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,
#3201
Robert J. Joynt
#96311
Overall Influence
#3202
Rui-Ming Xu
#76179
Overall Influence
Rui-Ming Xu , is a Chinese physicist, biophysicist and molecular biologist. He is a leading bioresearcher in China. Biography Early years Xu entered the Department of Physics at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China in 1980, and obtained his B.Sc. in physics in 1984. In 1984, Xu joined the China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application and was qualified and awarded a fellowship, so that he could pursue his further study in physics in the United States.
Go to Profile#3203
Jan Zaanen
#64780
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jan Zaanen is professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is best known for his contributions to the understanding of the quantum physics of the electrons in strongly correlated material, and in particular high temperature superconductivity. Zaanen's areas of interest are in the search for novel forms of collective quantum phenomena realized in systems build from mundane constituents like electrons, spins, and atoms.
Go to Profile#3204
John G. King
#69954
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
John Gordon King was an English-born American physicist who was the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the former director of MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory, and the former associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.
Go to Profile#3205
Samuel J. Bame
#96435
Overall Influence
#3206
Rychard Bouwens
#51285
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Rychard J. Bouwens is an associate professor at Leiden University. He is also a former member of the Advanced Camera for Surveys Guaranteed Time Observation team and postdoctoral research astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics, chemistry, and mathematics from Hope College. He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in physics at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Joseph Silk and also worked with Tom Broadhurst.
Go to Profile#3207
William W. Destler
#13985
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
William Wallace Destler is an American university professor and administrator. In 2017 he retired after having served for exactly 10 years as the 9th president of the Rochester Institute of Technology. He held the position from July 1, 2007, succeeding Albert J. Simone.
Go to Profile#3208
Sheila Tinney
#66795
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Sheila Christina Tinney was an Irish mathematical physicist. Her 1941 PhD from the University of Edinburgh, completed under the supervision of Max Born in just two years, is believed to make her the first Irish-born and -raised woman to receive a doctorate in the mathematical sciences.
Go to Profile#3209
Ivan Aničin
#59595
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Ivan Aničin, was Yugoslav and Serbian nuclear physicist, particle physicist, astrophysicist, and cosmologist, university Full Professor and Distinguished Professor of scientific institutes in Belgrade , Bristol , Grenoble , and Munich .
Go to Profile#3210
Yuk L. Yung
#72155
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Yuk-ling Yung is an American scientist who has been a Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology from 1986 to present. Biography Education He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, earning B.S. in Engineering Physics, with honors, and at Harvard University, acquiring a Ph.D. in Physics in 1974.
Go to Profile#3211
Jess Wade
#49592
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Jessica Alice Feinmann Wade is a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes . Her public engagement work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics advocates for women in physics as well as tackling systemic biases such as gender and racial bias on Wikipedia.
Go to Profile#3212
Jerome Kristian
#87700
Overall Influence
1934 - 1996 (62 years)
Jerome "Jerry" Kristian was a theoretical and observational cosmologist, and the first to provide observational evidence of quasar host galaxies. Kristian began his career in theoretical cosmology but transitioned into observation while working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the 1960s and 1970s. He helped to pioneer the observational study of pulsars and quasars and participated in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. He was the first to provide observational support for the now widely accepted theory that quasars are supermassive black holes at the center of distant galaxies.
Go to Profile#3213
Stéphane Udry
#57450
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Stéphane Udry is an astronomer at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, whose current work is primarily the search for extra-solar planets. He and his team, in 2007, discovered a possibly terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of the Gliese 581 planetary system, approximately 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. He also led the observational team that discovered HD 85512 b, another most promisingly habitable exoplanet.
Go to Profile#3214
Mark L. Latash
#96636
Overall Influence
#3215
Sergey Bozhevolnyi
#94957
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi is a Russian-Danish physicist. He is currently a professor and the leader for the Centre for Nano Optics at the University of Southern Denmark. Education and career Bozhevolnyi was raised in the village of Kopanskaya, Yeysky District, Krasnodar Krai, USSR and grew up in a family of teachers of physics and mathematics. In 1978 he graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with a Master of Science degree in physics. In 1981, he earned a PhD-degree from the same university with the thesis entitled "Study of electro-optical modulators and deflectors based on diffuse waveguides in LiNbO₃".
Go to Profile#3216
Joss Bland-Hawthorn
#94135
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn is a British-Australian astrophysicist. He is a Laureate professor of physics at the University of Sydney, and director of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. Early life and education Bland-Hawthorn was born 31 May 1959 in Ide Hill, Kent, England. He was educated at Kingham Hill School . He earned a degree in computer science, mathematics, and physics at the University of Birmingham before pursuing his PhD in astrophysics and astronomy at the University of Sussex and the Royal Greenwich Observatory. His dissertation, The Structure and Dynamics of the Ionised Gas withi...
Go to Profile#3217
David Hughes
#64768
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
David W. Hughes was professor of astronomy at the University of Sheffield, where he worked from 1965 to 2007. Hughes published over 200 research papers on asteroids, comets, meteorites and meteoroids. He wrote on the history of astronomy, the origin of the Solar System and the impact threat to planet Earth.
Go to Profile#3218
Jozef J. Zwislocki
#88722
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Jozef John Zwislocki was a Polish-born American neuroscientist. A native of Lwow, Poland, Zwislocki attended the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and taught at the University of Basel from 1945 to 1951. He left for a research fellowship at Harvard University and was a member of the Syracuse University faculty between 1957 and 1992. Zwislocki held twelve patents. Over the course of his career, Zwislocki was granted fellowship into the Acoustical Society of America, as well as membership to the United States National Academy of Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences, Americ...
Go to Profile#3219
Robert W. Schunk
#96781
Overall Influence
#3220
Csaba Csáki
#95732
Overall Influence
Csaba Csáki is a theoretical physicist who studied under Lisa Randall at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He is known for his work in models of extra dimensions and supersymmetry. He is currently a professor at Cornell University. He was granted fellowship by the American Physical Society in 2016.
Go to Profile#3221
Rachel Somerville
#77578
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Rachel S. Somerville is an American astronomer and holds the George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Chair in Astrophysics at Rutgers University. She is known for theoretical research into galaxy formation and evolution. She was awarded the 2013 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics “For providing fundamental insights into galaxy formation and evolution using semi-analytic modeling, simulations and observations.”
Go to Profile#3222
Robert T. Beyer
#63169
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Robert Thomas Beyer was an American physicist, best known for his work in acoustics, and for his translations of Russian and German physics books and journals into English. Early life and education Beyer was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on January 27, 1920. He received his A.B. in Mathematics from Hofstra in 1942, and his doctorate in physics from Cornell University in 1945, with a dissertation focused on magnetic amplifiers.
Go to Profile#3223
J. Stewart Marshall
#54840
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
John Stewart Marshall was a Canadian physicist and meteorologist. Researcher for the Canadian government during the Second World war and then professor at McGill University from 1945 until his retirement in 1979, he was renowned for his research in cloud physics and precipitation, but especially for being a pioneer of weather radar.
Go to Profile#3224
Laurence Eaves
#63208
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Laurence Eaves CBE, FRS, FLSW is a British physicist and professor at University of Nottingham. Life Laurence Eaves was born in Pentre, in the Rhondda valley, Wales in 1948 and was educated at Rhondda County Grammar School, Porth, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he took Firsts in Physics and Mathematics Moderations and in Physics Final Honours. He gained his DPhil at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, working under the supervision of R. A. Stradling on the interaction between conduction electrons and phonons in semiconductors at high magnetic fields.
Go to Profile#3225
William Chinowsky
#76970
Overall Influence
William Chinowsky is an American astrophysicist. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography Chinowsky received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He worked as a staff physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1961. He served as a program director of the National Science Foundation from 1992 to 1996 and was affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He works in observational high-energy neutrino astrophysics. Among his students were Carl Haber, a MacArthur Fellow known for his work in audio p...
Go to Profile#3226
Alexei Fridman
#44569
Overall Influence
1940 - 2010 (70 years)
Alexey Maksimovich Fridman was a Soviet physicist specializing in astrophysics, physics of gravitating systems and plasma physics. He discovered new types of instabilities in gravitating media, created the theory of planetary rings and predicted the existence of small Uranus satellites that were later discovered. He also developed the hydrodynamic theory of spiral structure in galaxies. Fridman worked at the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, INASAN, and was professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and at Moscow State University.
Go to Profile#3227
Jérôme Faist
#87331
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jérôme Faist is a Swiss physicist and since 2007 professor at the institute of quantum electronics at ETH Zürich. Academic career Jérôme Faist attended the EPF Lausanne under Franz-Karl Reinhart where he obtained his Bachelor's degree in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Optoelectronics in 1989. His study focused on vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers and optical modulators. Following his doctorate, he worked at IBM in Rüschlikon as a post-doc between 1989 and 1991. In 1991, he switched to Federico Capasso's group in Bell Laboratories Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey where he first worked as a post-doc and then as a Member of Technical Staff.
Go to Profile#3228
Norio Taniguchi
#10958
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Norio Taniguchi was a professor of Tokyo University of Science. He coined the term nano-technology in 1974 to describe semiconductor processes such as thin film deposition and ion beam milling exhibiting characteristic control on the order of a nanometer: "Nano-technology' mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule."
Go to Profile#3229
Karl Svozil
#41346
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karl Svozil is an Austrian physicist educated at the University of Vienna and Heidelberg University. Visiting scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, US , the Lebedev Institute of the Moscow State University, and the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg . Docent in Theoretical Physics at the Vienna Technical University. Ao. Univ. Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Vienna Technical University. External Researcher at the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science of the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#3230
Claire Wyart
#52810
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Claire Julie Liliane Wyart is a French neuroscientist and biophysicist, studying the circuits underlying the control of locomotion. She is a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite. Early life Wyart was born into a family of scientists. Her mother, Françoise Brochard-Wyart, is a prominent French physicist and a professor at the Curie Institute. Her father, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, was a Nobel-prize winning physicist. As their father was mostly absent, Wyart and her siblings were raised by their mother, though Claire thought of him as "the pillar who held our family together".
Go to Profile#3231
Jürgen Renn
#39303
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jürgen Renn is a German historian of science, and since 1994 Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Short biography Renn studied physics at the Free University of Berlin and at the Sapienza University of Rome. In 1987 he received his Ph.D in mathematical physics from the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#3232
Robert Brattain
#51908
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
R. Robert Brattain was an American physicist at Shell Development Company. He was involved in a number of secret projects during World War II. He is recognized as one of America's leading infrared spectroscopists for his work in designing several models of spectrophotometer, and for using the infrared spectrophotometer to determine the β-lactam structure of penicillin. His instrumentation work was essential to the subsequent study and understanding of structures in organic chemistry.
Go to Profile#3233
Helen Megaw
#47553
Overall Influence
1907 - 2002 (95 years)
Helen Dick Megaw was an Irish crystallographer who was a pioneer in X-ray crystallography. She made measurements of the cell dimensions of ice and established the Perovskite crystal structure. Education and career Megaw was born in Dublin to mathematics teacher Annie McElderry and judge Robert Megaw, two graduates of Queen's University Belfast who were both originally from Ballymoney, Antrim. She was educated at first at Alexandra College in Dublin, and then briefly at Methodist College in Belfast after the family moved back there in 1921, and finally at the Roedean School in England. While still at school, Megaw read Bragg's X-rays and Crystal Structure.
Go to Profile#3234
William Cronk Elmore
#74058
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
William Cronk Elmore was an American physicist, educator, and author who is best known for his work on and related to the Manhattan project during World War II and as a professor of physics at Swarthmore College, PA from 1938 to 1974. Bill Elmore authored two influential books during his life, Electronics-Experimental Techniques with Matthew Sands and the Physics of Waves with Mark Heald. He is also known for deriving a simple approximation for the delay through an RC network, known as the Elmore delay.
Go to Profile#3235
Gottfried Möllenstedt
#61849
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Gottfried Möllenstedt was a German physicist and professor at the University of Tübingen, where he founded the Institute of Applied Physics in 1957, and served as rector from 1966 to 1968. Together with his doctoral student Heinrich Düker , in 1955 he invented the electron biprism, which is widely used in electron holography.
Go to Profile#3236
Taha Yasseri
#8540
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Taha Yasseri is a physicist and sociologist known for his research on Wikipedia and computational social science. He is a professor at the School of Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. He was formerly a senior research fellow in computational social science at the Oxford Internet Institute , University of Oxford, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for data science, and a research fellow in humanities and social sciences at Wolfson College, Oxford. Yasseri is one of the leading scholars in computational social science and his research has been widely covered in mainstream media.
Go to Profile#3237
Patrick Maxwell
#66785
Overall Influence
Patrick Henry Maxwell FMedSci is a British physician and the Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, a position he has held since 2012. His research focuses regulation of gene expression by changes in oxygen. Patrick studied for a DPhil in Medicine at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He undertook postgraduate clinical and research training in nephrology and general medicine at Guy's Hospital and in Oxford.
Go to Profile#3238
Xue Qikun
#81423
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Xue Qikun is a Chinese physicist. He is a professor of Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has done much work in Condensed Matter Physics, especially on superconductors and topological insulators. In 2013, Xue was the first to achieve the quantum anomalous Hall effect , an unusual orderly motion of electrons in a conductor, in his laboratory at Tsinghua University. Xue is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, vice president for research of Tsinghua University, and director of State Key Lab of Quantum Physics. In 2016, he was one of the first recipients of the new Chinese Future Science...
Go to Profile#3239
Markolf Niemz
#29655
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Markolf H. Niemz is a German physicist, biophysicist, and author. He is a full professor at Heidelberg University. Biography Markolf Niemz studied physics at Frankfurt University and Heidelberg University, and bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. In 1992, he submitted his PhD thesis on the construction of a pulse compressed Nd:YLF laser to study the plasma-induced ablation of tissue.
Go to Profile#3240
Monica Olvera de la Cruz
#16631
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Monica Olvera de la Cruz is a Mexican born, American and French soft-matter theorist who is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry, and by courtesy Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Chemical and Biological Engineering, at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#3241
Gunther O. Hofmann
#31606
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gunther O. Hofmann is a German surgeon, biophysicist, and professor. Early life and education Gunther O. Hofmann was born in 1957 in Landshut, Bavaria. Hofmann attended medical school and earned a Staatsexamen and a doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Thereafter, he moved to the Technical University Munich, wherefrom he graduated in 1984 with a Dr. rer. nat. in physics.
Go to Profile#3242
Dorin N. Poenaru
#46431
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Dorin Mircea Stelian Poenaru is a Romanian nuclear physicist and engineer. He contributed to the theory of heavy particle radioactivity . Education Poenaru completed his higher education at the Emanuil Gojdu National College in Oradea where in 1953 he received a diploma of merit. After passing the entrance examination, he studied at the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunication of Politehnica University of Bucharest from which he graduated in 1958. In 1971, he received a B.A. in theoretical physics from the University of Bucharest while working in electronic engineering at the Institute of...
Go to Profile#3243
Mikhail Katsnelson
#33264
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Mikhail Iosifovich Katsnelson is a Russian-Dutch professor of theoretical physics. He works at Radboud University Nijmegen where he specializes in theoretical solid state physics and many-body quantum physics. He is one of the most cited scientists in the field of condensed matter physics.
Go to Profile#3244
Joshua A. Frieman
#95427
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Joshua A. Frieman is a theoretical astrophysicist who lives and works in the United States. He is a senior scientist at Fermilab and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Frieman is known for his work studying dark energy and cosmology, and he co-founded the Dark Energy Survey experiment. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#3245
Joseph Ford
#58707
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Joseph Ford was Regents' Professor of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in thermodynamics and chaos theory. Early life and education Born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, he was awarded a BS degree by the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and a Ph.D in physics by Johns Hopkins University in 1956.
Go to Profile#3246
Jonathan L. Rosner
#97261
Overall Influence
#3247
Luigi Arialdo Radicati di Brozolo
#46406
Overall Influence
1919 - 2019 (100 years)
Luigi Arialdo Radicati di Bròzolo was an Italian theoretical physicist Life and career Graduated in Physics at University of Turin in 1943 under Enrico Persico, he started his academic career in 1946 as an assistant professor of Eligio Perucca at the Institute of physics of Politecnico di Torino, where he remained until 1951, when he won a CNR international scholarship as research fellow at University of Birmingham. There, in the research group directed by Rudolf Peierls, he worked from 1951 to 1953, when he went back to Italy. Still Radicati remained constantly in contact with Peierls, inviting him regularly, at the time, as a guest at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.
Go to Profile#3248
Ellen Gould Zweibel
#93543
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ellen Gould Zweibel is an American astrophysicist and plasma physicist. In 1973, Zweibel received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and in 1977 her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University, with a thesis entitled The Equilibrium and Radial Oscillations of Cool Stellar Disks, under the supervision of Jeremiah P. Ostriker. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1977–1978 and then joined the solar physics group of the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In addition, she was from 1980 to 2003 a professor at the University of Colorado.
Go to Profile#3249
Arthur B. C. Walker Jr.
#38701
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Arthur Bertram Cuthbert Walker Jr. was an African-American solar physicist and a pioneer of EUV/XUV optics. He is most noted for having developed normal incidence multilayer XUV telescopes to photograph the solar corona. Two of his sounding rocket payloads, the Stanford/MSFC Rocket Spectroheliograph Experiment and the Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array, recorded the first full-disk, high-resolution images of the Sun in XUV with conventional geometries of normal incidence optics; this technology is now used in solar telescopes such as SOHO/EIT and TRACE, and in the fabrication of microchip...
Go to Profile#3250
John N. Mather
#22423
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
John Norman Mather was a mathematician at Princeton University known for his work on singularity theory and Hamiltonian dynamics. He was descended from Atherton Mather , a cousin of Cotton Mather. His early work dealt with the stability of smooth mappings between smooth manifolds of dimensions n and p . He determined the precise dimensions for which smooth mappings are stable with respect to smooth equivalence by diffeomorphisms of the source and target .
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