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,
#3051
Martin A. Uman
#41541
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Martin Allan Uman is an American engineer. He has been acknowledged by the American Geophysical Union as one of the world's leading authorities on lightning. Uman is probably best known for his work in lightning modeling, which is the application of electromagnetic field theory to the description of various lightning processes. This provides a better understanding of lightning in general and has had a number of important practical spinoffs, the most notable has been a lightning locating system and the redefinition of several important lightning characteristics relative to hazard protection. ...
Go to Profile#3052
Anwar Ali
#40361
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anwar Ali , is a Pakistani physicist and a computer programmer, who served as the Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission from 2006 until 2009. His scientific career is spent at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission as a computational physicist and played a key scientific role his nation's secret nuclear deterrent program.
Go to Profile#3053
Linda Reichl
#55702
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Linda Elizabeth Reichl is a statistical physicist who works in the Center for Complex Quantum Systems at the University of Texas at Austin, and is known for her research on quantum chaos. Education Reichl completed her Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Denver with the dissertation Microscopic Theory of Quasiparticle Spin Fluctations in a Fermi Liquid. She was advised by Elizabeth R. Tuttle and Ilya Prigogine.
Go to Profile#3054
David Goodsell
#49198
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David S. Goodsell, is an associate professor at the Scripps Research Institute and research professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey . He is especially known for his watercolor paintings of cell interiors.
Go to Profile#3055
David F. Wilson
#93583
Overall Influence
#3056
Samuel Okoye
#57544
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Samuel Ejikeme Okoye was a Nigerian astrophysicist from Amawbia in Anambra State, Nigeria. Okoye was the first black African to obtain a doctorate degree in Radio Astronomy. Early life and education Samuel Okoye was born in Amawbia, in south eastern Nigeria, Simeon and Agnes Okoye. He was the fifth of nine children. Simeon died late in 1949 when Sam was ten years.
Go to Profile#3057
William T. Silfvast
#52630
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
William Thomas Silfvast is an American physicist well known for his contributions to gas discharge laserss, soft x-ray lasers, and as the author of the influential textbook Laser Fundamentals. and also several thriller novels . Silfvast received his PhD in physics from the University of Utah and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. He then spent much of his career at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, with a Guggenheim Fellowship at Stanford in 1982–83. Later he became a professor and chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Central Florida's Center for Research in Electro-Optics and Lasers .
Go to Profile#3058
Joshua Zak
#32263
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Joshua Zak is an Israeli theoretical physicist and writer known for the Zak transform, Zak phase and the Magnetic Translation Group. He received the 2022 Israel Prize and 2014 Wigner medal. Most cited publications Zak J. Berry's phase for energy bands in solids. Physical Review Letters. 1989 Jun 5;62:2747. J. Zak. Magnetic translation group. Physical Review. 1964 Jun 15;134:A1602.Zak J, Moog ER, Liu C, Bader SD. A universal approach to magneto-optics. Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials. 1990 Sep 1;89:107-23 Zak J, Moog ER, Liu C, Bader SD. Magneto-optics of multilayers with arbitrary magnetization directions.
Go to Profile#3059
Richard J. Eden
#54081
Overall Influence
1922 - 2021 (99 years)
Richard John Eden was a British theoretical physicist who researched quantum field theory, nuclear theory and S-matrix theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1974 he founded the Energy Research Group at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and from 1982 to 1989 was Professor of Energy Studies there. From 1974, he served on the UK Advisory Committee for Energy Conservation.
Go to Profile#3060
Victoria Kaspi
#52680
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Victoria Michelle Kaspi is a Canadian astrophysicist and a professor at McGill University. Her research primarily concerns neutron stars and pulsars. Early life and education Kaspi was born in Austin, Texas, but her family moved to Canada when she was seven years old. She completed her undergraduate studies at McGill in 1989, and went to Princeton University for her graduate studies, completing her PhD in 1993 supervised by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Joseph Taylor.
Go to Profile#3061
Charles M. Falco
#49282
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Charles M. Falco is an American experimental physicist and an expert on the magnetic and optical properties of thin film materials. Biography Falco earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine in 1974 and spent the next eight years at Argonne National Laboratory before joining the University of Arizona in 1982 as a Professor of Optical Sciences. In 1989, he received the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Distinguished U.S. Scientist Award, and in 1998 was awarded the UA Chair of Condensed Matter Physics. Falco, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Ele...
Go to Profile#3062
Netta Engelhardt
#67500
Overall Influence
Netta Engelhardt is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist known for her work resolving the black hole information paradox, concerning the apparent loss of physical information from objects that enter black holes and become transformed into Hawking radiation. She is the Biedenharn Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#3063
Celso Grebogi
#50223
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Celso Grebogi is a Brazilian theoretical physicist who works in the area of chaos theory. He is one among the pioneers in the nonlinear and complex systems and chaos theory. Currently he works at the University of Aberdeen as the "Sixth Century Chair in Nonlinear and Complex Systems". He has done extensive research in the field of plasma physics before his work on the theory of dynamical systems. He and his colleagues have shown with a numerical example that one can convert a chaotic attractor to any one of numerous possible attracting time-periodic motions by making only small time-dependent perturbations of an available system parameter.
Go to Profile#3064
Ernst G. Bauer
#71937
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Ernst G. Bauer is a German-American physicist known for his studies in the field of surface science, thin film growth and nucleation mechanisms and the invention in 1962 of the Low Energy Electron Microscopy . In the early 1990s, he extended the LEEM technique in two directions by developing Spin-Polarized Low Energy Electron Microscopy and Spectroscopic Photo Emission and Low Energy Electron Microscopy . He is currently Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at the Arizona State University.
Go to Profile#3065
Harald Ibach
#93730
Overall Influence
#3066
Jean-Michel Raimond
#75201
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jean-Michel Raimond is a French physicist working in the field of quantum mechanics. Biography Raimond enrolled at the École normale supérieure in 1975. After graduating with a DEA in atomic and molecular physics, his first research work was in superradiance and Rydberg atoms.
Go to Profile#3067
Xiaohui Fan
#83642
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Xiaohui Fan is an American astronomer, and full professor at University of Arizona. He is widely known for his studies on quasars, extremely bright supermassive black holes, detected primarily at high redshift. In 2003, Fan was named to Popular Science magazine's annual Brilliant Ten list for developing methods to investigate distant quasars. Since 2001, he was a pioneer in the detection and discovery of high-redshift quasars, introducing new techniques and practically inventing the field. Using these quasars, he has shown that supermassive black holes with masses up to 10 million solar masses existed within one billion years after the big bang.
Go to Profile#3068
Albert H. Walenta
#42536
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Albert H. Walenta is professor for experimental physics at the University of Siegen in Germany. In 1986 he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. External links Homepage of the group Detector physics and electronics
Go to Profile#3069
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
#42166
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove was an American nuclear physicist. She was known for her experimental work in nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, and for her annual reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei. She was a recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Science.
Go to Profile#3070
Jonathan M. Dorfan
#66116
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jonathan Manne Dorfan is a particle physicist and the President-Emeritus of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate University. He is a former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center . In 2010 he joined the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as President. In 2017 he was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun.
Go to Profile#3071
John Mark Butler
#93867
Overall Influence
#3072
Peter Westervelt
#84287
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Peter Westervelt was an American physicist, noted for his work in nonlinear acoustics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Brown University. Education He received his BS in Physics from MIT in 1947, and his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1951, at which time he joined the Physics Department at Brown University.
Go to Profile#3073
Rolf Nordhagen
#59217
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Rolf Nordhagen was a Norwegian physicist and computer scientist. Early life and education Rolf was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of the noted botanist, Rolf Nordhagen and the brother of art historian Per Jonas Nordhagen. He took his PhD in Liverpool in 1958, and was a docent in nuclear physics at the University of Oslo from 1970 to 1974. He changed to being the university's director of "EDB" from 1974 to 1986 before being hired as a professor of informatics in 1986.
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Brian J. Boyle
#73472
Overall Influence
Brian J. Boyle is a Scottish astrophysicist based in Australia since 1996. His primary research interests are in the fields of quasars, active galaxies and cosmology. He has been involved in science-direction setting in Australia for over 15 years, contributing the mid-term review in 2000, leading the development of the Australian Astronomy Decadal Plan 2006-15 and facilitating the development of the Optical and Radio Astronomy Investment Plan for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy in 2007.
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George Gollin
#42802
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
George D. Gollin is an American physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Besides his work on particle physics and the International Linear Collider, he has since 2003 made numerous efforts in fighting institutions which are considered to be diploma mills, which has caused him to receive significant public attention. Gollin placed second in the 2014 Democratic primary for Illinois's 13th congressional district.
Go to Profile#3076
Wilson Sibbett
#66584
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Wilson Sibbett is a British physicist noted for his work on ultrashort pulse lasers and Streak cameras. He is the Wardlaw Professor of Physics at St Andrews University. Early life and education He was born in Portglenone in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, in March 1948.
Go to Profile#3077
Rafael Ferrando
#91729
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Rafael Ferrando is a Spanish astronomer, credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of numerous minor planets between 2001 and 2010. The main-belt asteroid 161545 Ferrando, discovered by Juan Lacruz, was named after him on 24 November 2007 .
Go to Profile#3078
Christopher Chyba
#39577
Overall Influence
Christopher F. Chyba is an American astrobiologist and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1982, and studied mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. He then received his Ph.D. in astronomy, with an emphasis in planetary science, from Cornell University in 1991. He was a White House Fellow on the National Security Council staff, and then serving in the Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1993 to 1995. He was a member of the S...
Go to Profile#3079
Sylwester Porowski
#68483
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sylwester Andrzej Porowski , is a Polish physicist specializing in solid-state and high pressure physics. He is the Co-Director and Board Member of The Institute of High Pressure Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Go to Profile#3080
Steven Pollock
#79862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Steven J. Pollock is an American professor of physics and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has taught since 1993. His specialisations are in physics education research and in nuclear theory. He is the 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year.
Go to Profile#3081
Roger Chevalier
#90961
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Roger Chevalier is an American astronomer currently on faculty at University of Virginia. A cited expert in theoretical astrophysics, his interests include astronomical supernovae environment and gases.
Go to Profile#3082
Paul A. Libby
#29779
Overall Influence
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Paul Andrews Libby was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, San Diego, a specialist in the field of combustion and aerospace engineering. Biography Libby received his bachelor's degree in 1942 and obtained his PhD in 1949, both from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After his bachelor's degree, he worked at Chance Vought Aircraft for two years and then served in the United States Navy during World War II until 1946 in between his Bachelors and Doctorate degrees; he was a Junior Grade Lieutenant when discharged.
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Rama Govindarajan
#29857
Overall Influence
Rama Govindarajan is an Indian scientist specialized in the field of fluid dynamics. She previously worked at the Engineering Mechanics Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research from 1998 to 2012 and as a professor at the TIFR Hyderabad Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences from 2012 to 2016. As of 2019 she is working as a professor at International Centre for Theoretical Sciences , Bengaluru. Govindarajan is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for the year 2007.
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Christopher Thompson
#76718
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Christopher Thompson is a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. He is a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics . Thompson received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988. His thesis discussed the cosmological effects of superconducting strings. His advisor was Jeremiah P. Ostriker.
Go to Profile#3085
Albert Polman
#94042
Overall Influence
#3086
Klaus Mølmer
#72647
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Klaus Mølmer is a Danish physicist who is currently a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen. From 2000 to 2022, he was a professor of physics at the University of Aarhus.
Go to Profile#3087
David Thoreson Lykken
#94049
Overall Influence
#3088
Gordon Walter Semenoff
#38125
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Gordon Walter Semenoff , , , is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is known for his research on quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and string theory and is particularly famous for his co-invention, together with Antti Niemi, of the parity anomaly in odd-dimensional gauge field theories and for his pioneering work on graphene. He is also well known for development of thermal field theory, the application of index theorems and their generalizations in quantum field theory and string theory, notably with r...
Go to Profile#3089
Eve Ostriker
#84427
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eve Charis Ostriker is an American astrophysicist, known for her research on star formation and on related topics involving superbubbles, molecular clouds, young stars, computational fluid dynamics, and supersonic turbulence. She is a professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences of Princeton University.
Go to Profile#3090
Eva Nogales
#36738
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eva Nogales is a Spanish-American biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as head of the Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology . She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Go to Profile#3091
Fiona A. Harrison
#78587
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Fiona A. Harrison is the Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech, Harold A. Rosen Professor of Physics at Caltech and the Principal Investigator for NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array mission. She won the Hans A. Bethe Prize in 2020 for her work on NuSTAR.
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George I. Stegeman
#94154
Overall Influence
#3093
Oscar Buneman
#37805
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Oscar Buneman made advances in science, engineering, and mathematics. Buneman was a pioneer of computational plasma physics and plasma simulation. Career In 1940 upon completion of his PhD with Douglas Hartree, Buneman joined Hartree's magnetron research group assisting the development of radar during World War II. They discovered the Buneman–Hartree criterion for the voltage threshold of a magnetron operation. After the war, Buneman developed theories and simulations of collision-less dissipation of currents called the Buneman instability. This is an example of anomalous resistivity or absorption.
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Walter Eric Spear
#42128
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Walter Eric Spear FRSE PhD FRS FInstP was a German physicist noted for his pioneering work to help develop large area electronics and thin film displays. He was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother; by the time he finished his school examinations in 1938 life for Jews and people associated with Jews was becoming difficult. With the support of friends and relatives in Britain, the family were able to move to London, where he arrived in 1938 "with a small suitcase and a large cello".
Go to Profile#3095
David Beratan
#47007
Overall Influence
David Nathan Beratan is an American chemist and physicist, the R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry at Duke University. He has secondary appointments in the departments of Physics and Biochemistry. He is the director of the Center for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence, a NSF Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation.
Go to Profile#3096
Barry Holstein
#86768
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Barry Ralph Holstein is an American physicist. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, recipient of the 2019 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics, and current editor of the peer-reviewed journal the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science.
Go to Profile#3097
Gillian Wright
#71772
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Gillian Susan Wright is a Scottish astronomer who is currently the director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, UK. She has also been involved in the development and construction of the James Webb Space Telescope as the European Principal Investigator for the Mid-Infrared Instrument . In 2006 Wright was appointed MBE for services to science.
Go to Profile#3098
Hui Cao
#92578
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Hui Cao is a Chinese American physicist who is the professor of applied physics, a professor of physics and a professor of electrical engineering at Yale University. Her research interests are mesoscopic physics, complex photonic materials and devices, with a focus on non-conventional lasers and their unique applications. She is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#3099
Myron L. Good
#64314
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Myron Lindsay Good was an American physicist, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Stony Brook University. Good's research interests spanned a broad range of topics in particle physics. He did important work on muon-catalyzed fusion, Kaon regeneration, strange particles, diffraction of particle beams, W boson phenomenology, and particle accelerator technology. Outside of particle physics, he also developed a theory of pulsars as rotating neutron stars.
Go to Profile#3100
Frank B. McDonald
#73292
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Frank Bethune McDonald was an American astrophysicist who helped design scientific instruments for research flights into space. He was a key force behind several initiatives and programs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for which he served as chief scientist.
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