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,
#351
Asher Peres
#4428
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
Asher Peres was an Israeli physicist. He is well known for his work relating quantum mechanics and information theory. He helped to develop the Peres–Horodecki criterion for quantum entanglement, as well as the concept of quantum teleportation, and collaborated with others on quantum information and special relativity. He also introduced the Peres metric and researched the Hamilton–Jacobi–Einstein equation in general relativity. With Mario Feingold, he published work in quantum chaos that is known to mathematicians as the Feingold–Peres conjecture and to physicists as the Feingold–Peres theor...
Go to Profile#352
Gordon L. Kane
#10717
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Gordon Leon Kane is Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan and director emeritus at the Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics , a leading center for the advancement of theoretical physics. He was director of the LCTP from 2005 to 2011 and Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics from 2002 - 2011. He received the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society in 2012, and the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2017.
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Yousef Sobouti
#5837
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Yousef Sobouti is a contemporary Iranian astrophysicist, theoretical physicist. Biography He got his undergraduate degree from Tehran University. In 1960 he received his MSc degree in physics from University of Toronto.
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Michael D. Griffin
#1583
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Douglas Griffin is an American physicist and aerospace engineer who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from 2018 to 2020. He previously served as Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and as Administrator of NASA from April 13, 2005, to January 20, 2009. As NASA Administrator Griffin oversaw such areas as private spaceflight, future human spaceflight to Mars, and the fate of the Hubble telescope.
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Michael Dine
#11113
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Michael Dine is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics, supersymmetry, string theory, and physics beyond the Standard Model. Education and career Dine received in 1974 a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and in 1978 a Ph.D. under Thomas Appelquist from Yale University with thesis Interactions of Heavy Quarks in Quantum Chromodynamics. He did research at SLAC and was for a number of years at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Henry Semat Professor at City College of New York. He is currently a professor at Santa Cruz Institute for Par...
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Michael Green
#5281
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael Boris Green is a British physicist and a pioneer of string theory. He is a Professor of Theoretical Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, emeritus professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 2009 to 2015.
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Klaus von Klitzing
#2739
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Klaus von Klitzing is a German physicist, known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics. Education In 1962, Klitzing passed the Abitur at the Artland-Gymnasium in Quakenbrück, Germany, before studying physics at the Braunschweig University of Technology, where he received his diploma in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Würzburg at the chair of Gottfried Landwehr, completing his PhD thesis entitled Galvanomagnetic Properties of Tellurium in Strong Magnetic Fields in 1972, and gaining habilitation in 1978.
Go to Profile#358
Llewellyn Thomas
#3257
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas was a British physicist and applied mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to atomic and molecular physics and solid-state physics. His key achievements include calculating relativistic effects on the spin-orbit interaction in a hydrogen atom
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Eric W. Weisstein
#3034
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Eric Wolfgang Weisstein is an American mathematician and encyclopedist who created and maintains the encyclopedias MathWorld and ScienceWorld. In addition, he is the author of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. He works for Wolfram Research.
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Daniel C. Tsui
#2736
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Daniel Chee Tsui is a Chinese-born American physicist. He is currently serves as the Professor of Electrical Engineering, emeritus, at Princeton University. Tsui's areas of research include electrical properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid-state physics.
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Sandra Faber
#9713
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
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Carlos Frenk
#9716
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Carlos Silvestre Frenk is a Mexican-British cosmologist. Frenk graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Cambridge, and spent his early research career in the United States, before settling permanently in the United Kingdom. He joined the Durham University Department of Physics in 1986 and since 2001 has served as the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University.
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Norris Bradbury
#3818
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Norris Edwin Bradbury , was an American physicist who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bradbury was in charge of the final assembly of "the Gadget", detonated in July 1945 for the Trinity test.
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Dimitar Sasselov
#15240
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Dimitar D. Sasselov is a Bulgarian astronomer based in the United States. He is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. In 2002, Sasselov led a team that discovered the most distant planet in the Milky Way known at the time.
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Martin Lewis Perl
#4799
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Martin Lewis Perl was an American chemical engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton. Life and career Perl was born in New York City, New York. His parents, Fay , a secretary and bookkeeper, and Oscar Perl, a stationery salesman who founded a printing and advertising company, were Jewish immigrants to the US from the Polish area of Russia.
Go to Profile#366
Yasunori Nomura
#13802
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Yasunori Nomura is a theoretical physicist working on particle physics, quantum gravity, and cosmology. He is a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a senior research scientist at Riken, and an affiliate member at Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. Since 2015, he has been the director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.
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Peter van Nieuwenhuizen
#6124
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen is a Dutch theoretical physicist. He is a distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University in the United States. Widely known for his contributions to String theory, Supersymmetry, Supergravity and Field theory.
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Igor Klebanov
#9309
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Igor R. Klebanov is an American theoretical physicist. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
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Jeremy Bernstein
#4346
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Jeremy Bernstein is an American theoretical physicist and popular science writer. Early life Bernstein's parents, Philip S. Bernstein, a Reform rabbi, and Sophie Rubin Bernstein named him after the biblical Jeremiah, the subject of his father's masters thesis. Philip's parents were immigrants from Lithuania, while Sophie was of Russian-Jewish descent. The family moved from Rochester to New York City during World War II, when his father became head of all the Jewish chaplains in the armed forces.
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Eric Allin Cornell
#4745
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Eric Allin Cornell is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, was able to synthesize the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. For their efforts, Cornell, Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.
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David Goodstein
#6447
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Louis Goodstein is an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology , where he is also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
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Asghar Qadir
#3754
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Asghar Qadir HI, SI, FPAS, is a Pakistani mathematician and a prominent cosmologist, specialised in mathematical physics and physical cosmology. Nowadays, he is widely considered one of the top mathematicians in Pakistan. Asghar has played a prominent role in promoting Relativity in Pakistan. To this day, Qadir has made important and significant contributions to the fields of differential equations, theoretical cosmology and mathematical physics. He is noted for his work in mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology.
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John N. Bahcall
#8317
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
John Norris Bahcall was an American astrophysicist and the Richard Black Professor for Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was known for a wide range of contributions to solar, galactic and extragalactic astrophysics, including the solar neutrino problem, the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and for his leadership and development of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
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Raphael Bousso
#7887
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Raphael Bousso is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is a professor at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics in the Department of Physics, UC Berkeley. He is known for the Bousso bound on the information content of the universe. With Joseph Polchinski, Bousso proposed the string theory landscape as a solution to the cosmological constant problem.
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Willibald Jentschke
#9324
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Willibald Jentschke was an Austrian-German experimental nuclear physicist. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project. After World War II, he emigrated to the United States to work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, for the Air Force Materiel Command. In 1950, he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he became director of the Cyclotron Laboratory there in 1951.
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Shuji Nakamura
#1988
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#377
Alan Lightman
#5338
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alan Paige Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently a professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
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Gerard K. O'Neill
#3514
Overall Influence
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill was an American physicist and space activist. As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments. Later, he invented a magnetic launcher called the mass driver. In the 1970s, he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space, including a space habitat design known as the O'Neill cylinder. He founded the Space Studies Institute, an organization devoted to funding research into space manufacturing and colonization.
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Paul Ginsparg
#3260
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paul Henry Ginsparg is an American physicist. He developed the arXiv.org e-print archive. Education He is a graduate of Syosset High School in Syosset, New York. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in physics and from Cornell University with a PhD in theoretical particle physics with a thesis titled Aspects of Symmetry Behavior in Quantum Field Theory.
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Mehdi Golshani
#4989
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Mehdi Golshani is a contemporary Iranian theoretical physicist, academic, scholar, philosopher and distinguished professor at Sharif University of Technology. He is also member of Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame, senior fellow of Academy of Sciences of Iran and a founding fellow of the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. He is a former member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution.
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Zdeněk Kopal
#12589
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
Zdeněk Kopal was a Czechoslovak astronomer who mainly worked in England. Kopal was born and grew up in Litomyšl . In his early astronomical career, he studied variable stars and in particular close eclipsing binary stars. He attended Cambridge University in 1938 and later that year he went to Harvard College Observatory. After the war he became head of the astronomy department at the University of Manchester. He later assisted NASA with the Apollo program as an external expert.
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Daniel Friedan
#6825
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Daniel Harry Friedan is an American theoretical physicist and one of three children of the feminist author and activist Betty Friedan. He is a professor at Rutgers University. Biography Education and career Friedan earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1987.
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Maurice Goldhaber
#8916
Overall Influence
1911 - 2011 (100 years)
Maurice Goldhaber was an American physicist, who in 1957 established that neutrinos have negative helicity. Early life and childhood He was born on April 18, 1911, in Lemberg, Austria, now called Lviv, Ukraine to a Jewish family. His son Alfred Goldhaber is a professor at the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at SUNY Stony Brook. His grandson, David Goldhaber-Gordon is a Physics Professor at Stanford University.
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Roger Blandford
#15058
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Roger David Blandford, FRS, FRAS is a British theoretical astrophysicist, best known for his work on black holes. Early life Blandford was born in Grantham, England and grew up in Birmingham. Career Blandford is famous in the astrophysical community for the Blandford–Znajek process, which is a mechanism for powering relativistic jets by the extraction of rotational energy from a black hole. The Blandford–Znajek mechanism has been invoked by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to explain the jet power in the first observation of a black hole shadow in the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Bla...
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Sabine Hossenfelder
#9286
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Areas of Specialization: Theorectical Physics, Quantum Gravity Sabine Hossenfelder is currently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and heads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group. She was previously a professor at Nordita in Stockholm, Sweden, and has held fellowships at University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona. Hossenfelder completed her BS in mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany in 1997, and stayed there for her MS and PhD studies in theoretical physics, completed in 2003. Hossenfelder is well known as a promine...
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Albert-László Barabási
#2055
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Albert-László Barabási is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist, best known for his discoveries in network science and network medicine. He is a distinguished university professor and Robert Gray Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, and holds appointments at the department of medicine, Harvard Medical School and the department of network and data science at Central European University. He is the former Emil T. Hofmann Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame and former associate member of the Center of Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer In...
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Giuseppe Cocconi
#13713
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
Giuseppe Cocconi was an Italian physicist who was director of the Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva. He is known for his work in particle physics and for his involvement with SETI where he wrote, "[t]he probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."
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Duncan Haldane
#7626
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane , known as F. Duncan Haldane, is a British-born physicist who is currently the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He is a co-recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz.
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Robert B. Leighton
#7074
Overall Influence
1919 - 1997 (78 years)
Robert Benjamin Leighton was a prominent American experimental physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology . His work over the years spanned solid state physics, cosmic ray physics, the beginnings of modern particle physics, solar physics, the planets, infrared astronomy, and millimeter- and submillimeter-wave astronomy. In the latter four fields, his pioneering work opened up entirely new areas of research that subsequently developed into vigorous scientific communities.
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Robert Mills
#6503
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Robert Laurence Mills was an American physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Chen-Ning Yang and Robert Mills formulated in 1954 a theory now known as the Yang–Mills theory – "the foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics."
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George E. Smith
#2485
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
George Elwood Smith is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device . He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor, which has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography".
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Jim Al-Khalili
#2378
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster. He is professor of theoretical physics and chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is a regular broadcaster and presenter of science programmes on BBC radio and television, and a frequent commentator about science in other British media.
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Chris Lintott
#9272
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Christopher John Lintott is a British astrophysicist, author and broadcaster. He is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and since 2023 is the Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. Lintott is involved in a number of popular science projects aimed at bringing astronomy to a wider audience and is also the primary presenter of the BBC television series The Sky at Night, having previously been co-presenter with Patrick Moore until Moore's death in 2012. He co-authored Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe and The Cosmic...
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John Hopfield
#581
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
John Joseph Hopfield is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network. Biography Hopfield was born in 1933 to Polish physicist John Joseph Hopfield and physicist Helen Hopfield. Helen was the older Hopfield's second wife. He is the sixth of Hopfield's children and has three children and six grandchildren of his own.
Go to Profile#395
Jearl Walker
#12921
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jearl Dalton Walker is a physicist noted for his book The Flying Circus of Physics, first published in 1975; the second edition was published in June 2006. He teaches physics at Cleveland State University.
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Lev Lipatov
#13712
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Lev Nikolaevich Lipatov was a Russian physicist, well known for his contributions to nuclear physics and particle physics. He has been the head of Theoretical Physics Division at St. Petersburg's Nuclear Physics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences in Gatchina and an Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Bruno Zumino
#5551
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Bruno Zumino was an Italian theoretical physicist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his DSc degree from the University of Rome in 1945. He was renowned for his rigorous proof of the CPT theorem with Gerhart Lüders; his pioneering systematization of effective chiral Lagrangians; the discoveries, with Julius Wess, of the Wess–Zumino model, the first four-dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theory with Bose-Fermi degeneracy, and initiator of the field of supersymmetric radiative restrictions; a concise formulation of supergravity; and for his deci...
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H. Dieter Zeh
#12550
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Heinz-Dieter Zeh , usually referred to as H. Dieter Zeh, was a professor of the University of Heidelberg and theoretical physicist. Education and career Zeh was born in Braunschweig and studied physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig and nuclear physics at the University of Heidelberg under J. Hans D. Jensen. At Heidelberg, he also investigated alpha particle formation in nuclei with Hans-Jörg Mang and Zeh investigated the topic for his PhD thesis under Mang. Between 1964 and 1965, Zeh was a research assistant at California Institute of Technology and in 1965 and between 1967 and 1968 at the University of California, San Diego.
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Michael S. Turner
#15859
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael S. Turner is an American theoretical cosmologist who coined the term dark energy in 1998. He is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Chicago, having previously served as the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, and as the assistant director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation.
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Clyde Tombaugh
#4021
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Clyde William Tombaugh was an American astronomer. He discovered Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt. At the time of discovery, Pluto was considered a planet, but was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids, and called for the serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects.
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