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,

#4651

Philippa Browning

#114212
Overall Influence
Philippa K. Browning is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. She specialises in the mathematical modelling of fusion plasmas. Early life and education Browning was educated at Millfield and studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1979. She completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1980. She was inspired by Yuri Gagarin to work in astrophysics. For her graduate studies Browning joined the University of St Andrews working with Eric Priest. She submitted her thesis on Inhomogeneous Ma...
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#4652

Jonathan E. Grindlay

#107798
Overall Influence
Jonathan E. Grindlay is an astrophysicist and Robert Treat Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy at the Harvard College Observatory of Harvard University. His research interests are in high energy astrophysics and the study of compact astronomical objects such as black holes in X-ray binaries. He is also one of the founders of the working group on time-domain astronomy of the American Astronomical Society.
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#4653

Pascale Garaud

#49701
Overall Influence
Pascale Garaud is a French astrophysicist and applied mathematician interested in fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and their applications to astrophysics and geophysics. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently serves as the department chair.
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#4654

Tyler B. Coplen

#120653
Overall Influence
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#4655

James P. Vary

#105986
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
James P. Vary is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the Iowa State University, specializing in nuclear theory with an emphasis on "ab initio" solutions of quantum many-particle systems and light-front quantum field theory.
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#4656

Harold L. Friedman

#120659
Overall Influence
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#4657

Thushara Pillai

#98645
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Thushara Pillai is an Indian astrophysicist and astronomer with a senior research scientist position at Boston University's Institute for Astrophysical Research. Her research interests have included molecular clouds, high-mass star formation, magnetic fields, astrochemistry, and the Galactic Center. She is known for her work that looked to understand star formation by observing magnetized interstellar clouds, and Pillai is the first astronomer to capture images of magnetic fields reorienting near areas of star formation.
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#4658

Frederick L. Scarf

#120700
Overall Influence
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#4659

Israel H. Silman

#120730
Overall Influence
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#4660

Ephraim Suhir

#120738
Overall Influence
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#4661

Peter J. Twin

#83177
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Peter John Twin is a British experimental nuclear physicist. He is known for his research into the structure of atomic nuclei, based upon his pioneering work on techniques of gamma ray spectroscopy and, specifically, the Total Energy Suppression Shield Array .
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#4662

You‐wei Du

#120794
Overall Influence
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#4663

Trevor Cox

#54714
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Trevor Cox is an English academic and science communicator. He was a Senior Media fellow for EPSRC, and is a past-President of the Institute of Acoustics. Academia Cox holds a degree in Physics and a PhD in Acoustics. He entered the field of acoustics because of an interest in music and his science background. He has been an academic in Acoustics Department at the University of Salford since 1995 and currently holds the position of Professor of Acoustic Engineering.
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#4664

Robert D. Mathieu

#91693
Overall Influence
Robert D. Mathieu is an astronomer and science educator who works at the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning . Recently, Mathieu led U.S. national initiatives for the improvement of science higher education. From 1998 to 2000 he was the associate director of the National Institute for Science Education, and led the development of the Field-tested Learning Assessment Guide and other resources for science, engineering, and mathematics faculty.
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#4665

Martin Ostoja-Starzewski

#107281
Overall Influence
Martin Ostoja-Starzewski is a Polish-Canadian-American scientist and engineer, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research includes work on deterministic and stochastic mechanics: random and fractal media, representative elementary volume in linear and nonlinear material systems, universal elastic anisotropy index, random fields, and bridging continuum mechanics to fluctuation theorem.
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#4666

Ian C. Percival

#99076
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Ian Colin Percival is a British theoretical physicist. He is the Emeritus Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University, University of London. He is one among the pioneers of quantum chaos and he is well known for his suggestion in the 1970s about the existence of a different type of spectra of quantum-mechanical systems due to classical chaos. Numerical explorations performed by other researchers clearly confirmed this idea later. In 1987, with Franco Vivaldi, he used the algebraic number theory of quadratic number fields to count the periodic orbits in generalized Arnold-Sinai cat maps.
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#4667

Gösta Gahm

Gösta Gahm
#116957
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Gösta Fredrik Gahm was a Swedish astronomer. Gösta Gahm was the professor emeritus of astronomy at Stockholm University. He was, until 2010, the chairman of the Swedish Astronomical Society, and was the main initiator of the popular science project Sweden Solar System.
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#4668

Andrew Lang

#107697
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Andrew Richard Lang FRS CBE was a British scientist and crystallographer. Biography Andrew Lang was the son of Ernest Frederick Stephen Lang, technical engineer with Beyer, Peacock & Company and Susannah C E A Guterbock, a naturalized German citizen.
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#4669

Alexander Andreev

#107889
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
Alexander Fyodorovich Andreev was a Russian theoretical physicist best known for explaining the eponymous Andreev reflection. Andreev was educated at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, starting in 1959 and graduating ahead of schedule in 1961, having been mentored by Landau.
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#4670

S. Ravi P. Silva

#120861
Overall Influence
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#4671

Michael Garrett

#101084
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael Garrett is a Scottish astronomer. He has been the Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics since September 2016. He was previously the General Director of ASTRON, part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
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#4672

Gordon William Frederic Drake

#120870
Overall Influence
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#4673

Anderson Sunda-Meya

#36431
Overall Influence
Anderson Sunda-Meya is a Congolese–American physicist and the Norwood Endowed Professor of Physics at Xavier University in New Orleans. He also holds the position of Associate Dean. Sunda-Meya was awarded the 2021 American Physical Society Excellence in Physics Education Award.
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#4674

Jean Kovalevsky

#86576
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Jean Kovalevsky was a French astronomer, specializing in celestial mechanics. He is known as a primary initiator and a leader of the Hipparcos space experiment. Biography Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Kovalevsky was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up bilingual in Russian and French. He studied from 1951 to 1955 at the École normale supérieure graduating with the agrégation in mathematics in 1954. He held from 1955 to 1960 the positions attaché de techerche and then chargé de recherche at the Paris Observatory. He was from 1957 to 1959 a graduate student and research assistant at Yale University.
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#4675

Marcin Kubiak

#118454
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Marcin Antoni Kubiak is a Polish astrophysicist, who obtained his professorship title on 25 April 1994. Member of the Committee of Astronomy of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a member of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment , co-discoverer of many extrasolar planetary systems . Author of the widely used academic book for astronomy students "Stars and Interstellar Matter" . Head of the Warsaw University Observatory , University of Warsaw during 1986–2008. Editor of quarterly scientific journal Acta Astronomica and a chairman of Copernicus Foundation for Polish Astronomy.
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#4676

Grant Tremblay

#102079
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Grant Tremblay is an American astrophysicist notable for research on supermassive black holes, science communication, and public advocacy for large space telescopes. He is currently an Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and was formerly a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory , and an Astronomer at ESO's Very Large Telescope .
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#4677

Joseph F. Hoffman

#97718
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Joseph Frederick Hoffman was an American scientist who primary researched the physiology of red blood cells. His research accomplishments were recognized in 1981 when he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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#4678

Antoni Opolski

#104083
Overall Influence
1913 - 2014 (101 years)
Antoni Opolski was a Polish physicist. His field was astronomy and astrophysics. After World War II, he worked at the astronomical observatory of the University of Wrocław. He retired in 1983. He was born in Rozwadów . He died from natural causes on 17 March 2014 in Wrocław, Poland. He was 100 years old. His funeral was held on 22 March.
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#4679

Paul William Hodge

#120972
Overall Influence
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#4680

Claude N. Cohen-tannoudji

#120976
Overall Influence
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#4681

Robert Behringer

#116420
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Robert P. Behringer was an American physicist based at Duke University, whose research first dealt with critical phenomena and transport properties in fluid helium, such as Rayleigh–Bénard convection, and since 1986 was involved with granular material, where his most notable achievements were in the development of the technique of photoelasticity to study spatio-temporal fluctuations. This enabled him to extract vector forces from images of photo-elastic disks, which are models for granular materials. His research demonstrated the strongly fluctuating nature of granular flows. Another aspect...
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#4682

Alasdair C. Steven

#120993
Overall Influence
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#4683

Maciej Wojtkowski

#84654
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Maciej Daniel Wojtkowski is a Polish physicist, specializing in physical optics and medical applications of optics, and founder and director of the International Centre for Translational Eye Research in Warsaw, Poland.
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#4684

Heike Riel

#70665
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Heike E. Riel is a nanotechnologist known for developing OLED displays. She works for IBM Research – Zurich, where she is Director of IoT Technology and AI Solutions, and Director of the Physical Sciences Department. Beyond her work on display technology, she is an expert in molecular electronics and nanoscale semiconductors.
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#4685

Steven Allan Boggs

#103673
Overall Influence
1946 - 2018 (72 years)
Steven Allan Boggs was an American physicist in the field of dielectrics and electrical insulation. He was a researcher in industry before becoming a tenured research professor at University of Connecticut from 1993 to 2013.
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#4686

Kamal Benslama

#88496
Overall Influence
Kamal Benslama is a Moroccan-Swiss experimental particle physicist. He is a professor of physics at Drew University, a visiting experimental scientist at Fermilab, and a guest scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory . He worked on the ATLAS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, which is considered the largest experiment in the history of physical science. At present, he is member of the MU2E collaboration at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago. Fermilab is a United States Department of Energy national labo...
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#4687

Ekkehard Sinn

#121054
Overall Influence
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#4688

Morton B. Panish

#121079
Overall Influence
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#4689

James H. Scofield

#121104
Overall Influence
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#4690

Myron Wyn Evans

#121113
Overall Influence
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#4691

Shinji Tsujikawa

#121148
Overall Influence
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#4692

Richard F. Wallis

#121175
Overall Influence
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#4693

Daniel Pomarède

#121178
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Daniel Pomarède is a staff scientist at the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe, CEA Paris-Saclay University. He co-discovered Laniakea, our home supercluster of galaxies, and Ho'oleilana, a spherical shell-like structure 1 billion light-years in diameter found in the distribution of galaxies, possibly the remnant of a Baryon Acoustic Oscillation. Specialized in data visualization and cosmography, a branch of cosmology dedicated to mapping the Universe, he also co-authored the discoveries of the Dipole Repeller and of the Cold Spot Repeller, two large influential c...
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#4694

Gerhard Gompper

#121205
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
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#4695

Christopher Sorensen

#97651
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Christopher Sorensen is the Cortelyou-Rust University Distinguished Professor and a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar in the Kansas State University Physics Department. He also is an adjunct professor in the department of chemistry at Kansas State University. He was named the Carnegie Foundation and Council for Advancement and Support of Education United States Professor of the Year for doctoral and research universities in 2007. His research interests include materials synthesis including graphene materials, light scattering, particulate systems, and soft matter physics.
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#4696

Kathy Vivas

#57293
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Anna Katherina Vivas is a Venezuelan astrophysicist recognized for her investigations of and finding up to 100 new and very distant RR Lyrae stars. They are between 13,000 and 220,000 light years from the Sun, and are considered some of the oldest in the Milky Way. Her research has enabled some of the first studies of the structure and properties of the whole halo of the Milky Way and not only its innermost parts. The observation was made possible by combining a telescope with a large format camera, allowing astronomers to cover large portions of the sky in a short amount of time.
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#4697

Riccardo Barbieri

#121261
Overall Influence
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#4698

Scott J. Bolton

Scott J. Bolton
#54622
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Scott J. Bolton is an American theoretical and experimental space physicist. He is an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division. His research area is planetary sciences with a focus on the giant planets and the origin of the solar system. Previously serving as a member of the Galileo and Cassini–Huygens missions, Bolton became the Principal Investigator of Juno, a New Frontiers program mission to Jupiter which began primary science in 2016.
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#4699

Ryoichiro Kageyama

#121286
Overall Influence
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#4700

Edward Hinds

#76093
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Edward Allen Hinds FInstP FAPS FRS is a British physicist noted for his work with cold matter. He was educated at Dame Allan's School in Newcastle before being offered a place at Jesus College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1968. He obtained both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate before moving to the United States to teach at Columbia University.
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