatorium in 1948. He worked originally on double stars but it was the open star clusters and their properties that became his main area of research. Wallenquist was a very active member of both the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm and the Royal Swedish Society of Sciences in Uppsala. From the 1950s onwards, he was the leading writer of popular astronomy in Sweden among the professional astronomers.
Go to Profile#2834
Edward J. Weiler
#65287
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Edward J. Weiler was the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration until his retirement on September 30, 2011. Career Edward J. Weiler received his PhD in astrophysics from Northwestern University in 1976. Prior to joining NASA, Weiler was a member of the Princeton University research staff. He joined Princeton in 1976 and was based at the Goddard Space Flight Center as the director of science operations of the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory-3 .
Go to Profile#2835
Christopher Bronk Ramsey
#75444
Overall Influence
Christopher Bronk Ramsey is a British physicist, mathematician and specialist in radiocarbon dating. He is a professor at the University of Oxford and was the Director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art from 2014 until 2019. He is a member of Merton College, Oxford and a Bodley Fellow. His doctorate, completed in 1987, included the first successful implementation of carbon dioxide gas as a target for radiocarbon dating via accelerator mass spectrometry.
Go to Profile#2836
María Yzuel
#39358
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
María Josefa Yzuel Giménez is a professor of physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has worked in medical optics, diffraction image theory, image quality evaluation and liquid crystals. She served as president of SPIE in 2009.
Go to Profile#2837
Yves Pomeau
#17337
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Yves Pomeau, born in 1942, is a French mathematician and physicist, emeritus research director at the CNRS and corresponding member of the French Academy of sciences. He was one of the founders of the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He is the son of literature professor René Pomeau.
Go to Profile#2838
Ronald Hanson
#49320
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ronald Hanson is a Dutch experimental physicist. He is best known for his work on the foundations and applications of quantum entanglement. He is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology and scientific director of QuTech. the Dutch Quantum Institute for quantum computing and quantum internet, founded by Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Research.
Go to Profile#2839
John S. Pate
#89566
Overall Influence
#2840
Jerzy Juliusz Kijowski
#34162
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jerzy Juliusz Kijowski – Polish physicist, Professor of Physical Sciences who specializes in physics, mathematics, classical and quantum field theory, and theory of gravity. Life and works Graduated from Faculty of Physics of University of Warsaw In 1965. Then, at the same university he was granted a PhD in 1969 and habilitation 1973. On September 17, 1982 he was awarded the title of Professor of Physical Sciences. He is a theoretical physicist, professionally associated with the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Warsaw. He is also a professor of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science...
Go to Profile#2841
Alan M. Portis
#58153
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Alan Mark Portis was an American solid-state physicist and founder of the Berkeley Physics Laboratory. Career Alan Portis was the dean of engineering at Berkeley as well as an engineering professor. He was an early researcher in electron paramagnetic resonance. He also founded the Berkeley Physics Laboratory. For the development of laboratory courses and curricula at UC Berkeley, he received the Millikan Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers. Portis was the doctoral advisor of the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Alan J. Heeger, as well as Nai Phuan Ong and Myron Sala...
Go to Profile#2842
Athena Coustenis
#55641
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Athena Coustenis is an astrophysicist specializing in planetology. Dr. Coustenis, a French national, is director of research, Centre national de la recherche scientifique , at LESIA , at the Paris Observatory, Meudon. She is involved in several space mission projects for the European Space Agency and for NASA. Her focus is on gas giant planets Saturn, Jupiter and their moons, and she is considered a foremost expert on Saturn's moon Titan.
Go to Profile#2843
Lidia Morawska
#69250
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lidia Morawska is a Polish–Australian physicist and distinguished professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, at the Queensland University of Technology and director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at QUT. She is also co-director of the Australia-China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management, an adjunct professor at the Jinan University in China, and a Vice-Chancellor fellow at the Global Centre for Clean Air Research , University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. Her work focuses on fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary fiel...
Go to Profile#2844
David Lovelock
#79189
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David Lovelock is a British theoretical physicist and mathematician. He is known for the Lovelock theory of gravity and Lovelock's theorem. Notes Books External links David Lovelock Personal Home Page
Go to Profile#2845
Marvin D. Girardeau
#64285
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Marvin D. Girardeau was a quantum physicist, and a faculty member in the Institute for Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon, where he was hired as a professor in 1963 and worked until his retirement in 2000, after which he became a research professor at the University of Arizona. He was a mathematical physicist with an unusual nonlinear career, which culminated in a remarkable impact in the ultracold atom physics community. One of Girardeau's achievements was to predict the existence of the Tonks–Girardeau gas in 1960. A Tonks–Girardeau gas was created in 2004, and its measured ...
Go to Profile#2846
Günther Laukien
#66665
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Günther Laukien was a German physicist and entrepreneur. He is known for his pioneering work in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and for his role in the Bruker company. Early life Laukien was born in 1924 in the German village of Eschringen in the Saarland. He finished high school in 1942 – during World War II – and joined the German Navy as a submarine engineer after his graduation. After the war ended in 1945, he studied physics at the University of Tübingen, from which he received his undergraduate degree in 1951.
Go to Profile#2847
Kasturi Lal Chopra
#89730
Overall Influence
#2848
Vladilen Stepanovich Letokhov
#89751
Overall Influence
#2849
Günther Dollinger
#41610
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Günther Dollinger is a German physicist and professor at the Bundeswehr University Munich. Life Dollinger completed his doctoral studies in physics at the Technical University of Munich . He is currently head of the Institute of Applied Physics and Measurement Technology within the Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Bundeswehr University Munich. He conducts research in different interdisciplinary and interinstitutional research projects. He is a member of the Munich Centre for Advanced Photonics, an inter-university excellence cluster, funded by the German government, based at Univer...
Go to Profile#2850
Thomas Witten
#78127
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Thomas Witten is an American theoretical physicist working in the field of soft matter physics. Biography Witten received his doctorate in physics in 1971 from the University of California, San Diego. He is currently the Homer J. Livingston Professor in the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago. He is known in particular for his work on diffusion-limited aggregation, crumpled sheets and coffee rings. His current research interests include polymers, complex fluids and granular materials. He cowrote the "Structured Fluids: Polymers, Colloids, Surfactants" together with Philip Pinc...
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