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,
#3001
Peter A. Stott
#33518
Overall Influence
Peter A. Stott is a climate scientist who leads the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the Met Office in Exeter, UK. He is an expert on anthropogenic and natural causes of climate change.
Go to Profile#3002
Daniel R. Altschuler
#71836
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Daniel R. Altschuler is a Uruguayan physicist linked in his professional activity to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, where he was director from 1992 to 2003. He is a writer, known for his science outreach work, and is very sensitive to the distinction between science and pseudoscience. In 2010 he received the Andrew Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics.
Go to Profile#3003
Lars Lindberg Christensen
#70083
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Lars Lindberg Christensen is a science communicator and author of a dozen books on astronomy and science communication translated to ten languages. He had a long career with the European Southern Observatory and is employed by U.S. National Science Foundation's NOIRLab and the International Astronomical Union . As press officer for the latter he was leading the media communication of the 2006 IAU reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet.
Go to Profile#3004
Joël Mesot
#58512
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Joël François Mesot is a Swiss physicist and academic. He is currently the President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, also known as ETH Zurich. Biography Mesot was born in Geneva, Switzerland, where he grew up. He studied physics at the ETH Zurich from 1984 to 1989, followed by doctoral studies at the same university as well as at the Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble in France. In 1992, he was awarded a PhD in physics from the ETH Zurich with a thesis on high-temperature superconductors supervised by Albert Furrer. Thereafter he joined the Paul Scherrer Institute as a researcher in the field of neutron scattering.
Go to Profile#3005
Helen Dodson Prince
#52060
Overall Influence
1905 - 2002 (97 years)
Helen Dodson Prince was an American astronomer who pioneered work in solar flares at the University of Michigan. Early life and education Helen Prince was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 31, 1905, to Helen Walter and Henry Clay Dodson. Being skilled in both physics and mathematics, Prince received a full scholarship to study mathematics at Goucher College, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927. During her undergraduate studies, she was influenced by professor Florence P. Lewis to study astronomy. Prince continued onto graduate school at the University of Michigan, where she received her master's degree in 1932 and her Ph.D.
Go to Profile#3006
Sera Markoff
#86553
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sera Markoff is an American astrophysicist and full professor of theoretical high energy astrophysics at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that produced the first image of a black hole.
Go to Profile#3007
Stanley S. Ballard
#72981
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Stanley S. Ballard was an American physicist, specializing in optics. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1963 and of the American Association of Physics Teachers during 1968–69. In 1986 he was awarded the Oersted Medal. During World War II, Ballard served as a Commander in the United States Navy. From 1956 to 1959 he was the President of the International Commission for Optics.
Go to Profile#3008
Michael A. Lieberman
#92701
Overall Influence
#3009
Alfred T. Goshaw
#92732
Overall Influence
#3010
Ilme Schlichting
#24596
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ilme Schlichting is a German biophysicist. Academic work Ilme Schlichting studied biology and physics at the University of Heidelberg from 1979 to 1987. She earned a PhD in biology there in 1990. Schlichting pursued post-doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and at Brandeis University in Boston in the United States as a Feodor Lynen Fellow. From 1994 to 2001 she was head of a working group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund. Since 2002 she is director of the department for Biomolecular Mechanisms at the Max Planck Institute for Medical ...
Go to Profile#3011
Joseph Kaplan
#48247
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Joseph Kaplan was a Hungarian-born American physicist. Kaplan was notable for his studies of atmospheric phenomena, for his international activities in geophysics. Kaplan also participated in efforts to launch the first Earth satellite. Kaplan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, chairman of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year, the founder and first director of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of California , an aerospace adviser to Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixo...
Go to Profile#3012
Boris P. Stoicheff
#64505
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Boris P. Stoicheff, , was a Macedonian Canadian physicist. Stoicheff was born in Bitola, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia . His family emigrated to Canada 1931, and he grew up in Toronto. He earned a degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto in 1947, and a PhD from the same institution in 1950. He stayed for another year at Toronto on a fellowship, then went to the National Research Council in Ottawa to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the spectroscopy laboratory headed by Gerhard Herzberg, where he worked on Raman scattering. In 1953 he was promoted at the National Resear...
Go to Profile#3013
William J. Willis
#84698
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
William J. Willis was an American experimental particle physicistist. Biography William Willis studied physics at Yale University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954 and his PhD in 1958 with advisor Earle Fowler and dissertation related to the development of hydrogen bubble chambers in Ralph P. Shutt's research group. Willis was a postdoc at Brookhaven National Laboratory , where he observed weak decays of kaons and hyperons in bubble chambers. In 1961/62 he was at CERN, where he was involved in experiments on weak decays of hyperons, which confirmed the Cabibbo theory of weak interaction.
Go to Profile#3014
Jan Hendrik Schön
#33076
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#3015
Markus Greiner
#64987
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Markus Greiner is a German physicist and Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Greiner studied under the Nobel Laureate Theodor Hänsch at the Ludwig-Maximilians University and at the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics, where he received his diploma and PhD in physics for experimental work on Bose-Einstein condensates and bosons in optical lattices. He was involved in the first realization of the quantum phase transition from a superfluid to Mott insulator in a Bose-Hubbard system.
Go to Profile#3016
Elizabeth H. Simmons
#53808
Overall Influence
Elizabeth H. Simmons is an American theoretical physicist, and Executive Vice Chancellor at University of California San Diego. Formerly, she was a distinguished professor of physics at Michigan State University, the dean of Lyman Briggs College, and the associate provost for faculty and academic staff development. She has also held positions at Harvard University and Boston University. Simmons is married to fellow physicist, R. Sekhar Chivukula. Together they have two children.
Go to Profile#3017
Rashid Alievich Sunyaev
#92814
Overall Influence
#3018
Thérèse Encrenaz
#62247
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Thérèse Encrenaz is a French planetary scientist who "played a leading role in the development of planetology in Europe". Her research concerns extraterrestrial atmospheres, particularly of the planets and comets in the Solar System. She is a research director for the CNRS, emeritus, affiliated with the Paris Observatory.
Go to Profile#3019
Allen Caldwell
#89804
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Allen Caldwell is one of currently seven directors of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He became director in 2002.
Go to Profile#3020
Giulia Galli
#53998
Overall Influence
Giulia Galli is a condensed-matter physicist. She is the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the department of chemistry at the University of Chicago and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. She is also the director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials. She is recognized for her contributions to the fields of computational condensed-matter, materials science, and nanoscience, most notably first principles simulations of materials and liquids, in particular materials for energy, pro...
Go to Profile#3021
Ennio Candotti
#35547
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ennio Candotti is a Brazilian physicist and scientific leader. He studied physics at the University of São Paulo, in São Paulo, from 1960 to 1964, and also at the University of Naples, in Naples, Italy . From 1966 to 1968 he specialized in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa , in mathematical physics at the University of Munich, in Munich, Germany and in dynamic systems at the University of Naples again.
Go to Profile#3022
Hu Jimin
#65181
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
Hu Jimin was a Chinese nuclear physicist, plasma physicist and educator. Life and career Hu was born on 26 January 1919 in Rugao, Nantong, Jiangsu Province. In 1935, Hu studied in Nantong High School. In 1937, Hu entered the Department of Chemistry of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Hu soon transferred into the Department of Physics, and studied under Prof. Wang Ganchang and Hsin Pei Soh. Hu graduated in 1942, and became a teaching assistant in the department.
Go to Profile#3023
Michael Thorpe
#67557
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael Thorpe is an English-American physicist and Foundation Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. He received his D. Phil from Oxford University in 1968 in condensed matter physics under supervision of Sir Roger James Elliott. His early research was on network glasses, but has recently focused on applying his knowledge to the study of protein dynamics.
Go to Profile#3024
Oliver G. Schmidt
#93015
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
#3025
J. Gordon Williams
#93041
Overall Influence
#3026
Archana Bhattacharyya
#55292
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Archana Bhattacharyya is an Indian physicist. She specializes in the field of ionospheric physics, geomagnetism, and space weather and is Director of the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, Navi Mumbai.
Go to Profile#3027
Jean Audouze
#33498
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jean Audouze is a French astrophysicist. He is a research director at CNRS and teaches at the Paris Institute of Political Science "Sciences Po". From 1993 to 1996 he was president of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in La Villette, and in 1998 he was named as director of the Palais de la Découverte, changing places with Michel Demazure who took Audouze's former position at La Villette. Awarded the Kalinga Prize in 2004.
Go to Profile#3028
Frances Hellman
#32341
Overall Influence
Frances Hellman is a physicist who was dean of the division of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley from 2015 until 2021. Her primary academic focus has been the study of the thermodynamic properties of novel solid materials, especially thin film semiconducting, superconducting, and magnetic materials. She has served as chair of the physics department and holds a dual appointment in the materials science and engineering department.
Go to Profile#3029
Marcel Froissart
#73564
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Marcel Froissart was a French theoretical physicist, specializing in particle physics. He is known for the Froissart bound and the Froissart–Stora equation. Biography After secondary study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Marcel Froissart matriculated in 1953 at the École polytechnique, where he graduated in 1955. He then entered in October 1956 Mines ParisTech, now known as École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris . After completing only one semester of a four-semester technical curriculum, he was sent in civil cooperation with the French Navy to Algeria . He was reassigned in 1957 to the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique , for which he worked in Geneva from 1957 to 1958 at CERN.
Go to Profile#3030
David Sherrington
#38880
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Sherrington is a British theoretical physicist and Wykeham Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. He is known for his work in condensed matter and statistical physics, and particularly for the invention of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, an exactly solvable mean-field model of a spin glass.
Go to Profile#3031
James Hough
#54893
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sir James Hough is a British physicist and an international leader in the search for gravitational waves. Career and research Hough has held the following professional positions:Professor of experimental physics at the University of Glasgow.Director of the Institute of Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow.Member of the LISA International Science Team.Delegate to the LIGO Council.Chair of the Education, Training and Careers Committee and the Fellowships Panel of the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
Go to Profile#3032
Robert Benjamin Leighton
#93116
Overall Influence
#3033
Tamara Smirnova
#64159
Overall Influence
1935 - 2001 (66 years)
Tamara Mikhaylovna Smirnova was a Soviet/Russian astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets and comets. Career From 1966 to 1988, Smirnova was a staff member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Leningrad. She is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 135 numbered minor planets during 1966–1984. She also co-discovered the periodic comet 74P/Smirnova-Chernykh, along with Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh.
Go to Profile#3034
Yoshihide Kozai
#41228
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Yoshihide Kozai was a Japanese astronomer specialising in celestial mechanics. He is best known for discovering, simultaneously with Michael Lidov, the Kozai mechanism, for which he received the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy in 1979. He was the first Japanese president of the International Astronomical Union from 1988 to 1991, and was director of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan from 1981 to 1994. He was professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and The Graduate University for Advanced Studies.
Go to Profile#3035
Martin Pope
#26256
Overall Influence
1918 - 2022 (104 years)
Martin Pope was an American physical chemist and professor at New York University. His discoveries of ohmic contacts and research in the fields of organic insulatorss and semiconductors led to techniques enabling organic semiconductors to carry relatively large currents, and to convert electricity into light and vice versa. These discoveries have had application in electrophotography, organic light-emitting diodes , photovoltaic cells, biological sensors, transistors, molecular electronics, and batteries.
Go to Profile#3036
Steven Gwon Sheng Louie
#41944
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Steven Gwon Sheng Louie is a computational condensed-matter physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research focuses on nanoscience. He is also scientific director of the Theory of Nanostructured Materials Facility at the Molecular Foundry.
Go to Profile#3037
Julian Charles Roland Hunt
#93223
Overall Influence
#3038
Robert Guy Griffin
#93243
Overall Influence
#3039
Ulf Leonhardt
#53439
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ulf Leonhardt, FRSE is a German and British scientist. In 2006, he published the first scientific paper on invisibility cloaking with metamaterials at the same time Pendry's group published their paper in the journal Science. He has been involved with the science of cloaking objects since then.
Go to Profile#3040
Tom Quinn
#85397
Overall Influence
Tom Quinn is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the leader of the N-Body Shop, a faculty member of the astrobiology program at UW, and an affiliate member at the eScience Institute. He assisted in generating the cosmological simulation code called ChaNGA.
Go to Profile#3041
Randall G. Hulet
#64405
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Randall Gardner Hulet is an American physicist. Hulet studied at Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1978. He received his doctorate in 1984, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Daniel Kleppner, and then joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder with David Wineland. In 1987, he became an assistant professor of physics at Rice University, and was promoted to associate professor in 1992, then full professor in 1996. He was appointed Fayez Sarofim Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2000.
Go to Profile#3042
Benjamin Fain
#39807
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Benjamin Fain was an Israeli physicist, professor-emeritus, and former refusenik. Biography Fain was born to a Jewish family in Kyiv. His father was a mathematician. He instilled in the child a love for science as well as a strong national sentiment.
Go to Profile#3043
Fritz Peter Schäfer
#32480
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Fritz Peter Schäfer was a German physicist, born in Hersfeld, Hesse-Nassau. He is the co-inventor of the organic dye laser. His book, Dye Lasers, is considered a classic in the field of tunable lasers. In this book the chapter written by Schäfer gives an ample and insightful exposition on organic laser dye molecules in addition to a description on the physics of telescopic, and multiple-prism, tunable narrow-linewidth laser oscillators.
Go to Profile#3044
Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz
#33449
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, born in Rio de Janeiro on July 19, 1956, is one of Brazil's most noted physicists and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. The scientific director of the São Paulo Research Foundation and a full professor of quantum electronics at the Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute at the State University of Campinas , Brito Cruz is engaged in research in which he uses femtosecond lasers to study ultrafast phenomena.
Go to Profile#3045
Moshe Zakai
#17535
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Moshe Zakai was a Distinguished Professor at the Technion, Israel in electrical engineering, member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Rothschild Prize winner. Biography Moshe Zakai was born in Sokółka, Poland, to his parents Rachel and Eliezer Zakheim with whom he immigrated to Israel in 1936. He got the BSc degree in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1951. He joined the scientific department of the Defense Minister of Israel, where he was assigned to research and development of radar systems. From 1956 to 1958, he did graduate wor...
Go to Profile#3046
James R. Chelikowsky
#68119
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James R. Chelikowsky is a professor of physics, chemical engineering, and chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the director of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences' Center for Computational Materials. He holds the W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Jr. Chair of Computational Materials.
Go to Profile#3047
Ekmel Özbay
#41450
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ekmel Özbay is a Turkish professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Physics Departments at Bilkent University and the director of the Nanotechnology Research Center, and Space Technologies Research Center in Ankara.
Go to Profile#3048
Jean-François Denisse
#75340
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Jean-François Denisse was a French astronomer and one of the leading pioneers of radio astronomy in France. Education and career Jean-François Denisse matriculated in 1936 at the École Normale Supérieure and in 1941 passed the agrégation in physical sciences. He then became a physics teacher at Dakar's lycée . Upon his return to France in 1946, he became a graduate student studying radio astronomy in the physics laboratory of ENS Paris. From 1948 to 1949 he studied the science and technology of antennas and receivers at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. He received his doctorate in 1950.
Go to Profile#3049
Paris Pişmiş
#22326
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Marie Paris Pişmiş de Recillas was an Armenian-Mexican astronomer. Pişmiş was born Mari Sukiasian in 1911, in Ortaköy, Istanbul. She completed her high school studies at Üsküdar American Academy. In 1937, she became the first woman to get a Ph.D. from the Science Faculty of Istanbul University. Her advisor was Erwin Finlay Freundlich. Later, she went to Harvard University where she met her future husband Félix Recillas, a Mexican mathematician. They settled in Mexico, and she became the first professional astronomer in Mexico. According to Dorrit Hoffleit, "she is the one person most influen...
Go to Profile#3050
Kevin Kendall
#93454
Overall Influence
