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,
#4601
Edwin Bergin
#105067
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Edwin Bergin is a US astrophysicist who is currently the Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan . He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and awarded a BS in Astronomy at Villanova University in 1989 and a PhD at the University of Massachusetts in 1995. After five years as a research assistant at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst , he was appointed astronomer/astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. He took the post of Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Michigan in 2003, became Associate Professor in 2007 and full Professor in 2011.
Go to Profile#4602
Michael S. Patterson
#119740
Overall Influence
#4603
Alfred Sherman Mcewen
#119756
Overall Influence
#4604
Basil Briggs
#110051
Overall Influence
1923 - 1994 (71 years)
Basil Hugh Briggs was an English Australian physicist, Reader in physics at the University of Adelaide, winner of the Harrie Massey Medal and Prize for outstanding contribution to physics in Australia in 1992.
Go to Profile#4605
Gerald C. Pomraning
#119771
Overall Influence
#4606
William Ronald Fawcett
#119835
Overall Influence
#4607
Marcelo Osvaldo Magnasco
#96532
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Marcelo Osvaldo Magnasco is a biophysicist and a professor at The Rockefeller University. He is known for his work on thermal ratchets as models of biological motors, auditory biophysics, bailout embeddings, neural coding, other studies of biological networks such as leaf venation, and for placing the date of the solar eclipse mentioned in the Odyssey on April 16, 1178 B.C. together with Constantino Baikouzis of the National University of La Plata.
Go to Profile#4608
B. Sriram Shastry
#119156
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Balajapalli Sriram Shastry is an Indian-American condensed matter physicist, specializing in strongly-correlated Fermi systems, quantum integrable systems, and statistical mechanics. Biography B. Sriram Shastry graduated in 1968 with a B.Sc. from Nagpur University and in 1970 with an M.Sc. in physics from Indian Institute of Technology Madras . He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from Mumbai's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , where he worked with Chanchal Kumar Majumdar. Shastry's doctoral dissertation, entitled Studies in the Magnetic Properties of C.P.C. and Nickel, dealt with "itinerant magnetism and quantum systems in low dimensions".
Go to Profile#4609
Udo Seifert
#119843
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#4610
Frithjof Karsch
#119861
Overall Influence
#4611
Sergey Bagayev
#98782
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sergey Nikolayevich Bagayev is a Russian scientist, a specialist in the field of quantum electronics and laser physics, director of the Institute of Laser Physics . His h-index is 16. Biography Sergey Bagayev was born on September 9, 1941, in Novosibirsk.
Go to Profile#4612
Joop Schaye
#119877
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
#4613
Monika Ritsch-Marte
#111201
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Monika Ritsch-Marte is an Austrian physicist in the fields of biomedical optics, theoretical quantum optics and non-linear optics. She is a professor at the Medical University of Innsbruck and director of the Institute of Biomedical Physics.
Go to Profile#4614
Bo Thidé
#101145
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bo Yngve Thidé is a Swedish physicist and professor emeritus at Uppsala University. He has studied radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation in space, particularly their interaction with matter and fields.
Go to Profile#4615
Alois Loidl
#119945
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
#4616
Ravindra N. Sudan
#109708
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Ravindra Nath Sudan was an Indian-American electrical engineer and physicist who specialized in plasma physics. He was known for independently discovering the whistler instability in 1963, an instability which causes audible low-frequency radio waves to be emitted in the magnetosphere in the form of whistler waves. He also pioneered the study of the generation and propagation of intense ion beams, and contributed to theories of plasma instabilities and plasma turbulence.
Go to Profile#4617
Philippe Guyot-Sionnest
#107076
Overall Influence
Philippe Guyot-Sionnest is a professor at the University of Chicago appointed jointly in the departments of physics and chemistry. He works in the field of colloidal semiconductors and metal nanocrystals.
Go to Profile#4618
Leonardo Senatore
#111166
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Leonardo Senatore is an Italian theoretical physicist and professor at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and SLAC. He was recently appointed professor at ETH Zurich.
Go to Profile#4619
Lila Gierasch
#70721
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Lila Mary Gierasch is an American biochemist and biophysicist. At present, she is a distinguished Professor working on "protein folding in the cell" in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the College of Natural Sciences, University of Massachusetts—Amherst.
Go to Profile#4620
Sadhan Kumar Adhikari
#50277
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sadhan Kumar Adhikari is a Brazilian-Indian professor of physics, since 1991, at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the São Paulo State University . Early life Sadhan Kumar Adhikari was born to Nalini Ranjan and Mira Adhikari on 2 January 1948 in Kharagpore, India. In 1962 he graduated from Hindu School, Kolkata and then joined the Bachelor of Science program at the Presidency University, Kolkata which he finished with honours by 1965. The same year he started the Master of Science course at the University of Calcutta which he completed by 1968. For a year he was a post-M.Sc fellow at t...
Go to Profile#4621
Ronald Paul Lepping
#120014
Overall Influence
#4622
Jure Zupan
#120015
Overall Influence
#4623
Ni Guangjiong
#91697
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Ni Guangjiong is a Chinese physicist. He began studies in physics about 1950, and became a Doctor of Philosophy in 1955. He married Su Qing, a physics professor, in 1960. He published his first book in 1978. He holds a Chair in Physics at Fudan University, Shanghai. He is the director of Modern Physics Institute and the head of the Division for Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#4624
Christine Davies
#97214
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Christine Tullis Hunter Davies is a professor of physics at the University of Glasgow. Education Davies attended Colchester County High School for Girls, then the University of Cambridge, where she was an undergraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 in physics with theoretical physics, followed by a PhD in 1984 for research on quantum chromodynamics and the Drell–Yan process while working in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
Go to Profile#4625
Michael Raupach
#95987
Overall Influence
1950 - 2015 (65 years)
Michael Robin Raupach was an Australian climate scientist. He is credited with developing the concept of a carbon budget, the amount of that is emitted and absorbed in the global ecosystem in the course of a year. When the in balance, emissions and absorption in carbon sinks are roughly the same, but when disturbed, possibly large changes in the ecosystem ensue. He was a founding co-chair of the Global Carbon Project , a network of the world's leading carbon cycle researchers. He was instrumental in publishing the Annual Carbon Budget, which draws on a large amount of scientific data to det...
Go to Profile#4626
Victor Savrin
#98842
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Victor Ivanovich Savrin is a Russian physicist known for his contributions to theoretical elementary particle physics and quantum field theory. Biography Victor Savrin was born on 4 December 1944 in Chapayevsk, Kuybyshev Oblast , USSR. In 1947 his family moved to Kuybyshev , and later, in the early 1950s, to Moscow. In 1962, after finishing school, Victor Savrin started his studies at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University, which he graduated in 1968.
Go to Profile#4627
Renée Hložek
#108255
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Renée Hložek is a South African cosmologist, Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and an Azrieli Global Scholar within the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She studies the cosmic microwave background, Type Ia supernova and baryon acoustic oscillations. She is a Senior TED Fellow and was made a Sloan Research Fellow in 2020. Hložek identifies as bisexual.
Go to Profile#4628
Djamshid. Chadi
#120125
Overall Influence
#4629
Woodruff T. Sullivan III
#102781
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Woodruff T. Sullivan III is a U.S. physicist and astronomer, known primarily for his work in astrobiology, galactic astronomy and extragalactic astronomy, history of astronomy, gnomonics, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence .
Go to Profile#4630
Lawrence Bruce Marks
#120151
Overall Influence
#4631
Alexandre Tkatchenko
#120171
Overall Influence
#4632
Derek York
#120189
Overall Influence
#4633
Jean Bellissard
#59521
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jean Vincent Bellissard is a French theoretical physicist and mathematical physicist, known for his work on C*-algebras, K-theory, noncommutative geometry as applied to solid state physics, particularly, to quantum Hall effect.
Go to Profile#4634
Amanda Hendrix
#77308
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Amanda R. Hendrix is an American planetary scientist known for her pioneering studies of solar system bodies at ultraviolet wavelengths. She is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Her research interests include moon and asteroid surface composition, space weathering effects and radiation products. She is a co-investigator on the Cassini UVIS instrument, was a co-investigator on the Galileo UVS instrument, is a Participating Scientist on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LAMP instrument and is a Principal Investigator on Hubble Space Telescope observing programs. As of 2019, ...
Go to Profile#4635
Ulrich R. Christensen
#120308
Overall Influence
#4636
Michael R. Baer
#120315
Overall Influence
#4637
Alwyn C. Scott
#120330
Overall Influence
#4638
Michael L. Norman
#120336
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#4639
David M. Strom
#103681
Overall Influence
David M. Strom is an experimental high energy particle physicist on the faculty of the University of Oregon. Early life and education Strom was born in Montana in 1957, the son of Kathryn Jean and Herbert Edward Strom. He was awarded a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics in 1980 at St. Olaf College. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics in 1986 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with his dissertation, Measurement of the D0 lifetime, advised by Sau Lan Wu.
Go to Profile#4640
Filippo Frontera
#114525
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Filippo Frontera is an Italian astrophysicist and professor, who deals with astronomical investigations on celestial gamma-rays. Biography and contributions Full professor of Experimental Physics of the University of Ferrara, Engineering Faculty, Ferrara, Italy, retired in 2012, for eight years Filippo Frontera was coordinator of the PhD course in Physics of this University. Previously, from 1969 to 1985, he was a scientist of the IASF-CNR institute in Bologna. As "Distinguished Scientist" of the University of Ferrara, he is continuing his research activity at the Physics and Earth Sciences ...
Go to Profile#4641
John Dudley
#105702
Overall Influence
John Michael Dudley is a physicist and currently Professor of Physics at the University Bourgogne Franche-Comté working at the joint University-CNRS research Institute FEMTO-ST in Besançon, France. Originally from New Zealand, he is known for his research in nonlinear and ultrafast optical physics, for service to international scientific societies, and for initiatives in promoting international scientific outreach and the public communication of science.
Go to Profile#4642
Pierre Boutouyrie
#120413
Overall Influence
#4643
D. S. J. Jones
#120414
Overall Influence
#4644
David H. Frisch
#41866
Overall Influence
1918 - 1991 (73 years)
David Henry Frisch was an American physicist who helped develop the atom bomb in World War II and later became active in the disarmament movement. He was also the husband of Rose Epstein Frisch. Biography Born in New York, Frisch grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Princeton in 1940. He was a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1940 to 1942, and then worked at Los Alamos from 1943 to 1945. After the war he moved to MIT, beginning as a research associate in 1946, obtained his PhD in 1947 and was appointed an assistant professor in 1948, associate professor in 1952 and full professor in 1958.
Go to Profile#4645
Roger Thomas James Phillips
#120455
Overall Influence
#4646
Amy Simon
#74540
Overall Influence
Amy Simon is an American planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, involved in several missions of the Solar System Exploration Program. Education Simon is from Union Township, Union County, New Jersey, where she attended Union High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in Space Sciences from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1993 and was inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma. She completed her doctoral studies in astronomy at the New Mexico State University in 1998. Upon graduation, she became a postdoctoral research scientist at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#4647
David E. Cox
#120497
Overall Influence
#4648
Juraj Tóth
#114375
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Juraj Tóth is a Slovak astronomer, discoverer of minor planets, and professor of astronomy at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. An expert in meteoroid fragmentation, he is known for his observations of the 1998 Leonid meteor shower from Modra Observatory, which were later published in the journal Earth, Moon, and Planets. His photograph of the Leonid meteor shower was credited by NASA.
Go to Profile#4649
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
#40175
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'.
Go to Profile#4650
Norman M. Kroll
#120524
Overall Influence
