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,
#3951
Nancy Makri
#67653
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Nancy Makri is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is the principal investigator of the Makri Research Group for the theoretical understanding of condensed phase quantum dynamics. She studies theoretical quantum dynamics of polyatomic systems, and has developed methods for long-time numerical path integral simulations of quantum dissipative systems.
Go to Profile#3952
Richard P. Binzel
#34023
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Richard "Rick" P. Binzel is an American astronomer and professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is a discoverer of minor planets, photometrist and the inventor of the Torino Scale, a method for categorizing the impact hazard associated with near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets. He is also a frequent trip leader for the MIT Alumni Association.
Go to Profile#3953
Stephan Herminghaus
#104037
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Stephan Herminghaus is a German physicist. He received a PhD in Physics from the University of Mainz in 1989. His postdoctoral stay was at the IBM Research Center in San Jose, California , in 1990 . He completed his habilitation at the University of Konstanz in 1994 and was the head of an independent research group at the MPI for Colloids and Interfaces, Berlin, from 1996 until 1999. He then became a full professor at the University of Ulm from 1999 until 2003. Since 2003, he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen. Since 2005, he has an additional appointment as an adjunct professor at the University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#3954
Sudhansu Datta Majumdar
#55146
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
Sudhansu Datta Majumdar was an Indian physicist, and faculty member of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Biography Born in 1915 in Sylhet , Sudhansu Datta Majumdar had his education in Sylhet; Presidency College, Calcutta, and University College of Science also called Rajabazar Science College, Calcutta University. In an academic career spanning several decades, he served in different capacities in various institutions. Beginning with a stint in the Palit Laboratory of Physics, Rajabazar Science College, Calcutta University, from where he wrote the now famous Majumdar–Papapetrou paper, he was appointed Lecturer in Physics in Calcutta University in 1951.
Go to Profile#3955
Dmitri Ryutov
#108965
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Ryutov is a Russian theoretical plasma physicist. Early life and career Ryutov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1962 and from the Kurchatov Institute in 1965, where he received his doctorate in plasma theory in 1966. From 1968 to 1997, he was at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, where he expanded the fusion research program from 1979 and was promoted from deputy director to chief scientist in 1994. He was also a professor of plasma physics at the Novosibirsk State University. From 1994, he was a senior visiting scientis...
Go to Profile#3956
Ondrej Krivanek
#74603
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ondrej L. Krivanek is a Czech/British physicist resident in the United States, and a leading developer of electron-optical instrumentation. He won the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience in 2020 for his substantial innovations in atomic resolution electron microscopy.
Go to Profile#3957
Sushanta Kumar Dattagupta
#68249
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sushanta Kumar Dattagupta, known better as Sushanta Dattagupta, is an Indian condensed matter physicist. He was Director of the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences Kolkata between 1999 and 2005 and then he was appointed Program Co-ordinator by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development for the newly evolving system of Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research . Subsequently, in 2006 he was made the founding director of IISER Kolkata. After serving one full term there the same ministry of HRD made him the Vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati, which is served between Septemb...
Go to Profile#3958
Clifford S. Patlak
#109547
Overall Influence
#3959
Maurice Lévy
#46269
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Maurice Marc Lévy was a French physicist and teacher. He was president of the CNES from 1973 to 1976. Education Maurice Lévy obtained his Baccalauréat at the Lycée Bugeaud in Algiers and then graduated in mathematics and physics from the University of Algiers. He then obtained a graduate degree in optics and entered the CNRS in 1945. He left Algeria for France and joined the Physical Research Laboratory of the Sorbonne , directed by Jean Cabannes. After a brief stay at the University of Leiden, he defended his thesis in 1949 under the supervision of Jean Cabannes. Louis de Broglie partici...
Go to Profile#3960
Karen Masters
#95758
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Karen Masters is an Astrophysicist and Associate Professor of Astrophysics in Haverford College, Pennsylvania exploring galaxy formation. She is also the project scientist for the citizen science project Galaxy Zoo, and uses the classifications to study the evolution of galaxies.
Go to Profile#3961
Daniel Branton
#109583
Overall Influence
#3962
Joshua N. Winn
#109612
Overall Influence
#3963
James H. Woodward
#51028
Overall Influence
Dr. James Woodward is an aeronautical engineer, professor, and past chancellor of University of North Carolina at Charlotte. James Woodward was born in Sanford, Florida and grew up in Columbus, Georgia. He married his childhood sweetheart at the age of sixteen. Shortly after he graduated from high school and attended Auburn University. He decided he wanted to be an Aeronautical Engineer, so he enrolled in the School of Aeronautics at Georgia Tech where he graduated first in his class in 1961. He received his master's degree in 1962 and his PhD in engineering mechanics in 1967. Upon receiving h...
Go to Profile#3964
Manuella Vincter
#85957
Overall Influence
Manuella Vincter is a professor in the Department of Physics at Carleton University. She is the deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Career Vincter earned her B.Sc. in 1990 from McGill University, her M.Sc. in 1993 and her PhD in 1996, both at the University of Victoria. Her PhD thesis was on the precision measurement of the ratio of vector to axial-vector coupling of the weak force, which she conducted at the LEP collider at CERN as a member of the OPAL Experiment. She then joined the faculty at the University of Alberta, where she worked on the HERMES experiment at the DESY laboratory and also joined the ATLAS collaboration.
Go to Profile#3965
Alfred Hübler
#43381
Overall Influence
1957 - 2018 (61 years)
Alfred Wilhelm Hübler was a German-born research physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory as well as a tenured faculty member in the University of Illinois Department of Physics. He was the director of the Center for Complex Systems Research and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.
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Albert George Wilson
#49142
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
Albert George Wilson was an American astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets. He was born in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech in 1947; his thesis title was Axially Symmetric Thermal Stresses in a Semi-Infinite Solid advised by Harry Bateman.
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Martin Aeschlimann
#95422
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Martin Aeschlimann is a Swiss physicist and professor in the physics department of the University of Kaiserslautern. Since 2008 he is the spokesman of the State Research Center for Optics and Material Sciences .
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Sylvain Arend
#60946
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Sylvain Julien Victor Arend was a Belgian astronomer born in Robelmont, Luxembourg province, Belgium. His main interest was astrometry. Together with Georges Roland, he discovered the bright comet C/1956 R1 . He also discovered, or co-discovered, the periodic comets 49P/Arend-Rigaux and 50P/Arend, Nova Scuti 1952, and a number of asteroids, including notably the Amor asteroid 1916 Boreas and the Trojan asteroid 1583 Antilochus. He also discovered 1652 Hergé which is named after Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin. The asteroid 1563 Noël is named after his son, Emanuel Arend.
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Vojtěch Petráček
#65993
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Vojtěch Petráček is a Czech nuclear physicist and University Lecturer. Since February 2018, He has also been the rector of the Czech Technical University in Prague in Prague. Education After attending the Nad Štolou Grammar School in the Letnány, Petráček studied mathematics and physics from 1982 at the Charles University, obtaining a doctorate in 1987.
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Ajoy Roy
#31487
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Ajoy Roy was a Bangladeshi professor of physics at the University of Dhaka, but was best known for his prominent role in Bangladesh's human rights activism and freethinking. He was one of the eminent educationists promoting secular humanism in Bangladesh.
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Emlyn Rhoderick
#85484
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Emlyn Huw Rhoderick was a Welsh physicist and academic, who spent 33 years as professor of solid-state electronics at the Manchester College of Science and Technology . Life Rhoderick was born in Pontypridd, south Wales on 29 September 1920. He was educated at Cowbridge Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford, obtaining first-class honours in natural science , having studied mathematics in his first year at the university on the advice of his tutor. Before studying nuclear physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he worked at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment during the Second World War on coastal defence radar.
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Edward M. Sion
#99090
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Edward M Sion is an American astrophysicist who is Professor in the Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Science at Villanova University. He specializes on the structure and evolution of white dwarf stars and white dwarf stars in explosive binary star systems known as cataclysmic variables.
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Thomas Garm Pedersen
#97720
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Thomas Garm Pedersen is a Danish professor in physics and nanotechnology at Aalborg University. His research concerns the nanostructure of materials. Pedersen's research has resulted in a large research project regarding the development of more efficient solar power cells with silicon-based materials and nanostructures.
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Roger G. Newton
#65600
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Roger Gerhard Newton was a German-born American physicist. Newton was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Weimar Germany on November 30, 1924, to parents Margaret Blume and Arthur Newton, a dentist. Because of their Jewish heritage, Newton's family was targeted by the Gestapo. Though Newton enrolled at the University of Berlin, he and his family moved to Buffalo, New York after World War II. After serving in the United States Army, he applied to various American universities, intending to study physics. Receiving an encouraging reply by John U. Monro at Harvard University, he submitted letters ...
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Nicolaas Berend Ing Westerhof
#109723
Overall Influence
#3976
Howard Carmichael
#48449
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Howard John Carmichael is a British-born New Zealand theoretical physicist specialising in quantum optics and the theory of open quantum systems. He is the Dan Walls Professor of Physics at the University of Auckland and a principal investigator of the Dodd-Walls Centre. Carmichael has played a role in the development of the field of quantum optics and is particularly known for his Quantum Trajectory Theory which offers a more detailed view of quantum behaviour by making predictions of single events happening to individual quantum systems. Carmichael works with experimental groups around the...
Go to Profile#3977
Wei-Kan Chu
#35840
Overall Influence
Wei-Kan Chu is an American physicist, an expert in ion beam interaction with solid, currently the Cullen University Professor and distinguished university professor at the University of Houston and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#3978
Rod Davies
#67342
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Rodney Deane Davies CBE FRS was a Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester. He was the President of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1987–1989, and the Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory in 1988–97. He is best known for his research on the Cosmic microwave background and the 21cm line.
Go to Profile#3979
Ashesh Prosad Mitra
#55265
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Ashesh Prosad Mitra FNA, FASc, FRS was a physicist who headed the National Physics Laboratory in Delhi, India and was the Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research . He is primarily known for his work on environmental physics.
Go to Profile#3980
Ghassan Andoni
#43307
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ghassan Andoni is a Palestinian activist. Born in Beit Sahour to a Palestinian Christian family, he is a professor of physics at Bir Zeit University and he advocates nonviolent resistance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Go to Profile#3981
Paul Sigler
#71161
Overall Influence
1934 - 2000 (66 years)
Paul B. Sigler was the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. Major awards included membership in the National Academy of Sciences, HHMI Investigator status, and Guggenheim and Helen Hay Whitney Fellowships. He is noted for pioneering studies of Phospholipase A2 and trp repressor amongst many others.
Go to Profile#3982
Yasuhiro Matsumura
#109803
Overall Influence
#3983
Klaus Fredenhagen
#61426
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Klaus Fredenhagen is a German theoretical physicist who works on the mathematical foundations of quantum field theory. Biography Klaus Fredenhagen was born on 1 December 1947 in Celle, a German city in Lower Saxony. He graduated in 1976 from the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Gert Roepstorff and Rudolf Haag. In 1985 he became a privatdozent and in 1990 a full professor at the second theory institute of the Hamburg University. Since 2013 he has been a professor emeritus and has continued to be active in research.
Go to Profile#3984
J. Doyne Farmer
#97134
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
J. Doyne Farmer is an American complex systems scientist and entrepreneur with interests in chaos theory, complexity and econophysics. He is Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University, where he is also director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. Additionally he is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His current research is on complexity economics, focusing on systemic risk in financial markets and technological progress. D...
Go to Profile#3985
Yuanbo Zhang
#57958
Overall Influence
Yuanbo Zhang is a condensed matter physicist and a professor of physics at Fudan University. He is known for his work on the electronic properties of low-dimensional systems. Education and Career He studied physics at Peking University and earned his bachelor's degree in 2000, and a doctorate at Columbia University in 2006 under the supervision of Philip Kim, they work on graphene almost at the same time with Geim and Novoselov. Zhang worked at the University of California, Berkeley as a Miller Research Fellow until 2009, when he joined the faculty at Fudan University. He joined the faculty at...
Go to Profile#3986
Terry Wyatt
#75501
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Terence Richard Wyatt is a Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, UK. Education Wyatt was educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Tamworth, Imperial College London and St Edmund Hall, Oxford where he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1983 for research supervised by Robin Devenish at the University of Oxford.
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Matt Taylor
#39493
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Matthew Graham George Thaddeus Taylor is a British astrophysicist employed by the European Space Agency. He is best known to the public for his involvement in the landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by the Rosetta mission 's Philae lander, which was the first spacecraft to land on a comet nucleus. He is Project Scientist of the Rosetta mission.
Go to Profile#3988
Markus Aspelmeyer
#80560
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Markus Aspelmeyer is an Austrian quantum physicist. Aspelmeyer was born 1974 in the Bavarian town Schongau. He also attended the local school, where he received his abitur in 1993. He studied physics and philosophy at the University of Munich, receiving his BS in philosophy and his Ph.D in physics in 2002. He joined the group of Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna in 2002 with a Feodor Lynen PostDoctoral Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He became Universitätsassistent at the University and then, Junior, later Senior Researcher, at the Institute for Quantum Optics an...
Go to Profile#3989
Rong Gen Cai
#109933
Overall Influence
#3990
V. Sasisekharan
#23605
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Viswanathan Sasisekharan is an Indian biophysicist known for his work on the structure and conformation of biopolymers. He introduced the use of torsion angles to describe polypeptide and protein conformation, a central principle of the plot . Additionally, he was the first to introduce alternative models of DNA structure that provided insights beyond the standard double helix model. For his contributions to the biological sciences, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of India’s highest science awards, in 1978.
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Chris H. Greene
#106595
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Chris H. Greene is an American physicist and the Albert Overhauser Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.
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Sergio Doplicher
#51090
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sergio Doplicher is an Italian mathematical physicist, who mainly dealt with the mathematical foundations of quantum field theory and quantum gravity. Biography Sergio Doplicher graduated in Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1963 under the supervision of Giovanni Jona-Lasinio. From 1976 to 2011 he was full professor of quantum mechanics in the mathematics department of Sapienza University, retiring there in 2011 as professor emeritus.
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Brian Keith Tanner
#76065
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Brian Keith Tanner CPhys, FRSA, FInstP, FHEA is a British physicist, currently Emeritus Professor of Physics and former Dean of Knowledge Transfer at Durham University. Early life Brian Tanner grew up in Northamptonshire, attending Wellingborough Grammar School. He studied undergraduate physics at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he went on to graduate with a DPhil in 1971 on 'X-ray diffraction topography; methods and applications'.
Go to Profile#3994
Jagadeesh Moodera
#46190
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jagadeesh Subbaiah Moodera is an American physicist of Indian origin and is senior research scientist at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. In 1994 together with the MIT research team led by P.M. Tedrow and R. Meservey, they showed a practical way to implement room temperature magnetic tunnel junction using a magnetic stack based on CoFe–Al2O3–Co, demonstrating a tunnel magnetoresistance ratio of 11.8%.
Go to Profile#3995
Mayda Velasco
#79784
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mayda Velasco is a physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. She works in experimental particle physics and is a leading member of the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. She founded COFI and is its first director. She is a pioneer in the physics potential of photon colliders.
Go to Profile#3996
Ricardo Galvão
#47527
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão is a prominent Brazilian physicist and engineer, formerly the Director-General of the National Institute for Space Research. He is a full Professor of the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, fellow of the Institute of Physics and councilman of the European Physical Society. Galvão has occupied major positions within the Brazilian Physics community such as the presidency of the Brazilian Physical Society and the directorship of the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics .
Go to Profile#3997
Enn Kasak
#103291
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Enn Kasak is an Estonian philosopher and astrophysicist. 1981 he graduated from University of Tartu in astrophysics speciality. 1981-1995 he worked at Tõravere Observatory. 1998-2007 he taught at Tallinn University. Since 2007 he is teaching at Tartu University.
Go to Profile#3998
Walter Gratzer
#41339
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Walter Bruno Gratzer was a German-born British biophysical chemist. He was professor of biophysical chemistry at King's College London and an author and reviewer of popular science. He was the first Nature news correspondent appointed by editor John Maddox. Oliver Sacks of Nature writes that his reviews have high literary quality and show knowledge of a wide range of topics. He was a friend of James D. Watson, and wrote the introduction and afterword of his A Passion for DNA.
Go to Profile#3999
Allan J. Lichtenberg
#110010
Overall Influence
#4000
Suzie Sheehy
#88818
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Suzanne Lyn Sheehy is an Australian accelerator physicist who runs research groups at the universities of Oxford and Melbourne, where she is developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine.
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