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,
#4001
Andrew M. Davis
#83292
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Andrew M. Davis is an American meteoriticist and professor of astronomy and geoscience at the University of Chicago. He is the son of American chemist and physicist Raymond Davis Jr., a Nobel Prize in Physics laureate. His main field of study is the origin of the elements by stellar nucleosynthesis. He currently is the head of a project to build a new instrument called the ion nanoprobe, which will allow isotopic and chemical analysis at finer scales than any contemporary instrument. He is also studying the cometary dust and contemporary interstellar dust returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006.
Go to Profile#4002
Jennifer Lotz
#93226
Overall Influence
Jennifer Mae Lotz is an American astronomer who studies the shape and evolution of galaxies, including galaxy mergers. She works at the NOIRLab, a project of the National Science Foundation, as director of the Gemini Observatory.
Go to Profile#4003
Robert C. Duncan
#61011
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Robert C. Duncan is an American astrophysicist now retired from the University of Texas at Austin. Early life and education Duncan was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1955. He grew up in Houston and Boston, where his father played a key role in NASA's Apollo Project. Duncan later earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Dartmouth College in 1977 and a PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1986. He also studied at the University of Cambridge. As a student, Duncan was a competitive runner and marathoner.
Go to Profile#4004
Petr Pravec
#35311
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Petr Pravec is a Czech astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets, born in Třinec, Czech Republic. Pravec is a prolific discoverer of binary asteroids, expert in photometric observations and rotational lightcurves at Ondřejov Observatory. He is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery and co-discovery of 350 numbered minor planets, and is leading the effort of a large consortium of stations called "BinAst" to look for multiplicity in the near-Earth objects and inner main-belt populations.
Go to Profile#4005
Erio Tosatti
#102110
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Erio Tosatti is an Italian theoretical physicist active at the International School for Advanced Studies , and at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics , both in Trieste, Italy. He is a broad-scope theorist who carried out research on a wide range of condensed matter physics phenomena. His early work dealt with optical properties, electron energy loss, theory of excitons and nonlocal dielectric response in solids, including layer crystals such as graphite and semiconductors; charge- and spin-density-waves; surface physics in all its aspects, particularly reconstruc...
Go to Profile#4006
Rudy Wijnands
#110139
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Rudy Wijnands is a Dutch astrophysicist. He is professor of Observational High-Energy Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. Academic career Since 2004 Wijnands has been part of the faculty with the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In 2008 he was appointed associate professor, and in 2017 full professor. Before that, he worked at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and MIT in the United States. He received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1999 with a thesis entitled "Millisecond phenomena in X-ray binaries".
Go to Profile#4007
Krisztián Sárneczky
#63864
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Krisztián Sárneczky is a Hungarian teacher of geography and prolific discoverer of minor planets and supernovae, researching at Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary. He is a board member of the Hungarian Astronomical Association and member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, leader of the Comet Section of the HAA, and is a contributor in the editorial work of Hungarian Astronomical Almanach.
Go to Profile#4008
Carol Christian
#103058
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carol Ann Christian is an American astronomer and science communicator, who works for the Space Telescope Science Institute as a scientist on the institute's outreach program. Christian was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied astronomy and physics at Boston University, from which she graduated with a PhD in 1979 with a thesis on Investigations of distant field stars and clusters in the galactic anticenter. She then worked as an astronomer for University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, Christian and her colleagues decided to establish Eureka Scientific as a conduit for grant applications ...
Go to Profile#4009
Matej Pavšič
#49580
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Matej Pavšič is a Slovenian theoretical physicist. During his work at Jožef Stefan Institute he has investigated mirror particles, conformal relativity, Kaluza-Klein theories, brane world scenarios, Clifford algebras and relativity in Clifford spaces.
Go to Profile#4010
Qiudong Wang
#36021
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Qiudong Wang is a professor at the Department of Mathematics, the University of Arizona. In 1982 he received a B.S. at Nanjing University and in 1994 a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati. Wang is best known for his 1991 paper The global solution of the n-body problem, in which he generalised Karl F. Sundman's results from 1912 to a system of more than three bodies. However, L. K. Babadzanjanz claims to have made the same generalization earlier, in 1979.
Go to Profile#4011
Constance M. Rockosi
#71002
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Constance "Connie" Mary Rockosi is a professor and former department chair in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in 2001 and helped design the camera for the telescope that was used as part of the initial Sloan Digital Sky Survey . She also was in charge of the SDSS-III domain for the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration project and is the primary investigator on SEGUE-2. Her focuses involve the study of the Milky Way galaxy, with a focus on the evolution that it took to reach its current state.
Go to Profile#4012
Marek Czosnyka
#110227
Overall Influence
#4013
John Beverley Oke
#104911
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
John Beverley Oke was an astronomer and professor of astronomy at Caltech. He worked in astronomical photometry and spectroscopy and is well known for creating instruments for the detection and measurement of cosmic phenomena. His instruments were used on the Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar, California and the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. "He was one of the first really serious and really excellent astronomer-instrumentalists," says James E. Gunn, Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University Observatory, "and he and the instruments he designed and built were very la...
Go to Profile#4014
Nail N. Akhmediev
#110252
Overall Influence
#4015
Alexander Pukhov
#110258
Overall Influence
#4016
Ranjan Sen
#79653
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Ranjan Sen is an Indian microbiologist, biophysicist and a senior scientist as well as the head of the Laboratory of Transcription at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics. Known for his studies in the field of prokaryotic transcription, Sen is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences in 2007.
Go to Profile#4017
Patrick H. Diamond
#109761
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Patrick Henry Diamond is an American theoretical plasma physicist. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a director of the Fusion Theory Institute at the National Fusion Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea, where the KSTAR Tokamak is operated.
Go to Profile#4018
John H. Hubbell
#89555
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
John Howard Hubbell was an American radiation physicist born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was on the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1950 until 1988, when he retired. He remained a contractor to NIST until he died in 2007. He was a founder and past president of the International Radiation Physics Society.
Go to Profile#4019
Robert Wilson
#87514
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Sir Robert Wilson was a British astronomer and physicist. He studied physics at King's College, Durham and obtained his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where he worked at the Royal Observatory on stellar spectra. His works laid the groundwork for the development of the Great Space Observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope.
Go to Profile#4020
Burkard Hillebrands
#92571
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Burkard Hillebrands is a German physicist and professor of physics. He is the leader of the magnetism research group in the Department of Physics at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Academic career Burkard Hillebrands was born in 1957. He studied physics at the University of Cologne and was awarded his PhD in 1986 at the University of Cologne under the supervision of Gernot Güntherodt.
Go to Profile#4021
Goetz Oertel
#80887
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Goetz Oertel was an American physicist and science manager. Youth Flight from West Prussia Oertel was born in Stuhm, West Prussia, Germany . In January 1945, Oertel escaped from the advancing Red Army with his parents, milling director Egon Oertel and his wife Margarete westwards, initially to Gransee in Brandenburg, then continuing to Triptis in Thuringia which was captured by US forces rather than the Soviets. When Thuringia fell under Soviet control in the course of the Potsdam Agreement, the flight continued by horse and carriage, further westwards to Öhringen in southwestern Württemberg.
Go to Profile#4022
Susan Cooper
#98296
Overall Influence
Susan C. Cooper was professor of experimental physics at Oxford University from 1995 to 2015, and a professorial fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Education Cooper was originally a theatre major. Cooper received her undergraduate degree from Colby College in 1971. She received her PhD from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1980, where her doctoral advisor was William Chinowsky and her thesis was titled Jets in e+e− Annihilation. In her thesis, Cooper studied the properties of jets created by electron-positron annihilation using data collected by the Mark I detector at SLAC Natio...
Go to Profile#4023
Uwe Fink
#110335
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
#4024
Aleksandr Baldin
#100600
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Baldin was a Soviet and Russian physicist, expert in the field of physics of elementary particles and high energy physics. After finishing the railway technical school, he studied in the Moscow Institute of Engineers and Transport, followed by a DSc program in Moscow Engineering Physics Institute completing in 1949, when he became a professor in Lebedev Physical Institute. In 1968, he was named the director of Laboratory of High Energy Physics in the Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, where the Soviet nuclear weapons were developed. He was elected a member of Russian Academy of Sciences and a faculty of Moscow State University.
Go to Profile#4025
Nicola Marzari
#110345
Overall Influence
#4026
Harold Reitsema
#75348
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Harold James Reitsema is an American astronomer who was part of the teams that discovered Larissa, the fifth of Neptune's known moons, and Telesto, Saturn's thirteenth moon. Reitsema and his colleagues discovered the moons through ground-based telescopic observations. Using a coronagraphic imaging system with one of the first charge-coupled devices available for astronomical use, they first observed Telesto on April 8, 1980, just two months after being one of the first groups to observe Janus, also a moon of Saturn. Reitsema, as part of a different team of astronomers, observed Larissa on May...
Go to Profile#4027
Helen Caines
#88145
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Helen Louise Caines is a Professor of Physics at Yale University. She studies the quark–gluon plasma and is the co-spokesperson for the STAR experiment. Education Caines studied physics at the University of Birmingham and graduated in 1992. She earned her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 1996.
Go to Profile#4028
Masanori Koshiba
#110371
Overall Influence
#4029
Raffaele Mezzenga
#107486
Overall Influence
Raffaele Mezzenga is a soft condensed matter scientist, currently heading the Laboratory of Food and Soft Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He is among the 0.1% most cited scientists according to the Clarivate 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list in the cross-field discipline.
Go to Profile#4030
Jacqueline Bloch
#83699
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jacqueline Bloch is a French physicist, born in 1967, specialist in nanosciences, member of the French Academy of sciences. Biography Jacqueline Bloch is an ESPCI engineer, graduated in 1991 , with a DEA in condensed matter physics . She holds a doctorate from the Pierre and Marie Curie University on the study of the optical properties of quantum wires. In 1994, she joined the CNRS and carried out her research at the L2M in Bagneux, which moved and became the LPN in Marcoussis in 2001. In 1998, she spent a year there and carried out research at the Bell Laboratories. She is interested in the ultimate coupling between light and matter in close connection with semiconductor nanotechnologies.
Go to Profile#4031
Mark Boslough
#52548
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mark Boslough is an American physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, research professor at University of New Mexico, fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel. He is an expert in the study of planetary impacts and global catastrophes. Due to his work in this field, Asteroid 73520 Boslough was named in his honor.
Go to Profile#4032
Alan Soper
#103605
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alan Kenneth Soper FRS is an STFC Senior Fellow at the ISIS neutron source based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Education Soper was educated at the Campion School, Hornchurch and the University of Leicester where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree followed by a PhD in 1977 for research into the structure of aqueous solutions conducted at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble supervised by John Enderby.
Go to Profile#4033
Astrid Beckmann
#47049
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Astrid Beckmann is a German physicist, a professor of mathematics and mathematics education, and was a long-serving university president. Beckmann served as president of the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd from 2010 to 2018. She also taught at the University of Ulm.
Go to Profile#4034
Janos K. Lanyi
#110509
Overall Influence
#4035
Yasunobu Nakamura
#51720
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Yasunobu Nakamura is a Japanese physicist. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology and the Principal Investigator of the Superconducting Quantum Electronics Research Group at the Center for Emergent Matter Science within RIKEN. He has contributed primarily to the area of quantum information science, particularly in superconducting quantum computing and hybrid quantum systems.
Go to Profile#4036
Isao Imai
#38234
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for fluid mechanics and mathematical physics. Imai was born on 7 October 1914 in Dairen. A few years later, his family returned to Kobe, where he spent his childhood. He skipped one grade in elementary school and another in middle school, and he entered the First Higher School. He proceeded to the Imperial University of Tokyo, majoring in physics, and graduated at the age of 21. Upon his graduation in 1936, he was appointed assistant to Susumu Tomotika in the newly established Imperial University of Osaka. Two years later, he returned to the Imperial University of Tokyo as a lecturer, and in 1942 was promoted to assistant professor.
Go to Profile#4037
Benjamin Bederson
#68871
Overall Influence
1921 - 2023 (102 years)
Benjamin Bederson was an American physicist. He worked on the Manhattan Project. Background Bederson graduated from City College of New York, Columbia University, and New York University. He worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a dean at New York University. From 1992 to 1996, he was an Editor-in-Chief of Physical Review.
Go to Profile#4038
Pieter Walstra
#110589
Overall Influence
#4039
Paul Weiss
#67081
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Paul S. Weiss is a leading American nanoscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds numerous positions, including UC Presidential Chair, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Bioengineering, and of Materials Science and Engineering, and founder and editor-in-chief of ACS Nano. From 2019–2014, he held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences and was the director of the California NanoSystems Institute. Weiss has co-authored over 400 research publications and holds over 40 US and international patents.
Go to Profile#4040
Janet Conrad
#94635
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Janet Marie Conrad is an American experimental physicist, researcher, and professor at MIT studying elementary particle physics. Her work focuses on neutrino properties and the techniques for studying them. In recognition of her efforts, Conrad has been the recipient of several highly prestigious awards during her career, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the American Physical Society Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award.
Go to Profile#4041
Tulika Bose
#102395
Overall Influence
Tulika Bose is a Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose research focuses on developing triggers for experimental searches of new phenomena in high energy physics. Bose is a leader within the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, a CERN collaboration famous for its experimental observation of the Higgs boson in 2012.
Go to Profile#4042
Pierre Collet
#63045
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pierre Collet is a French mathematical physicist, specializing in statistical mechanics, stochastic processes, and chaos theory. In 1978, Collet received a doctorate under Jean-Pierre Eckmann at the University of Geneva, with a thesis entitled Étude du modèle hiérarchique par le groupe de renormalisation. Collet is currently Director of Research of the CNRS at the École polytechnique.
Go to Profile#4043
Steven T. Bramwell
#74898
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Steven T. Bramwell is a British physicist and chemist who works at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London. He is known for his experimental discovery of spin ice with M. J. Harris and his calculation of a critical exponent observed in two-dimensional magnets with P. C. W. Holdsworth. A probability distribution for global quantities in complex systems, the "Bramwell-Holdsworth-Pinton distribution", is named after him.
Go to Profile#4044
Anastasia Volovich
#78042
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Anastasia Volovich is a professor of physics at Brown University. She works on theoretical physics: quantum field theory, general relativity, string theory and related areas in mathematics. Early life and education Volovich was born in Moscow. She attended the Moscow State University for her undergraduate studies where she completed her master's degree in 1999. Volovich moved to the United States for her graduate studies and completed her doctorate under the supervision of Andrew Strominger at Harvard University in 2002.
Go to Profile#4045
Masatoshi Murakami
#110733
Overall Influence
#4046
Frank Haig
#31964
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Frank Rawle Haig, S.J. is an American Jesuit priest, physicist and academic administrator. He served as the third President of Wheeling Jesuit University from 1966 to 1972 and the seventh president of Le Moyne College from 1981 until 1987.
Go to Profile#4047
Joseph Rudnick
#99129
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Joseph Alan Rudnick is an American physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA. Rudnick currently serves as the senior dean of the UCLA College of Letters and Science and dean of the Division of Physical Sciences. He previously served as the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests include condensed-matter physics, statistical mechanics, and biological physics.
Go to Profile#4048
Vishnu Jejjala
#100109
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Vishnumohan "Vishnu" Jejjala is an Indian-American physicist who specializes in string theory. Jejjala was born in Coimbatore, India. His family moved to the United States in 1980. Jejjala earned Bachelor of Science degrees in physics, mathematics, and astronomy from University of Maryland at College Park in 1996. He earned a Master of Science and Ph.D. in physics in 2002 from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He did postdoctoral work at Virginia Tech from 2002 to 2004, Durham University from 2004 to 2007, and Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 2007 to 2009. Since 2009, h...
Go to Profile#4049
Belinda Wilkes
#88784
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Belinda Jane Wilkes is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and former director of the Chandra X-ray Center. Education and career She was born in Staffordshire, England and grew up in Albrighton, Shropshire, attending Wolverhampton Girls' High School before obtaining a BSc. in Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland followed by a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge, England. In 1982 she moved to the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory as a NATO postdoctoral fellow and in 1984 to SAO...
Go to Profile#4050
Wolfgang Glänzel
#110787
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Wolfgang Joachim Emil Glänzel is a German statistician who is a full professor at KU Leuven, where he is also the director of the Centre for R&D Monitoring. In 1999, he and Henk Moed received the Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal from the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics . Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of Scientometrics, as well as secretary-treasurer of the ISSI. In that role, he took the controversial decision to withdraw an article under pressure by a commercial publisher criticized in that paper and partly owned by the publisher of his journal.
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