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,
#2901
Tobias Preis
#5815
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Tobias Preis is Professor of Behavioral Science and Finance at Warwick Business School and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a computational social scientist focussing on measuring and predicting human behavior with online data. At Warwick Business School he directs the Data Science Lab together with his colleague Suzy Moat. Preis holds visiting positions at Boston University and University College London. In 2011, he worked as a senior research fellow with H. Eugene Stanley at Boston University and with Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich. In 2009, he was named a member of the Gutenberg Academy.
Go to Profile#2902
Rogier Windhorst
#78748
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Rogier Arnold Windhorst is an astronomer and a professor of physics and astronomy at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy in 1984 from the University of Leiden and did post doctorate work at Mt.Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories. He currently serves as associate chair at Arizona State and is among six Arizona state faculty who were awarded Regents Professor appointments in 2006; he presides over the School of Earth and Space Exploration at the university. In 2008, he became Foundation Professor of Astrophysics at Arizona State University and co-director of the ASU C...
Go to Profile#2903
Michael A. Dopita
#71411
Overall Influence
1946 - 2018 (72 years)
#2904
Giovanni Ciccotti
#88034
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Giovanni Ciccotti is an Italian physicist. Ciccotti held the position of Professor of the Structure of Matter at the University of Rome La Sapienza until 2013. He is the author of more than a hundred articles on molecular dynamics and statistical mechanics. He worked with J.P. Ryckaert on new methods for molecular dynamics on constrained systems. See also SHAKE algorithm.
Go to Profile#2905
Sokrates Pantelides
#88235
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sokrates Pantelides from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to point-defect dynamics in semiconductor devices.
Go to Profile#2906
Gurgen Askaryan
#50293
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Gurgen Ashotovich Askaryan was a prominent Soviet - Armenian physicist, famous for his discovery of the self-focusing of light, pioneering studies of light-matter interactions, and the discovery and investigation of the interaction of high-energy particles with condensed matter.
Go to Profile#2907
Aditi Mitra
#53614
Overall Influence
Aditi Mitra is an Indian-American theoretical condensed matter physicist known for her research on molecular scale electronics and non-equilibrium quantum systems. Other topics in her research include floquet theory and topological insulators. She is a professor of physics at New York University.
Go to Profile#2908
Robert H. McNaught
#61700
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert H. McNaught is a Scottish-Australian astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University . He has collaborated with David J. Asher of the Armagh Observatory.
Go to Profile#2909
David Tannor
#20282
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Joshua Tannor is a theoretical chemist, who is the Hermann Mayer Professorial Chair in the department of chemical physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Biography Tannor has a BA from Columbia University , and a PhD with Eric Heller from UCLA . He did his post-doc work with Stuart Rice and David W. Oxtoby at the University of Chicago. He is a black belt in karate.
Go to Profile#2910
Nissim Kanekar
#60597
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Nissim Kanekar is an Indian astrophysicist, cosmologist and a professor at National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Known for his research on the evolution of the electron proton mass ratio, Kanekar is a member of the International Astronomical Union and a recipient of Swarna Jayathi Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest India...
Go to Profile#2911
Bernd Büchner
#78244
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Bernd Büchner is, since 2003, Director of the Institute for Solid State Research, IFW Dresden and Professor for Experimental Physics at the Dresden University of Technology. Büchner is known for contributions to the field of high-temperature superconductivity, recent work on iron-based superconductors and authored over 1000 scientific papers.
Go to Profile#2912
Sandu Popescu
#34528
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sandu Popescu is a Romanian-British physicist working in the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information. Education and career He studied with Yakir Aharonov, followed by postdoctoral research positions with François Englert, and then with Abner Shimony and Bahaa Saleh. From 1996 to 1999 he was Reader at the Isaac Newton Institute, University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2913
Peter Ridd
#11682
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Peter Vincent Ridd is an Australian physicist, author, and former professor at James Cook University , North Queensland, Australia. Ridd is known for his participation in a media campaign seeking to discredit the science informing the protection of the Great Barrier Reef.
Go to Profile#2914
Monika Mościbrodzka
#76457
Overall Influence
Monika Mościbrodzka is a Polish astrophysicist who is a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is an expert in general relativistic plasma dynamics and numerical astrophysics. She was part of the Event Horizon Telescope team who contributed to the first direct image of a black hole, supermassive black hole M87*. She was awarded the 2022 Dutch Research Council Athena Prize and the 2023 Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Go to Profile#2915
Kathy Sykes
#31845
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Katharine Ellen Sykes is a British physicist, broadcaster and Professor of Sciences and Society at the University of Bristol. She was previously Collier Professor of Public Engagement in Science and Engineering, from 2002 to 2006. She has presented various BBC2 and Open University TV series, including Rough Science, Ever Wondered about Food, Alternative Therapies. Alternative Medicine and presented for the documentary television miniseries Brave New World with Stephen Hawking in 2011.
Go to Profile#2916
Roland Wiesendanger
#67344
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Roland Wiesendanger is a German physicist, specializing in nanoscience. Since 1993 he has been a full professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has been awarded three times in a row with the ERC Advanced Grant of the European Research Council as first scientist in Europe.
Go to Profile#2917
Lyudmila Chernykh
#16803
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Lyudmila Ivanovna Chernykh was a Ukrainian-Russian-Soviet astronomer, wife and colleague of Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. Professional career In 1959 she graduated from Irkutsk State Pedagogical Institute . Between 1959 and 1963 she worked in the Time and Frequency Laboratory of the All-Union Research Institute of Physico-Technical and Radiotechnical Measurements in Irkutsk, where she did astrometrical observations for the Time Service.
Go to Profile#2918
Hans-Joachim Freund
#91030
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#2919
Daniel L. Stein
#41969
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Daniel L. Stein is an American physicist and Professor of Physics and Mathematics at New York University. From 2006 to 2012 he served as the NYU Dean of Science. He has contributed to a wide range of scientific fields. His early research covered diverse topics, including theoretical work on protein biophysics, biological evolution, amorphous semiconductors, quantum liquids, topology of order parameter spaces, liquid crystals, neutron stars, and the interface between particle physics and cosmology. His primary focus, however, has been on quenched randomness in condensed matter and on stochastic processes in both irreversible and extended systems.
Go to Profile#2920
Bogdan Maglich
#23625
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Bogdan Cvete Maglić was a Serbian-American experimental nuclear physicist and the leading advocate of a purported non-radioactive aneutronic fusion energy source. Maglich built four models of Migma, devices producing fusion of deuterium atoms in colliding ion beams.
Go to Profile#2921
Kalyan Bidhan Sinha
#32120
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kalyan Bidhan Sinha is an Indian mathematician. He is a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, and Professor Emeritus for life of the Indian Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#2922
J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.
#27358
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr. was an African American nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer and mathematician. A child prodigy, he attended the University of Chicago at the age of 13, becoming its youngest ever student. His graduation at a young age resulted in him being hailed as "the Negro Genius" in the national media.
Go to Profile#2923
Muhammad Raziuddin Siddiqui
#55847
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Muhammad Raziuddin Siddiqui was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and mathematician. Biography Life and education Siddiqui was born on 8 January 1908 in the Princely State of Hyderabad Deccan to Mohammed Muzafferuddin Siddiqui and Baratunnisa Begum. His family consisted of one elder brother, Mohammed Zakiuddin Siddiqui and two sisters, Abida Begum and Sajida Begum. He was the youngest in the family. He attended the newly established Osmania University. After passing the Rashidia Exams in 1918, Siddiqui completed his matriculation from Osmania University in 1921, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics, with distinction, in 1925.
Go to Profile#2924
Anatole Abragam
#91134
Overall Influence
#2925
Ronald Mallett
#42978
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ronald Lawrence Mallett is an American theoretical physicist, academic and author. He has been a faculty member of the University of Connecticut since 1975 and is best known for his position on the possibility of time travel.
Go to Profile#2926
Nihat Berker
#20689
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ahmet Nihat Berker is a Turkish scientist, theoretical chemist, physicist and emeritus professor of physics at MIT. Currently, he is the acting Dean of Engineering and Natural Sciences in Kadir Has University, Turkey. He is the son of a notable scientist and engineer Ratip Berker, who was deceased on 17 October 1997. His wife, Bedia Erim Berker is a professor of chemistry at Istanbul Technical University, and one of his sons, Selim Berker is a professor of epistemology in the department of philosophy at Harvard University and his other son, Ratip Emin Berker is currently a junior at Harvard.
Go to Profile#2927
Amanda Weltman
#77299
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Amanda Weltman is a South African theoretical physicist. She is best known for co-authoring a series of papers proposing "chameleon gravity" to explain the existence of dark energy. She is currently a Professor and South African Research Chair at the University of Cape Town.
Go to Profile#2928
Tilman Esslinger
#76146
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tilman Esslinger is a German experimental physicist. He is Professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and works in the field of ultracold quantum gases and optical lattices. Biography Tilman Esslinger received his PhD in physics from the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Germany, in 1995. In his doctoral research he worked under the supervision of Theodor Hänsch on subrecoil laser cooling and optical lattices. He then build up his own group in Hänsch’s lab and conducted pioneering work on atom lasers, observed long-range phase coherence in a Bose–Einstein condensate, and realized the superfluid to Mott-insulator transition with a Bose gas in an optical lattice.
Go to Profile#2929
Bas Pease
#46336
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Rendel Sebastian "Bas" Pease FRS was a British physicist who strongly opposed nuclear weapons while advocating the use of nuclear fusion as a clean source of power. Biography Pease was born at 9 Brunswick Walk, Cambridge. His father was the geneticist Michael Pease, son of Edward Reynolds Pease. His mother was Helen Bowen Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood IV. He was the four times great-grandson of the potter Josiah Wedgwood. Until he was about 11 years old, Pease was taught at home, mainly by his mother; he then went to Bedales School, from where he went up to Trinity College, Cambridg...
Go to Profile#2930
Michael K. Moe
#87311
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Michael K. Moe is an American experimental physicist, specializing in particle physics and nuclear physics. He is known his role in 1987 in the direct detection of two neutrino double beta decay in 82Se.
Go to Profile#2931
Allan Blaer
#62975
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Allan Blaer is a physicist, professor emeritus and special lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1964, where he was the valedictorian. He later went on to obtain his PhD in physics at the same institution. He has done research in both theoretical and experimental physics. In quantum field theory, he worked on phase transitions in low-temperature bosonic and fermionic systems, quantum field theory anomalies, dyons and magnetic monopoles in non-abelian gauge theories, and renormalization theory. In experimental physics...
Go to Profile#2932
Diederik Aerts
#39007
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Diederik Aerts is a Belgian theoretical physicist, professor at Brussels Free University and founding director of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies . He is best known for his work in quantum foundations and quantum cognition.
Go to Profile#2933
Alain Brillet
#44324
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alain Brillet is a French physicist specialized in gravitational wave detectors. Biography Alain Brillet graduated from the ESPCI Paris in 1970, following which he worked for the CNRS in Orsay during his Ph.D. thesis until 1976. He later worked in Boulder with John Hall, before returning to France in 1982. He is most famous for being one of the two fathers of the Virgo interferometer with Adalberto Giazotto, directing the consortium during its design and construction between 1989 and 2003.
Go to Profile#2934
Solomon J. Buchsbaum
#52344
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Solomon J. Buchsbaum was a Polish American physicist and technologist, best known as chair of the White House Science Council under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and as a senior executive at Bell Laboratories.
Go to Profile#2935
Aomawa Shields
#73601
Overall Influence
Aomawa L. Shields is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine. Her research is focused on exploring the climate and habitability of small exoplanets, using data from observatories including NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Shields was a 2015 TED Fellow, and is active in science communication and outreach. She develops interactive workshops to encourage self-esteem and teach about astronomy, combines her training in theater and her career in astronomy.
Go to Profile#2936
Stefi Baum
#79827
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stefi Baum is an American astronomer. The American Astronomical Society honored her work by awarding her the Annie J. Cannon Prize in 1993. Baum helped to develop the Hubble Space Telescope and, starting in 2004, was the director of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science.
Go to Profile#2937
Fred Gilman
#82899
Overall Influence
Frederick Joseph Gilman is an American physicist and the Buhl Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. Early life and education Gilman was born on October 9, 1940. He grew up in East Lansing, Michigan and received his B.S. in physics from Michigan State University in 1962, shaped by undergraduate research experiences in particle physics and bacteriophage genetics. He was a member of the three-person team that placed first in the December 1961 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition for undergraduates in the United States and Canada.
Go to Profile#2938
Dave Thirumalai
#91307
Overall Influence
#2939
Kunioki Mima
#77552
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
is a Japanese plasma physicist. He is known for his contributions to the theory of turbulent transport in plasmas, and in particular the derivation of the Hasegawa–Mima equation in 1977, which won him the 2011 Hannes Alfvén Prize.
Go to Profile#2940
Richard Klein
#77392
Overall Influence
Richard Klein is an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and a Scientific Staff Member at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . Klein received his bachelor's degree in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1966 and his PhD in physics from Brandeis University in 1973.
Go to Profile#2941
Diedrich Wattenberg
#76290
Overall Influence
1909 - 1996 (87 years)
Diedrich Wattenberg was a German astronomer. He was a prolific populariser, writer and speaker on his subject, becoming in the 1950s a familiar presence on radio and, later, television programmes.
Go to Profile#2942
Gerhard Hummer
#91389
Overall Influence
#2943
Michael Riordan
#85814
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael Riordan is an American physicist, science historian and author. Riordan earned his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. He worked at the University of Rochester, then moved to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and concurrently held an adjunct professorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While associated with SLAC, Riordan was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. The American Institute of Physics honored Riordan with the 2002 Andrew Gemant Award.
Go to Profile#2944
John Wikswo
#53652
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Peter Wikswo, Jr. is a biological physicist at Vanderbilt University. He was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, United States. Wikswo is noted for his work on biomagnetism and cardiac electrophysiology.
Go to Profile#2945
Jonathan Coleman
#82038
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Jonathan Coleman is the Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in the School of Physics and a Principal Investigator in CRANN at Trinity College Dublin. Coleman's research focuses on solution-processing of nanomaterials and their use in applications. He is most well known for the development of liquid phase exfoliation, a widely used method for preparing two-dimensional nanosheets.
Go to Profile#2946
Joakim Edsjö
#88590
Overall Influence
Joakim Edsjö is a Swedish professor of theoretical physics at Stockholm University. His research is carried out at the interface of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, and is particularly concerned with the search for dark matter.
Go to Profile#2947
Anthony Schuyler Arrott
#61607
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Anthony Schuyler Arrott is an American-born Canadian physicist, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University. He is a specialist in condensed matter physics, physics of magnetism and liquid crystals. He is the author of over 200 scientific papers. Arrott is the subject of the 2020 documentary Portrait, directed by Lily Ekimian and A.T. Ragheb.
Go to Profile#2948
Alberto Vecchio
#38577
Overall Influence
Alberto Vecchio is a physicist, professor at University of Birmingham in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and the Director of the Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy. He was a contributor in the upgrade of LIGO to Advanced LIGO which resulted in the discovery of gravitational waves in February 2016.
Go to Profile#2949
Robert Delbourgo
#87850
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Delbourgo BSc, ARCS, PhD, DSc, FAIP, FAA, is an Australian physicist, winner of the Walter Boas Medal in 1988. Delbourgo was educated at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and University of London . His PhD was obtained under the supervision of Abdus Salam . Salam and Delbourgo have co-authored 30 research publications.
Go to Profile#2950
Paul Marmet
#72671
Overall Influence
1932 - 2005 (73 years)
Paul Marmet, was a Canadian physicist, inventor, author, and professor at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, who served as the President of the Canadian Association of Physicists. Marmet is notable for developing a novel high-resolution electron velocity selector, a scientific instrument which became widely used by scientists around the world.
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