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,
#1
Peter Higgs
#66
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
#2
Edward Teller
#11
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design. Teller was known for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality.
Go to Profile#3
Hans Bethe
#32
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
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Eugene Wigner
#21
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
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Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
#154
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American theoretical physicist who spent his professional life in the United States. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for "...theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes. Many concepts, institutions, and inventions, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are named after ...
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Edward Witten
#58
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#7
Abdus Salam
#75
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
Mohammad Abdus Salam was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize, after Anwar Sadat of Egypt.
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John Archibald Wheeler
#104
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr to explain the basic principles of nuclear fission. Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of the Breit–Wheeler process. He is best known for popularizing the term "black hole" for objects with gravitational collapse already predicted during the early 20th century, for inventing the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe".
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François Englert
#337
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
#10
Sheldon Glashow
#173
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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Kip Thorne
#163
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#12
Murray Gell-Mann
#94
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co...
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Leonard Susskind
#247
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#14
Steven Weinberg
#225
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
#15
Julian Schwinger
#189
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Julian Seymour Schwinger was a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics , in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order. Schwinger was a physics professor at several universities.
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Yoichiro Nambu
#346
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism.
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Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
#234
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under Werner Heisenberg's leadership. There is ongoing debate as to whether or not he and the other members of the team actively and willingly pursued the development of a nuclear bomb for Germany during this time.
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Freeman Dyson
#65
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Freeman John Dyson was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Go to Profile#19
C. R. Hagen
#775
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Carl Richard Hagen is a professor of particle physics at the University of Rochester. He is most noted for his contributions to the Standard Model and Symmetry breaking as well as the 1964 co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble . As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Phys...
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John Bardeen
#77
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N. Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
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Francis Crick
#7
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Francis Harry Compton Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
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Gerald Guralnik
#773
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble . As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Frank Wilczek
#422
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Frank Wilczek was born in Mineola, New York in 1951. He earned his BSc degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and proceeded to complete MA and PhD degrees at Princeton in Math and Physics respectively. Wilczek is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute as well as Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Further, he is Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full Professor at Stockholm University.
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Tsung-Dao Lee
#178
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Tsung-Dao Lee is a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee–Yang theorem, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion physics, nontopological solitons, and soliton stars. He was a University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University in New York City, where he taught from 1953 until his retirement in 2012.
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Lee Smolin
#394
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#26
Alan Guth
#934
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alan Guth currently holds the title of Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at MIT. Previously, Guth has held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He earned his B.S. in physics at MIT in 1968, and completed his MS and PhD there by 1971. Guth is a theoretical particle physicist and cosmologist, best known for developing the idea of cosmic inflation (a theory that revises the Big Band theory to explain the expansion of the universe). Over the years, Guth has continued to develop this idea through numerous papers, and it has become a major theory in current cosmology.
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Robert Brout
#1104
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Robert Brout was an American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions in elementary particle physics. He was a professor of physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together with François Englert, the Service de Physique Théorique.
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Gerard 't Hooft
#664
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#29
William Alfred Fowler
#963
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
William Alfred Fowler was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential BFH paper.
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Rudolf Peierls
#495
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
Go to Profile#31
Fred Hoyle
#825
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Sir Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper. He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory in favor of the "steady-state model", and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth. He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for six years.
Go to Profile#32
Brian Greene
#795
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#33
Andrei Linde
#1442
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Moscow State University. In 1975, Linde was awarded a PhD from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. He worked at CERN since 1989 and moved to the United States in 1990, where he became professor of physics at Stanford University. Among the various awards he has ...
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Philip W. Anderson
#1005
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Philip Warren Anderson was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking , and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. Anderson is also responsible for naming the field of physics that is now known as condensed matter physics.
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David Gross
#583
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#36
David Bohm
#311
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
David Joseph Bohm was an American–Brazilian–British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Among his many contributions to physics is his causal and deterministic interpretation of quantum theory known as De Broglie–Bohm theory.
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Hannes Alfvén
#852
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics . He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of auroraee, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial...
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Masatoshi Koshiba
#833
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
was a Japanese physicist and one of the founders of neutrino astronomy. His work with the neutrino detectors Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in detecting solar neutrinos, providing experimental evidence for the solar neutrino problem.
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Antony Hewish
#772
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Antony Hewish was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969.
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Max Tegmark
#420
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#41
Peter Woit
#951
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Peter Woit is an American theoretical physicist. He is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit, a critic of string theory, has published a book Not Even Wrong and writes a blog of the same name.
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Carl Sagan
#272
Overall Influence
1934 - 1996 (62 years)
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surfac...
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Victor Weisskopf
#872
Overall Influence
1908 - 2002 (94 years)
Victor Frederick "Viki" Weisskopf was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Niels Bohr. During World War II he was Group Leader of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and he later campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
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Chien-Shiung Wu
#620
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.
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Andrew Strominger
#908
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Andrew Eben Strominger is an American theoretical physicist who is the director of Harvard's Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. He has made significant contributions to quantum gravity and string theory. These include his work on Calabi–Yau compactification and topology change in string theory, and on the stringy origin of black hole entropy. He is a senior fellow at the Society of Fellows, and is the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics.
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Alexei Starobinsky
#2081
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alexei Alexandrovich Starobinsky is a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist and cosmologist. He received the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation", together with Alan Guth and Andrei Linde in 2014.
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Robert Woodrow Wilson
#1198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Woodrow Wilson is an American astronomer who, along with Arno Allan Penzias, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. The pair won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
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Karl Wirtz
#1464
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon.
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Martin Rees
#626
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.
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Carl David Anderson
#1048
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Carl David Anderson was an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.
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