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,
#301
Vera Rubin
#4953
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves. By identifying the galaxy rotation problem, her work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter. These results were later confirmed over subsequent decades.
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Erwin Neher
#1559
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Erwin Neher is a German biophysicist, specializing in the field of cell physiology. For significant contribution in the field, in 1991 he was awarded, along with Bert Sakmann, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells".
Go to Profile#303
Janna Levin
#6768
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Janna J. Levin is an American theoretical cosmologist and a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in astronomy and physics with a concentration in philosophy at Barnard College in 1988 and a PhD in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. Much of her work deals with looking for evidence to support the proposal that our universe might be finite in size due to its having a nontrivial topology. Other work includes black holes and chaos theory. She joined the faculty at Barnard College in January 2004 and is currentl...
Go to Profile#304
Vladimir E. Zakharov
#3985
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Vladimir Evgen'evich Zakharov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician and physicist. He was Regents' Professor of mathematics at The University of Arizona, director of the Mathematical Physics Sector at the Lebedev Physical Institute, and was on the committee of the Stefanos Pnevmatikos International Award. Zakharov's research interests covered physical aspects of nonlinear wave theory in plasmas, hydrodynamics, oceanology, geophysics, solid state physics, optics, and general relativity.
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Gerald E. Brown
#10751
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Gerald Edward Brown was an American theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear physics and astrophysics. Since 1968 he had been a professor at the Stony Brook University. He was a distinguished professor emeritus of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University.
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Peter Mansfield
#1867
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Sir Peter Mansfield was a British physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging . Mansfield was a professor at the University of Nottingham.
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Hubert Reeves
#5769
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Hubert Reeves was a Canadian astrophysicist and popularizer of science. Early life and education Reeves was born in Montreal on July 13, 1932, and as a child lived in Léry. Reeves attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, a prestigious French-language college in Montreal. He obtained a BSc degree in physics from the Université de Montréal in 1953, an MSc degree from McGill University in 1956 with a thesis entitled "Formation of Positronium in Hydrogen and Helium" and a PhD degree at Cornell University in 1960.
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Harald Fritzsch
#8985
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Harald Fritzsch was a German theoretical physicist known for his contributions to the theory of quarks, the development of Quantum Chromodynamics and the great unification of the standard model of particle physics.
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Ralph Kronig
#4803
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Ralph Kronig was a German physicist. He is noted for the discovery of particle spin and for his theory of X-ray absorption spectroscopy. His theories include the Kronig–Penney model, the Coster–Kronig transition and the Kramers–Kronig relations.
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Hugh David Politzer
#11494
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hugh David Politzer is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
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Wolfgang Rindler
#4995
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Wolfgang Rindler was a physicist working in the field of general relativity where he is known for introducing the term "event horizon", Rindler coordinates, and for the use of spinors in general relativity. An honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the , he was also a prolific textbook author.
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Steven Frautschi
#8509
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Steven C. Frautschi is an American theoretical physicist, currently professor of physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology . He is known principally for his contributions to the bootstrap theory of the strong interactions and for his contribution to the resolution of the infrared divergence problem in quantum electrodynamics . He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 for "contributions to the introduction of Regge poles into particle physics, elucidation of the role of infrared photons in high energy scattering, and for seminal contributions to undergra...
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Gary Gibbons
#5834
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Gary William Gibbons is a British theoretical physicist. Education Gibbons was born in Coulsdon, Surrey. He was educated at Purley County Grammar School and the University of Cambridge, where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of Dennis Sciama. When Sciama moved to the University of Oxford, he became a student of Stephen Hawking, obtaining his PhD from Cambridge in 1973.
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Vladimir Gribov
#8697
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Vladimir Naumovich Gribov was a prominent Russian theoretical physicist, who worked on high-energy physics, quantum field theory and the Regge theory of the strong interactions. His best known contributions are the pomeron, the DGLAP equations, and the Gribov copies.
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Harald Lesch
#7320
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Harald Lesch is a German physicist, astronomer, natural philosopher, author, television presenter, professor of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and professor of natural philosophy at the Munich University of Philosophy.
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Sally Ride
#1200
Overall Influence
1951 - 2012 (61 years)
Sally Kristen Ride was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space, having done so at the age of 32.
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Ali Javan
#1599
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Ali Javan ; December 26, 1926 – September 12, 2016 Life and career Ali Javan was born in Tehran to Azeri parents from Tabriz . He attended a school conducted by Zoroastrians. He graduated from Alborz High School, and started his university studies at the School of Science at the University of Tehran for a year. During a visit to New York in 1948, he attended several graduate courses at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 1954 under his thesis advisor Charles Townes without having received a bachelor's or master's degree. In 1955, Javan held a position as a Post Doctoral in the Radiat...
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Allan Sandage
#7788
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Allan Rex Sandage was an American astronomer. He was Staff Member Emeritus with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. He determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.
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Jeff Forshaw
#10216
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Jeffrey Robert Forshaw is a British particle physicist with a special interest in quantum chromodynamics : the study of the behaviour of subatomic particles, using data from the HERA particle accelerator, Tevatron particle accelerator and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Since 2004 he has been professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
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Jack Sarfatti
#6091
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jack Sarfatti is an American theoretical physicist. Working largely outside academia, most of Sarfatti's publications revolve around quantum physics and consciousness. Sarfatti was a leading member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, an informal group of physicists in California in the 1970s who, according to historian of science David Kaiser, aimed to inspire some of the investigations into quantum physics that underlie parts of quantum information science. Sarfatti co-wrote Space-Time and Beyond and has self-published several books.
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David J. Wineland
#3546
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Jeffrey Wineland is an American Nobel-laureate physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology physics laboratory. His work has included advances in optics, specifically laser-cooling trapped ions and using ions for quantum-computing operations. He was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Serge Haroche, for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".
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Heinz Maier-Leibnitz
#6050
Overall Influence
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz was a German physicist. He made contributions to nuclear spectroscopy, coincidence measurement techniques, radioactive tracers for biochemistry and medicine, and neutron optics. He was an influential educator and an advisor to the Federal Republic of Germany on nuclear programs.
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Miguel Alcubierre
#5806
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Miguel Alcubierre Moya is a Mexican theoretical physicist. Alcubierre is known for the proposed Alcubierre drive, a speculative warp drive by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel.
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Sumio Iijima
#2044
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#325
Savas Dimopoulos
#10764
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Savas Dimopoulos is a particle physicist at Stanford University. He worked at CERN from 1994 to 1997. Dimopoulos is well known for his work on constructing theories beyond the Standard Model. Life He was born an ethnic Greek in Istanbul, Turkey and later moved to Athens due to ethnic tensions in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Anthony Zee
#4534
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anthony Zee is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating from Princeton University, Zee obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1970, supervised by Sidney Coleman. During 1970–72 and 1977–78, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1973 to 1978, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. In his first year as assistant professor at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader.
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Alan Stern
#5489
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sol Alan Stern is an American engineer, planetary scientist and space tourist. He is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Chief Scientist at Moon Express. Stern has been involved in 24 suborbital, orbital, and planetary space missions, including eight for which he was the mission principal investigator. One of his projects was the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System, an instrument which flew on two space shuttle missions, STS-85 in 1997 and STS-93 in 1999.
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Kenneth Bainbridge
#5150
Overall Influence
1904 - 1996 (92 years)
Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge was an American physicist at Harvard University who worked on cyclotron research. His precise measurements of mass differences between nuclear isotopes allowed him to confirm Albert Einstein's mass–energy equivalence concept. He was the Director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test, which took place July 16, 1945. Bainbridge described the Trinity explosion as a "foul and awesome display". He remarked to J. Robert Oppenheimer immediately after the test, "Now we are all sons of bitches." This marked the beginning of his dedication to ending the testing of ...
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Richard Garwin
#4053
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Richard Lawrence Garwin is an American physicist, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design. In 1978, Garwin was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributing to the application of the latest scientific discoveries to innovative practical engineering applications contributing to national security and economic growth.
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Peter Goddard
#5348
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Peter Goddard is a British mathematical physicist who works in string theory and conformal field theory. Among his many contributions to these fields is the Goddard–Thorn theorem . Biography Goddard was educated at Emanuel School and the University of Cambridge, where he was a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics , and founding deputy director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He was Master of St John's College from 1994 until 2004. He was Director of the Institute for Advanced Study from January 2004 through June 2012. He is now ...
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Rolf-Dieter Heuer
#9894
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Rolf-Dieter Heuer is a German particle physicist. From 2009 to 2015 he was Director General of CERN and from 5 April 2016 to 9 April 2018 President of the German Physical Society . Since 2015 he has been Chair of the European Commission's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, and since May 2017 he has been President of the SESAME Council.
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Jeffrey A. Harvey
#7927
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jeffrey A. Harvey is an American string theorist at the University of Chicago. Scientific contributions Among Harvey's many contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he is one of the co-discoverers of the heterotic string, along with David Gross, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm. The four physicists were colloquially known as the "Princeton string quartet".
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Alex Filippenko
#11778
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow.
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Bernard Katz
#1243
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Sir Bernard Katz, FRS was a German-born British physician and biophysicist, noted for his work on nerve physiology; specifically, for his work on synaptic transmission at the nerve-muscle junction. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970 with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1969.
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Bertram Brockhouse
#3799
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Bertram Neville Brockhouse, was a Canadian physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter", in particular "for the development of neutron spectroscopy".
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William Daniel Phillips
#3954
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
William Daniel Phillips is an American physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1997, with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. „Temperature is a measure of what we call kinetic energy, i.e. the energy of motion."
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Alan Hodgkin
#1838
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles. Early life and education Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 5 February 1914. He was the oldest of three sons of Quakers George Hodgkin and Mary Wilson Hodgkin. His father was the son of Thomas Hodgkin and had read for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge where he had befriended electrophysiologist Keith Lucas.
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Max Jammer
#2470
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Max Jammer , was an Israeli physicist and philosopher of physics. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He was Rector and Acting President at Bar-Ilan University from 1967 to 1977. Biography Jammer studied physics, philosophy and history of science, first at the University of Vienna, and then from 1935 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a PhD in experimental physics in 1942. He served in the British Army for the rest of the war.
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Antonino Zichichi
#8604
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Antonino Zichichi is an Italian physicist who has worked in the field of nuclear physics. He has served as President of the World Federation of Scientists and as a professor at the University of Bologna.
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Paul Frampton
#8253
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Paul Howard Frampton is an English theoretical physicist who works in particle theory and cosmology. From 1996 until 2014, he was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Salento, in Italy.
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Erich Bagge
#7984
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Erich Rudolf Bagge was a German scientist. Bagge, a student of Werner Heisenberg for his doctorate and Habilitation, was engaged in German Atomic Energy research and the German nuclear energy project during the Second World War. He worked as an Assistant at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik in Berlin. Bagge, who became associated professor at the University of Hamburg in 1948, was in particular involved in the usage of nuclear power for trading vessels, and he was one of the founders of the Society for the Usage of Nuclear Energy in Ship-Building and Seafare. The first German nuclear vessel, the "NS Otto Hahn", was launched in 1962.
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Remo Ruffini
#11320
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Remo Ruffini . He is the Director of ICRANet, International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics Network and one of the founders of the International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics . Ruffini initiated the International Relativistic Astrophysics PhD , a common graduate school program of several universities and research institutes for the education of theoretical astrophysicists. He is the Director of the Erasmus Mundus IRAP PhD program . He has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome "Sapienza" from 1978 to 2012.
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David Pines
#6725
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
David Pines was the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter and the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter , distinguished professor of physics, University of California, Davis, research professor of physics and professor emeritus of physics and electrical and computer engineering in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign , and a staff member in the office of the Materials, Physics, and Applications Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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André Neveu
#6445
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
André Neveu is a French physicist working on string theory and quantum field theory who coinvented the Neveu–Schwarz algebra and the Gross–Neveu model. Biography Neveu studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure . In 1969 he received his diploma at University of Paris XI in Orsay with and Claude Bouchiat and in 1971 he completed his doctorate there.
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Herman Feshbach
#11115
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Herman Feshbach was an American physicist. He was an Institute Professor Emeritus of physics at MIT. Feshbach is best known for Feshbach resonance and for writing, with Philip M. Morse, Methods of Theoretical Physics.
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Peter Grünberg
#1869
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Peter Andreas Grünberg was a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.
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Donald Lynden-Bell
#9246
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS was a British theoretical astrophysicist. He was the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres, and that such black holes power quasars. Lynden-Bell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society and received numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. He worked at the University of Cambridge for his entire career, where he was the first director of its Institute of Astronomy.
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Neil Turok
#5993
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Neil Geoffrey Turok is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.
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Raman Sundrum
#10975
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Raman Sundrum is an Indian-American theoretical particle physicist. He contributed to the field with a class of models called the Randall–Sundrum models, first published in 1999 with Lisa Randall. Sundrum is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and the director of Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics.
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Kerson Huang
#7366
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Kerson Huang was a Chinese-born American theoretical physicist and translator. Huang was born in Nanning, China and grew up in Manila, Philippines. He earned a B.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1950 and 1953, respectively. He served as an instructor at MIT from 1953 to 1955, and subsequently spent two years as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. After returning to the MIT faculty in 1957, Huang became an authority on statistical physics, and worked on Bose–Einstein condensation and quantum field theory. At MIT, he had many PhD students in theoretical physics including Raymond G.
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