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,
#451
Alan J. Heeger
#3491
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Alan Jay Heeger is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Heegar was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for co-founding the field of conducting polymers and for pioneering work in making these novel materials available for technological applications.
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Saul Teukolsky
#14190
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Saul Arno Teukolsky is a theoretical astrophysicist and a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Caltech and Cornell University. His major research interests include general relativity, relativistic astrophysics, and computational astrophysics.
Go to Profile#453
Albrecht Unsöld
#15129
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Albrecht Otto Johannes Unsöld was a German astrophysicist known for his contributions to spectroscopic analysis of stellar atmospheres. Career Albrecht Unsöld was born in Bolheim, Württemberg, Germany. After school attendance in Heidenheim, Unsöld studied physics at the University of Tübingen and the University of Munich. At Munich, he studied under Arnold Sommerfeld, and was granted his doctorate in 1927. As a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, he was an assistant in Potsdam and worked at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. He then completed his Habilitation in Munich in 1929.
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R. Brent Tully
#15378
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Brent Tully is a Canadian-born American astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii. Born in Toronto, Ontario, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tully's specialty is the astrophysics of galaxies. With J. Richard Fisher, he proposed the Tully–Fisher relation, which shows that the luminosity of a galaxy and the orbital velocities of its stars are correlated. This relation can be used to determine the distances of galaxies and, by inference, the size and age of the universe. His books The Nearby Galaxies Atlas & Catalog published in 1988 give the 3D locations for 2,400 galaxies within 130 million light years of Earth.
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Roland Omnès
#5232
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Roland Omnès is the author of several books which aim to give non-scientists the information required to understand quantum mechanics from an everyday standpoint. Biography Omnès is currently Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics in the Faculté des Sciences at Orsay, at the Université Paris-Sud XI. He has been instrumental in developing consistent histories and quantum decoherence approaches in quantum mechanics. In 1959 he received the Paul-Langevin Prize.
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James Hansen
#2179
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years, he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of global warming, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.
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Heinrich Rohrer
#2353
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Heinrich Rohrer was a Swiss physicist who shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope . The other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska. The Heinrich Rohrer Medal is presented triennially by the Surface Science Society of Japan with IBM Research – Zurich, Swiss Embassy in Japan, and Ms. Rohrer in his memory. The medal is not to be confused with the Heinrich Rohrer Award presented at the Nano Seoul 2020 conference.
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Albert Ghiorso
#3054
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Albert Ghiorso was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer of a record 12 chemical elements on the periodic table. His research career spanned six decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1990s.
Go to Profile#459
Mildred Dresselhaus
#4924
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Mildred Dresselhaus , known as the "Queen of Carbon Science", was an American physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist. She was an institute professor and professor of both physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also served as the president of the American Physical Society, the chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the director of science in the US Department of Energy under the Bill Clinton Government. Dresselhaus won numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal ...
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Thanu Padmanabhan
#10246
Overall Influence
1957 - 2021 (64 years)
Thanu Padmanabhan was an Indian theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose research spanned a wide variety of topics in gravitation, structure formation in the universe and quantum gravity. He published nearly 300 papers and reviews in international journals and ten books in these areas. He made several contributions related to the analysis and modelling of dark energy in the universe and the interpretation of gravity as an emergent phenomenon. He was a Distinguished Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pune, India.
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John Perdew
#14997
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John P. Perdew is a theoretical condensed matter physicist known for his contributions to the fields of solid-state physics and quantum chemistry. His work on density functional theory has led to him being one of the world's most cited physicists. Perdew currently teaches and conducts research at Temple University.
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Fereydoon Abbasi
#4602
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani is an Iranian nuclear scientist who was head of the Atomic Energy Organization from 2011 to 2013. He survived an assassination attempt in 2010, but was seriously wounded. He is a conservative and principlist politician.
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Guy von Dardel
#7489
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Guy Fredrik von Dardel was a Swedish physicist who researched particle physics and participated in the establishment of CERN. Biography Dardel was the son of Fredrik Elias August von Dardel by his marriage to Maria Sofia "Maj" Wising. His half-brother, from his mother's previous marriage, was Raoul Wallenberg. His sister was Nina Lagergren . His niece Nane Lagergren, Nina's eldest daughter, was married to Kofi Annan.
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Frank Shu
#6977
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Frank Hsia-San Shu was a Chinese-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and author. He served as a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego. He is best known for proposing the density wave theory to explain the structure of spiral galaxies, and for describing a model of star formation, where a giant dense molecular cloud collapses to form a star.
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J. Richard Gott
#6633
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Richard Gott III is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. He is known for his work on time travel and the Doomsday argument. Exotic matter time travel theories Paul Davies's bestseller How to Build a Time Machine credits Gott with the proposal of using cosmic strings to create a time machine. Gott's machine depends upon the antigravitational tension of the strings to deform space without attracting nearby objects. The traveler would follow a precise path around rapidly separating strings, and find that he or she had moved backwards in time. Gott's solution does...
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Nicholas Kemmer
#8034
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Nicholas Kemmer was a Russian-born nuclear physicist working in Britain, who played an integral and leading edge role in United Kingdom's nuclear programme, and was known as a mentor of Abdus Salam – a Nobel laureate in physics.
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Steven E. Jones
#4608
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Steven Earl Jones is an American physicist. Among scientists, Jones became known for his research into muon-catalyzed fusion and geo-fusion. Jones is also known for his association with 9/11 conspiracy theories. Jones has claimed that mere airplane crashes and fires could not have resulted in so rapid and complete a fall of the World Trade Center Towers and 7 World Trade Center, suggesting controlled demolition instead. In late 2006, some time after Brigham Young University officials placed him on paid leave, he elected to retire in an agreement with BYU. Jones continued research and writin...
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Sergio Fubini
#10330
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Sergio Fubini was an Italian theoretical physicist. He was one of the pioneers of string theory. He was engaged in peace activism in the Middle East. Biography Fubini was born in Turin. In 1938, he fled the country as a politically persecuted Jew to Switzerland. In 1945, he attended the Lycée in Turin, where he studied physics and in 1950 graduated "cum laude." Afterwards, he was an assistant in Turin. From 1954 to 1957, he was in the USA. From 1958 to 1967, he was at CERN in Geneva. In 1959, he became a professor of nuclear physics at University of Padua. In 1961, he became a professor of theoretical physics at University of Turin.
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Alexander Dalgarno
#15700
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Alexander Dalgarno FRS was a British physicist who was a Phillips Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Biography Alexander Dalgarno was born in London in 1928, and spent his childhood there. He was educated in mathematics and atomic physics at University College, London, earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951 under the joint supervision of Harrie Massey and Richard Buckingham. He was an academic at the Queen's University, Belfast from 1951 to 1967 where he worked with Sir David Bates and rose from assistant lecturer to professor. In the 1950s, he laid the foundations for lon...
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Bertrand Halperin
#9047
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bertrand I. Halperin is an American physicist, former holder of the Hollis Chair of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University. Biography Halperin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood and attended public schools. His mother was Eva Teplitzky Halperin and his father Morris Halperin. His mother was a college administrator and his father a customs inspector. Both his parents were born in USSR. His paternal grandmother's family the Maximovs claimed descent from Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the BESHT.
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Nima Arkani-Hamed
#7193
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Nima Arkani-Hamed is an American-Canadian theoretical physicist of Iranian descent, with interests in high-energy physics, quantum field theory, string theory, cosmology and collider physics. Arkani-Hamed is a member of the permanent faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also director of the Carl P. Feinberg Cross-Disciplinary Program in Innovation at the Institute and director of The Center for Future High Energy Physics in Beijing, China.
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Jared Diamond
#155
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books. Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is commonly referred to as a polymath, stemming from his knowledge in many fields including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
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George Efstathiou
#17355
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
George Petros Efstathiou is a British astrophysicist who is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and was the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge from 2008 to 2016. He was previously Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford.
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Feryal Özel
#9225
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Feryal Özel is a Turkish-American astrophysicist born in Istanbul, Turkey, specializing in the physics of compact objects and high energy astrophysical phenomena. As of 2022, Özel is the Department Chair and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics in Atlanta. She was previously a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in the Astronomy Department and Steward Observatory.
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Heinz Billing
#4596
Overall Influence
1914 - 2017 (103 years)
Heinz Billing was a German physicist and computer scientist, widely considered a pioneer in the construction of computer systems and computer data storage, who built a prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave detector.
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W. G. Unruh
#10718
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
William George "Bill" Unruh is a Canadian physicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver who described the hypothetical Unruh effect in 1976. Early life and education Unruh was born into a Mennonite family in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His parents were Benjamin Unruh, a refugee from Russia, and Anna Janzen, who was born in Canada. He obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1967, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, New Jersey, under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler.
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Katharine Way
#10856
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Katharine "Kay" Way was an American physicist best known for her work on the Nuclear Data Project. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. She became an adjunct professor at Duke University in 1968.
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Lev Davidovich Landau
#21962
Overall Influence
#479
Laura Danly
#17676
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Laura Danly is an American astronomer and academic who served as Curator of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. She has also served as chair of the Department of Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
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Allan MacLeod Cormack
#5748
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Allan MacLeod Cormack was a South African American physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on X-ray computed tomography , a significant and unusual achievement since Cormack did not hold a doctoral degree in any scientific field.
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Kai Siegbahn
#4934
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn was a Swedish physicist who shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics. Biography Siegbahn was born in Lund, Sweden, son of Manne Siegbahn the 1924 physics Nobel Prize winner. Siegbahn earned his doctorate at the University of Stockholm in 1944. He was professor at the Royal Institute of Technology 1951–1954, and then professor of experimental physics at Uppsala University 1954–1984, which was the same chair his father had held. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Schawlow. Siegbahn received half the prize "for his contribution t...
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Robert Wald
#9398
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert M. Wald is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He studies general relativity, black holes, and quantum gravity and has written textbooks on these subjects.
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K. Alex Müller
#4834
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Karl Alexander Müller was a Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 with Georg Bednorz for their work in superconductivity in ceramic materials. Biography Müller was born in Basel, Switzerland, on 20 April 1927, to Irma and Paul Müller. His mother is Jewish. His family immediately moved to Salzburg, Austria, where his father was studying music. Alex and his mother then moved to Dornach, near Basel, to the home of his grandparents. Then they moved to Lugano, in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, where he learned to speak Italian fluently. His ...
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Gérard de Vaucouleurs
#9808
Overall Influence
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
Gérard Henri de Vaucouleurs was a French astronomer best known for his studies of galaxies. Life and career Gerard de Vaucouleurs was born on April 25th, 1918 in Paris, he took the maiden name of his mother as his last name. He had an early interest in amateur astronomy and received his undergraduate degree in 1939 at the Sorbonne in that city.
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João Magueijo
#13462
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
João Magueijo is a Portuguese cosmologist and professor in theoretical physics at Imperial College London. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light theory. Education and career João Magueijo studied physics at the University of Lisbon. He undertook graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge. He has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge and is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates General Relativity and postgraduates Advanced General Relativity.
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Steven Gubser
#12461
Overall Influence
1972 - 2019 (47 years)
Steven Scott Gubser was a professor of physics at Princeton University. His research focused on theoretical particle physics, especially string theory, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. He was a widely cited scholar in these and other related areas.
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Paul Horowitz
#7801
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Paul Horowitz is an American physicist and electrical engineer, known primarily for his work in electronics design, as well as for his role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . Biography At age 8, Horowitz achieved distinction as the world's youngest amateur radio operator. He went on to study physics at Harvard University , where he has also spent all of his subsequent career. His early work was on scanning microscopy . Horowitz has also conducted astrophysical research on pulsars and investigations in biophysics. His interest in practical electronics has led to a handful of...
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James Binney
#19405
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
James Jeffrey Binney, FRS, FInstP is a British astrophysicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and former head of the Sub-Department of Theoretical Physics as well as an Emeritus Fellow of Merton College. Binney is known principally for his work in theoretical galactic and extragalactic astrophysics, though he has made a number of contributions to areas outside of astrophysics as well.
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Daniel Z. Freedman
#6776
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Daniel Zissel Freedman is an American theoretical physicist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. He is mainly known for his work in supergravity. He is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
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Hitoshi Murayama
#16440
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hitoshi Murayama is a Japanese-born physicist with notable contributions in the fields of particle physics and cosmology. He is currently a professor at the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the Director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.
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Gordon Gould
#2348
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Richard Gordon Gould was an American physicist who is sometimes credited with the invention of the laser and the optical amplifier. . Gould is best known for his thirty-year fight with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain patents for the laser and related technologies. He also fought with laser manufacturers in court battles to enforce the patents he subsequently did obtain.
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Rudolf Kippenhahn
#16227
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Rudolf Kippenhahn was a German astrophysicist and science author. Biography Rudolf Kippenhahn was born in Pernink, Czechoslovakia. He originally studied mathematics and physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg before changing to Astronomy. From 1975 to 1991, Kippenhahn was director of the Max Planck Institute For Astrophysics in Garching, Munich, Germany. After 1991, Kippenhahn was an active published author in Göttingen, trying to popularise astronomical science research, in the same vein as Stephen Hawking's writing, for which he won the Bruno H. Bürgel prize. His books covered such diverse topics as astronomy, cryptology and atomic physics.
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Abner Shimony
#5436
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Abner Eliezer Shimony was an American physicist and philosopher. He specialized in quantum theory and philosophy of science. As a physicist, he concentrated on the interaction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He authored many works and research on complementarity in quantum entanglement as well as multiparticle quantum interferometry, both relating to quantum coherence. He authored research articles and books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. He received the 1996 Lakatos Prize for his work in philosophy of science. Shimony is also the author of Tibaldo and the Hole in ...
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Robert L. Park
#2608
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Robert Lee Park was an American emeritus professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a former director of public information at the Washington office of the American Physical Society. Park was most noted for his critical commentaries on alternative medicine and pseudoscience, as well as his criticism of how legitimate science is distorted or ignored by the media, some scientists, and public policy advocates as expressed in his book Voodoo Science. He was also noted for his preference for robotic over crewed space exploration.
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Arthur Jaffe
#2646
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Arthur Michael Jaffe is an American mathematical physicist at Harvard University, where in 1985 he succeeded George Mackey as the Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science. Education and career After graduating from Pelham Memorial High School in 1955, Jaffe attended Princeton University as an undergraduate obtaining a degree in chemistry in 1959, and later Clare College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar, obtaining a degree in mathematics in 1961. He then returned to Princeton, obtaining a doctorate in physics in 1966 with Arthur Wightman. His whole career has been spent teaching mathematical physics and pursuing research at Harvard University.
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Matthias Mann
#5346
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Matthias Mann is a scientist in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics. Early life and education Born in Germany he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at Yale University where he worked in the group of John Fenn, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Pierre Hohenberg
#4820
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Pierre Hohenberg was a French-American theoretical physicist, who worked primarily on statistical mechanics. The Hohenberg-Kohn theorems, formulated by Hohenberg and Walter Kohn gave rise to the density functional theory . He is also known for the development of dynamic scaling theory of critical phenomena, along with Bertrand Halperin.
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Horst Ludwig Störmer
#3842
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Horst Ludwig Störmer is a German physicist, Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Columbia University. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" . He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee.
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Henry Way Kendall
#8130
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Henry Way Kendall was an American particle physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 jointly with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."
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John R. Pierce
#2063
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
John Robinson Pierce , was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years using the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
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