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
#3701
Warren P. Mason
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Warren Perry Mason was an American electrical engineer and physicist at Bell Labs. A graduate of Columbia University, he had a prolific output, publishing four books and nearly a hundred papers. He was issued over two hundred patents, more than anyone else at Bell Labs. His work included acoustics, filters, crystals and ceramics, materials science, polymer chemistry, ultrasonics, bonding to semiconductors, internal friction, and viscoelasticity.
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William Maxwell Reed
1871 - 1962 (91 years)
William Maxwell Reed was a pioneering U.S. author of illustrated science books for children. After schooling at Harvard, he taught astronomy at Harvard and Princeton University. Reed later went into the steel industry.
Go to Profile#3703
Peter Beiersdorfer
#3704
Wang Guosong
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Wang Guosong , was a Chinese electrical engineer, and a pioneer of electrotechniques in modern China. Wang was also an educator, and best known for his acting President position of Zhejiang University in history.
Go to Profile#3705
Boris Podolsky
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Boris Yakovlevich Podolsky was a Russian-American physicist of Jewish descent, noted for his work with Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox. Education In 1896, Boris Podolsky was born into a poor Jewish family in Taganrog, in the Don Host Oblast of the Russian Empire and attended the Taganrog Gymnasium. He moved to the United States in 1913. After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1918, he served in the US Army and then worked at the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light. In 1926, he obtained an MS in mathematics from the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#3706
Max Delbrück
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück was a German–American biophysicist who participated in launching the molecular biology research program in the late 1930s. He stimulated physical scientists' interest into biology, especially as to basic research to physically explain genes, mysterious at the time. Formed in 1945 and led by Delbrück along with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey, the Phage Group made substantial headway unraveling important aspects of genetics. The three shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses".
Go to Profile#3707
Bice Sechi-Zorn
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Bice Sechi-Zorn was an Italian/American nuclear physicist, and professor at the University of Maryland. Life She graduated from University of Cagliari. She met her husband, Gus T. Zorn, at the University of Padua. They both worked at the University of Maryland. She was a professor of physics beginning from 1976 to 1984.
Go to Profile#3708
Chester Stock
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Chester Stock was an American paleontologist who specialized in the Pleistocene mammalian fauna of the Rancho La Brea tar pits. He served as a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
Go to Profile#3709
Arie Jan Haagen-Smit
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Arie Jan Haagen-Smit was a Dutch chemist. He is best known for linking the smog in Southern California to automobiles and is therefore known by many as the "father" of air pollution control. After serving as an original board member of the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, formed in 1960 to combat the smog, Dr. Haagen-Smit became the California Air Resources Board's first chairman in 1968. Shortly before his death in Pasadena, California of lung cancer, the Air Resources Board's El Monte Laboratory was named after him.
Go to Profile#3710
Stanley Corrsin
1920 - 1986 (66 years)
Stanley Corrsin was an American physicist, fluid dynamicist, and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He was known for his contributions in the field of fluid dynamics in general and turbulence in particular. He was a recipient of Fluid Dynamics Prize in 1983. Corrsin died of cancer on 2 June 1986 at the age of 66.
Go to Profile#3711
William Gould Young
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
William Gould Young was an American physical organic chemist and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles . He served as vice chancellor at UCLA for 13 years, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The chemistry building at UCLA bears his name.
Go to Profile#3712
Edward C. Molina
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Edward Charles Dixon Molina was an American engineer, known for his contributions to teletraffic engineering. Biography Edward Molina was born on December 13, 1877. After completing high school, he went to work, and was self-taught in mathematics. He began working for the Western Electric Company in 1898 at the age of 21 and entered the AT&T research department in 1901. His invention of relay translators in 1906 resulted in the panel dial systems. In his studies of telephone traffic, Molina independently rediscovered the Poisson distribution in 1908. It was briefly named in his honor among American telephone engineers until the prior art was recovered.
Go to Profile#3713
Albert Francis Blakeslee
1874 - 1954 (80 years)
Albert Francis Blakeslee was an American botanist. He is best known for his research on the poisonous jimsonweed plant and the sexuality of fungi. He was the brother of the Far East scholar George Hubbard Blakeslee.
Go to Profile#3714
George Ellery Hale
1868 - 1938 (70 years)
George Ellery Hale was an American astrophysicist, best known for his discovery of magnetic fields in sunspots, and as the leader or key figure in the planning or construction of several world-leading telescopes; namely, the 40-inch refracting telescope at Yerkes Observatory, 60-inch Hale reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, 100-inch Hooker reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson, and the 200-inch Hale reflecting telescope at Palomar Observatory. He played a key role in the foundation of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research and the National Research Council, a...
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Tse‐lok Ho
#3716
Max Krook
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Max Krook was an American mathematician and astrophysicist. Krook was born in Standerton, South Africa, the son of Pesach Israel Krook and Leah Krook. An undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand, Krook received a doctorate in mathematics from Cambridge University in England in 1938 under the supervision of Arthur Eddington. He was subsequently recruited to Birmingham University by Rudolf Peierls.
Go to Profile#3717
Hans Albert Einstein
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Hans Albert Einstein was a Swiss-American engineer and educator, the second child and first son of physicists Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. He was a long-time professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3718
Lewis Victor Heilbrunn
1892 - 1959 (67 years)
Lewis Victor Heilbrunn was an influential American biologist. Heilbrunn was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927, and on his return from Europe began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he would hold for 30 years. His Outline of General Physiology became a standard foundational text in the field.
Go to Profile#3719
John Robert Woodyard
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
John Robert Woodyard was an American physicist who made important contributions to the technology of microwave electronics and invented "doping" to improve the performance of semiconductors. Life Born in West Virginia and educated in Washington, Woodyard showed an early enthusiasm for radio telegraphy and trained and worked as a radio operator and technician, at sea and on land. In 1928 he enrolled at the University of Washington to study electrical engineering and graduated in 1932. He then pursued an academic career, eventually arriving at Stanford University to work with Russel and Sigurd F.
Go to Profile#3720
Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
Prof. Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao was an Indian physicist in the field of Spectroscopy. Rangadhama Rao is best known for his work on spectroscopy, his role in the development of Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance , and his long association with the physics laboratories of Andhra University. In his later years, he became known for his position as the Principal of all the colleges of Andhra University before their divisions into separate colleges, viz., AU College of Arts and Commerce, AU College of Engineering, AU College of Law, AU College of Pharmacy and AU College of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#3721
Carl Niemann
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Carl George Niemann was an American biochemist who worked extensively on the chemistry and structure of proteins, publishing over 260 research papers. He is known, with Max Bergmann, for proposing the Bergmann-Niemann hypothesis that proteins consist of 288 residue polypeptides or multiples thereof with periodic sequences of amino acids, and for contributing to the downfall of the cyclol model of protein structure.
Go to Profile#3722
Jean Weigle
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Jean-Jacques Weigle was a Swiss molecular biologist at Caltech and formerly a physicist at the University of Geneva from 1931 to 1948. He is known for his major contributions on field of bacteriophage λ research, focused on the interactions between those viruses and their E. coli hosts.
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Martin D. Whitaker
1902 - 1960 (58 years)
Martin Dewey Whitaker was an American physicist who was the first director of the Clinton Laboratories during World War II. He served as president of Lehigh University from 1946 until his death in 1960.
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Jack Parsons
1914 - 1952 (38 years)
John Whiteside Parsons was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology , Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.
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William P. Murphy
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
William Parry Murphy was an American physician who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and George Hoyt Whipple for their combined work in devising and treating macrocytic anemia .
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Joseph Grinnell
1877 - 1939 (62 years)
Joseph Grinnell was an American field biologist and zoologist. He made extensive studies of the fauna of California, and is credited with introducing a method of recording precise field observations known as the Grinnell System. He served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley from the museum's inception in 1908 until his death.
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Jesse DuMond
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Jesse William Monroe DuMond was an American experimental physicist. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards and later at Caltech where he was involved in experimental approaches to establish accurate measurements of a number of physical constants including the mass and charge of the electron; and Planck's constant.
Go to Profile#3728
James Ferguson
1797 - 1867 (70 years)
James Ferguson was a Scottish-born American astronomer and engineer, who made the first discovery of an asteroid from North America . Biography James Ferguson was born in Scotland on August 31, 1797, and his family moved to the United states in 1800.
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Paul I. Richards
1923 - 1978 (55 years)
Paul Irving Richards was a physicist and applied mathematician. Richard's is best known to electrical engineers for the eponymous Richards' transformation. However, much of his career was concerned with radiation transport and fluid flow. Notably, he produced one of the earliest models of traffic waves on busy highways.
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Peter Szolovits
#3731
Alfred Holmes White
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Alfred Holmes White was a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan. Biography He was born in Peoria, Illinois to Samuel Holmes White and Jennie McLaren. He married Rebecca Mason Downey on July 28, 1903, and had two children.
Go to Profile#3732
Ian Rylance Booth
#3733
George Ernest Gibson
1884 - 1959 (75 years)
George Ernest Gibson was a Scottish-born American nuclear chemist. Early years George Ernest Gibson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and educated partly in Germany where he attended a gymnasium in Darmstadt, finishing his schooling in Edinburgh. He studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh receiving his B.Sc. in 1906. He worked with Otto Lummer at the former University of Breslau where he received his Ph.D. in 1911, and stayed there as lecturer for two additional years before returning to the University of Edinburgh in 1912.
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Margaret Eliza Maltby
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Margaret Eliza Maltby was an American physicist notable for her measurement of high electrolytic resistances and conductivity of very dilute solutions. Maltby was the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT, where she had to enroll as a "special" student because the institution did not accept female students. Maltby was also the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1895.
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Lloyd A. Jeffress
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Lloyd Alexander Jeffress was an acoustical scientist, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a developer of mine-hunting models for the US Navy during World War II and after, Jeffress was known to psychologists for his pioneering research on auditory masking in psychoacoustics, his stimulus-oriented approach to signal-detection theory in psychophysics, and his "ingenious" electronic and mathematical models of the auditory process.
Go to Profile#3736
Joseph Edward Mayer
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Joseph Edward Mayer was a chemist who formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory. He was professor of chemistry at the University of California San Diego from 1960 to 1972, and previously at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972. He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society .
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Robert James Moon
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Robert James Moon was an American physicist, chemist and engineer. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he served on the faculty there and participated in the Manhattan Project. External links Who Was Robert J. Moon? https://21sci-tech.com/articles/drmoon.html 21st Century Science & TechnologyUniversity of Chicago Photo Archive, Accelerator Building http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?one=apf2-00146.xmlInterview: Robert Moon. Part I. 'We grew up confident we could solve any problem.' https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1987/eirv14n43-19871030/eirv14n43-19871030_031-dr_robert_moon.pdf Executive Intelligence Review, Vol.
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Robert E. Rundle
1915 - 1963 (48 years)
Robert Eugene Rundle was an American chemist and crystallographer. He was a professor at Iowa State University and fellow of the American Physical Society. Early life and education Rundle was born in Orleans, Nebraska in 1915. He attended University of Nebraska where he completed a bachelor of science in 1937 and a master's degree in 1938. He completed a Ph.D. in 1941 at the California Institute of Technology. His advisors were Linus Pauling and J. Holmes Sturdivant.
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Isabelle Stone
1868 - 1966 (98 years)
Isabelle Stone was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society. She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Early life and education Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago. She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890, and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University. Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.
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Alexander Graham Christie
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Alexander Graham Christie was a Canadian/American mechanical engineer and Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, who served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1939–40.
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Rose Mooney-Slater
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Rose Camille LeDieu Mooney-Slater was a professor of physics at the Newcomb College of the Tulane University and the first female X-ray crystallographer in the United States. Life Rose Camille LeDieu was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Mooney-Slater received a B.S. and M.S. in physics from the Newcomb College of the Tulane University in 1926 and 1929, respectively. In 1932, she received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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Martha Doan
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Martha Doan was an American chemist whose contributions include research in compounds of thallium, three published work, and tenure as a professor and dean at various institutions in the US. Throughout her lifetime she received four degrees, a B.S. and master's from Purdue, a B.L. from Earlham College, and a Sc.D. from Cornell. She was a dean of women for two colleges, Earlham College and Iowa Wesleyan College. In addition to her involvement in higher education, she was involved with several national organizations that involved chemistry and science. She was awarded a certificate for Outstanding Service to Science in 1951.
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Frank Elmore Ross
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Frank Elmore Ross was an American astronomer and physicist. He was born in San Francisco, California and died in Altadena, California. In 1901 he received his doctorate from the University of California. In 1905 he became director of the International Latitude Observatory station at Gaithersburg, Maryland. In 1915 he became a physicist for Eastman Kodak Company at Rochester, New York. He accepted a position at Yerkes Observatory in 1924 and worked there until his retirement in 1939.
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Alexey A. Petrov
Alexey A Petrov is an American physicist known for his theoretical research in the area of physics of heavy quarks. Petrov is a USC Endowed Chair in Physics and the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South Carolina. Previously he was a professor of physics at Wayne State University. He is the first particle theorist in the State of Michigan to receive National Science Foundation's CAREER award
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George Ashley Campbell
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
George Ashley Campbell was an American engineer. He was a pioneer in developing and applying quantitative mathematical methods to the problems of long-distance telegraphy and telephony. His most important contributions were to the theory and implementation of the use of loading coils and the first wave filterss designed to what was to become known as the image method. Both these areas of work resulted in important economic advantages for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company .
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Max Millikan
1913 - 1969 (56 years)
Max Franklin Millikan was an American economist, Professor of Economics at MIT, assistant director of the Office of Research and Reports at the CIA, and director of the MIT Center for International Studies.
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Gerhard Heinrich Dieke
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Gerhard Heinrich Dieke was a German/U.S. physicist. He was a pioneer in investigating the structure of atoms and molecules by spectroscopic methods. Dieke studied at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, and received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California in 1926. After completing his graduate studies, he worked at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Tokyo and in 1929 he was Dirk Coster's assistant at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Dieke joined the department of physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1930 as an associate professor, and he...
Go to Profile#3749
Paco Lagerstrom
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Paco Axel Lagerstrom was an applied mathematician and aeronautical engineer. He was trained formally in mathematics, but worked for much of his career in aeronautical applications. He was known for work in applying the method of asymptotic expansion to fluid mechanics problems. Several of his works have become classics, including "Matched Asymptotic Expansions: Ideas And Techniques".
Go to Profile#3750
Ralph Duncan James
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Ralph Duncan James was a Canadian mathematician working on number theory and mathematical analysis. Born in Liverpool, Ralph moved with his parents to Vancouver, British Columbia when he was 10 years old. After graduating from high school, Ralph attended University of British Columbia. After graduating, he continued in mathematics, writing a master’s thesis on Tangential Coordinates. Proceeding to University of Chicago, he studied number theory and Waring's problem under L. E. Dickson. In 1932 he was a awarded a Ph.D. on the strength of his dissertation Analytical Investigations of Waring's Theorem.
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