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,
#3551
Elmar Zeitler
#49671
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Elmar Zeitler was a German physicist. Academic career After his service within German Luftwaffe and American prisoner of war, Zeitler studied physics in his hometown Würzburg. The advisor of his dissertation "Investigation about the hard component of cosmic rays" was Helmuth Kulenkampff. After working in chemical industry 1954–58, he started to work on the quantitative aspects of electron microscopy during a stay at the Department for Cell Research and Genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm under the direction of Torbjörn Caspersson in 1958. Together with Günter Bahr, he was the first to publish about the determination of molecular weight by using electron microscopy.
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Carroll Alley
#58990
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Carroll Overton Alley, Jr. was an American physicist. He served as the Principal Investigator on the Apollo Program's Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment, which significantly restricted the possible range of spatial variation of the strength of the gravitational interaction. Alley was a PhD student of Robert Henry Dicke.
Go to Profile#3553
Aninda Sinha
#32482
Overall Influence
Aninda Sinha is an Indian theoretical physicist working as a professor at Center for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. Early life and education Sinha finished his schooling from Don Bosco Park Circus, Kolkata. He obtained his B.Sc. From Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 1999, and MA, CASM and PhD from University of Cambridge. Sinha ranked first in B.Sc. and won the Mayhew prize for the part III mathematics degree in University of Cambridge. His PhD advisor was Professor Michael Green. He is a member of the Kandi Raj family and is the son of late Atish Chandra ...
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Walter A. Rosenblith
#50016
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Walter A. Rosenblith was a biophysicist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected to all three National Academies . From 1943 to 1947 Rosenblith was a member of the physics faculty at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota. In 1947, he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory. He joined the MIT faculty in 1951 as an associate professor of communications biophysics in the Department of Electrical Engineering, was tenured in 1957, chair of the faculty from 1967 to 1969, and named Institute Professor in 1975.
Go to Profile#3555
Lev Pavlovich Rapoport
#36976
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Lev Pavlovich Rapoport was well known for his pioneering works in nuclear and atomic theoretical physics. Early work His first works in this field concerned the simplest of atoms, atomic hydrogen, and, more specifically, light scattering from, and two-photon ionization of, hydrogen atoms. His analytical calculations of the cross sections for those processes are now considered classic works, and the methods he used to derive the corresponding formulas have formed the basis of many subsequent theoretical works by researchers both in Russia and abroad.
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Peter Smith
#19066
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peter H. Smith is a professor emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, where he holds the inaugural Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science. He is also the principal investigator for the $420 million robotic explorer Phoenix which landed at the north pole of the planet Mars on May 25, 2008. Peter H. Smith's papers are held at the University of Arizona Special Collections Library.
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Ray Weymann
#67505
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Ray Weymann is a retired astronomer and astrophysicist, associated with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. His PhD is from Princeton University. He is a founder of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a member National Academy of Sciences , and past president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1973-1975.
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Mauri Valtonen
#102329
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Mauri Valtonen is a Finnish astronomer and professor at the University of Turku. His fields of scientific interest include active galaxies, cosmology, and the three-body problem. Valtonen completed a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1975. He served as Director of Tuorla Observatory from 1980 to 2002 and returned to this position again in 2007.
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Bernice Weldon Sargent
#74671
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Bernice Weldon Sargent, was a Canadian physicist who worked at the Manhattan Project's Montreal Laboratory during the Second World War as head of its nuclear physics division. In his 1932 doctoral thesis, he discovered the relationship between the radioactive disintegration constants of beta particle-emitting radioisotopes and corresponding logarithms of their maximum beta particle energies. These plots are known as "Sargent curves".
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Robert Russell Newton
#60704
Overall Influence
1918 - 1991 (73 years)
Robert Russell Newton was an American physicist, astronomer, and historian of science. Newton was Supervisor of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Newton was known for his book The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy . In Newton's view, Ptolemy was "the most successful fraud in the history of science". Newton claimed that Ptolemy had predominantly obtained the astronomical results described in his work The Almagest by computation, and not by the direct observations that Ptolemy described. Distrust of Ptolemy's observations goes back at least as far as doubts raised in the 16th century by Tycho Brahe and in the 18th century by Delambre.
Go to Profile#3561
Ray Mackintosh
#98324
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ray Mackintosh is an emeritus professor of nuclear physics based at the UK's Open University in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. He is co-author of Nucleus, A Trip Into The Heart of Matter . Mackintosh is active in nuclear theory research, has more than 100 publications, and has been involved in publicity activities for the nuclear physics community. He has also authored and presented several television programmes for the Open University on BBC2.
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Timothy M. P. Tait
#82011
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Timothy Maurice Paul Tait is a Canadian-American particle physicist known for his contributions to the theoretical physics and particle physics, particularly in the field of dark matter. He is currently a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.
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Hendrik Schatz
#92787
Overall Influence
Hendrik Schatz is a professor of Nuclear Astrophysics at Michigan State University. He earned his Diploma from the University of Karlsruhe in 1993, and his PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 1997 after completing his thesis work at the University of Notre Dame. He is one of the Principal Investigators for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics and is a leading expert on nuclear astrophysics,. Schatz also serves the science advisory committees for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and GSI. Hendrik's primary field of expertise is Type I X-ray Bursts. His most notable contribution to this field is the discovery of the SnTeSb-cycle.
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Otto Øgrim
#71323
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Johan Otto Øgrim was a Norwegian physicist. Personal life Øgrim was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, as a son of Tobias Immanuel Øgrim , leader of the Salvation Army in Norway, and salvationist Othonie Margrethe Olsen . He spent his childhood years in Kristiania, Bærum and Hamar.
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Tom Marsh
#45959
Overall Influence
1961 - 2022 (61 years)
Thomas Richard Marsh was a highly regarded astronomer and astrophysicist working in the field for four decades, recently specialising in the accretion and evolution of binary star systems. He was awarded the Herschel Medal in 2018 for his development of doppler tomography which he used to study compact binary stars.
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Roberty J. Silbey
#102482
Overall Influence
#3567
J. F. Krishnaswamy Chandrasekaran Greenleaf
#102489
Overall Influence
#3568
Reinhard Lipowsky
#102494
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#3569
Aaron Parsons
#93309
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Aaron R. Parsons is an American astrophysicist who works primarily in the fields of radio astronomy instrumentation and experimental cosmology. Biography Parsons was born in 1980. He grew up in Rangely, Colorado and graduated simultaneously from high school and from Colorado Northwestern Community College with an AS degree in 1998. He majored in physics and mathematics at Harvard University, and graduated with a BA in 2002. After working as a development engineer at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab from 2002 to 2004, Parsons entered graduate school at the University of California, Berkel...
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Robert U Newton
#102580
Overall Influence
#3571
Hans Adolf Buchdahl
#84764
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Hans Adolf Buchdahl was a German-born Australian physicist. He contributed to general relativity, thermodynamics and optics. He is particularly known for developing f gravity and Buchdahl's theorem on the Schwarzschild's solution for the inside of a spherical star.
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José W. F. Valle
#90244
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
José W. F. Valle is a Spanish-Brazilian physicist. Biography Born in Brazil, he earned a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Syracuse University . In January 1983 he joined the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, UK, as a Research Associate, where he got married with a Spanish geneticist. In 1986 he moved to Spain, joining as a visiting professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and subsequently IFIC at the University of Valencia in 1987. He is a Full Professor at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research CSIC. He is known for his numerous contributions to theoretical astr...
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Barth Netterfield
#77146
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Calvin Barth Netterfield , known as Barth Netterfield, is a Canadian astrophysicist, and a Professor in the Department of Astronomy and the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. He is a leading expert in the development of balloon-borne telescopes. These are astrophysical experiments that are lifted into the stratosphere by high-altitude balloons where they conduct observations that would be hindered by atmospheric interference if done on the ground. Netterfield is primarily known for his work in observational cosmology, specifically in developing instrumentation to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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Donald Ginsberg
#93608
Overall Influence
1933 - 2007 (74 years)
Donald Maurice Ginsberg was an American physicist and expert on superconductors. Born in Chicago, Ginsberg attended the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1952, a Bachelor of Science in 1955, and a Master of Science in 1956. He then earned his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1959 to 1996 and in 1998 he won the American Physical Society's Oliver E. Buckley Prize for his work on high temperature superconductivity. This is the highest award in condensed matter physics and a great honor for humble Ginsberg.
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Surya Ganguli
#65504
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Surya Ganguli is a university professor at Stanford University and a visiting research professor at Google. Ganguli is primarily known for his work on neural networks and deep learning, although he has also published papers on theoretical physics. He presently runs the Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab at Stanford, where he aims to reverse engineer how networks of neurons and synapses cooperate across multiple scales of space and time to facilitate sensory perception, motor control, memory, and other cognitive functions. He is also known for being a prolific public speaker and lecturer, hav...
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Helmut Ormestad
#83053
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Helmut Ormestad was a Norwegian physicist and researcher at the University of Oslo, specializing in acoustics. In 1983 he was awarded the Cappelen Prize, for co-writing the physics textbook series Rom Stoff Tid with Otto Øgrim and Kåre Lunde.
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Steen Rasmussen
#32367
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Steen Rasmussen is a Danish physicist mainly working in the areas of artificial life and complex systems. He is currently a professor in physics and a center director at University of Southern Denmark as well as an external research professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His formal training was at the Technical University of Denmark and University of Copenhagen . He spent 20 years as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory the last five years as a leader of the Self-Organized Systems team. He has been part of the Santa Fe Institute since 1988.
Go to Profile#3578
Lutz Bornmann
#102692
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
#3579
Jacek K. Furdyna
#102694
Overall Influence
#3580
Robyn Millan
#86183
Overall Influence
Robyn M. Millan is an American experimental physicist, best known for her work on radiation belts that surround the Earth. Education Millan received a B.A. in Astronomy and Physics , a M.A. in Physics , and a Ph.D. in Physics , all from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3581
Giuseppe Arcidiacono
#52181
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Giuseppe Arcidiacono was an Italian physicist, born in Acireale. He earned his degree in physics at the University of Catania in 1951. Arcidiacono was mathematician Luigi Fantappiè's main disciple. Together they worked on what they called projective relativity at the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica in Rome.
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Suzanne Imber
#81689
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Suzanne Mary Imber is a British planetary scientist specialising in space weather at the University of Leicester. She was the winner of the 2017 BBC Two television programme Astronauts, Do You Have What It Takes?.
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Norman Wolmark
#102831
Overall Influence
#3584
Patricia McBride
#88958
Overall Influence
Patricia McBride is an American particle physicist working with the CMS collaboration at the LHC. On February 9, 2022, she was elected Spokesperson for CMS starting Fall 2022. Patricia studied physics in college at Carnegie Mellon. She received her PhD from Yale University and did a postdoc at Harvard University. She started working at Fermilab in 1994 where she participated in many experiments and had various leadership roles. Patricia has been a part of the CMS collaboration since 2005, working as head of the CMS Center at Fermilab from 2012 to 2013 and, later, as U.S. CMS operations program manager.
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Laszlo B. Kish
#38016
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Laszlo Bela Kish is a physicist and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. His activities include a wide range of issues surrounding the physics and technical applications of stochastic fluctuations in physical, biological and technological systems, including nanotechnology. His earlier long-term positions include the Department of Experimental Physics, University of Szeged, Hungary , and Angstrom Laboratory, Uppsala University, Sweden . During the same periods he had also conducted scientific research in short-term positions, such as at the Eindhoven Uni...
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Kathryn Huff
#58687
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Kathryn D. Huff is an American engineer serving as the assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy. In January 2022, she was nominated to the position. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 5, 2022 by a 80–11 vote and sworn in on May 11, 2022.
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Philip Quirke
#102865
Overall Influence
#3588
Sjors Scheres
#66907
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Sjors Hendrik Willem Scheres FRS is a Dutch scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, UK. Education Scheres studied Chemistry at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and spent nine months at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France for his undergraduate research thesis. He then came back to Utrecht University for his DPhil in Protein Crystallography, which was supervised by Piet Gros.
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Duncan Lorimer
#98371
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Duncan R. Lorimer is a British-born American astrophysicist. He is a professor of astronomy at West Virginia University, known for the discovery of the first fast radio burst in 2007. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester, and later held appointments at University of Manchester ; the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy ; Cornell University ; University of Manchester and West Virginia University .
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Thomas Eugene Everhart
#44994
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Thomas Eugene Everhart FREng is an American educator and physicist. His area of expertise is the physics of electron beams. Together with Richard F. M. Thornley he designed the Everhart–Thornley detector. These detectors are still in use in scanning electron microscopes, even though the first such detector was made available as early as 1956.
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William C. Davidon
#42174
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
William Cooper Davidon was an American professor of physics and mathematics, and a peace activist. As the mastermind of the March 8, 1971, FBI office break-in, in Media, Pennsylvania, Davidon was the informal leader of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. The Media break-in resulted in the disclosure of COINTELPRO, which in turn led to subsequent investigations and reforms of the FBI.
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Aden Meinel
#60675
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Aden B. Meinel was an American astronomer. He retired in 1993 as a distinguished scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He also held the rank of professor emeritus at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences. His research interests have included upper atmospheric physics, glass technology, optical design, instrumentation and space systems.
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Brian Wecht
#71475
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Brian Alexander Wecht, also known by his character name Ninja Brian, is an American musician, Internet personality and theoretical physicist. He is best known as a member of comedy musical duo Ninja Sex Party and video game-based comedy music trio Starbomb. He has also been a past member of the affiliated Let's Play webseries Game Grumps, all three alongside Dan Avidan.
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Nina Marković
#45119
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nina Marković is a Croatian-American physicist. Her work focuses on quantum transport in low-dimensional systems, superconductivity, nanostructures, and quantum computing. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2004. Marković worked at Delft University of Technology, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the Goucher College Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2015.
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N. Peter Armitage
#76117
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
N. Peter Armitage is an American physicist who is currently a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on understanding material systems which exhibit coherent quantum effects at low temperatures, like superconductors and quantum magnetism. His principal scientific interest is understanding how is it that large ensembles of strongly interacting, but fundamentally simple particles like electrons in solids act collectively to exhibit complex emergent quantum phenomena. He exploits and develops techniques using low frequency microwave and THz range radiation that probe these systems at their natural frequency scales.
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Paul Goldbart
#66930
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Paul Mark Goldbart is a physicist and author, and was the first director of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research ranges widely over the field of condensed matter physics, including soft matter, disordered systems, nanoscience and superconductivity. Goldbart was provost of Stony Brook University from March 2021 until January 2022. Prior to that he had served as dean of the college of natural sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, Dean of the College of Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and as the direct...
Go to Profile#3597
Ue-Li Pen
#88780
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Ue-Li Pen is a Canadian astrophysicist, cosmologist, and computational physicist. Education and career Born in Germany to Taiwanese parents, Ue-Li Pen at age 13 moved with his parents to Canada. He received in 1989 B.Sc. in mathematics from National Taiwan University, in 1991 M.Sc. in physics from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, and in 1996 Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University with thesis Numerical Studies of Gasdynamics in Cluster of Galaxies under the supervision of Jeremiah P. Ostriker.
Go to Profile#3598
Martin Wegener
#103021
Overall Influence
#3599
Neil S. Sullivan
#87601
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Neil S. Sullivan is a professor of physics at the University of Florida. He attended Otago University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1964 followed by a Master of Science in 1965. In 1972, he obtained his PhD from Harvard University with the thesis Nuclear Magnetism of Solid Hydrogen at Low Temperatures.
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Erika Hamden
#77763
Overall Influence
Erika Tobiason Hamden is an American astrophysicist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution. She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium . She is a 2019 TED fellow.
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