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
#3751
Charles Pollard Olivier
1884 - 1975 (91 years)
Charles Pollard Olivier was an American astronomer, notable for his contributions to the study of meteors, double stars and variable stars. Biography Charles grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he lived close to the University of Virginia. In 1901 he became an assistant at the nearby Leander McCormick Observatory, and in 1905 he was Vanderbilt fellow at the observatory. He completed his Ph.D. in astronomy by 1911, with a dissertation disproving the existence of stationary meteor radiants.
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William Ripley Nichols
1847 - 1886 (39 years)
William Ripley Nichols was a noted American chemist. Early life Nichols was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1869, and served there as instructor and assistant professor until 1872, when he was elected professor of general chemistry, which chair he retained until his death in Hamburg, Germany.
Go to Profile#3753
Lawrence O. Brockway
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Lawrence Olin Brockway was a physical chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan, where he developed early methods for electron diffraction. Early life and education Brockway was born on September 23, 1907, in Topeka, Kansas. He attended the University of Nebraska and received his B.S. in 1929 and his M.S. a year later. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he was one of the first graduate students of Linus Pauling. He and Pauling were interested in the physics of interatomic interactions and focused their efforts on the structure of chalcopyri...
Go to Profile#3754
Ruth Wheeler
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Ruth Wheeler was an American chemist specialising in the field of nutrition and public education. Early life and education Ruth Wheeler was born on 5 August 1877 in Plains, Pennsylvania, to Jared Ward Wheeler and Martha Jane Wheeler . She was taught to read by her mother, and graduated from West Pittston High School in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Her thinking was influenced by her Welsh grandfather, Rev. Dr. Evan Benjamin Evans, a minister concerned with feeding the poor.
Go to Profile#3755
Robert Lyster Thornton
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Robert Lyster Thornton was a British-Canadian-American physicist who worked on the cyclotrons at Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in the 1930s. During World War II he assisted with the development of the calutron as part of the Manhattan Project. He returned to Berkeley in 1945 to lead the construction of the cyclotron, and spent the rest of his career there.
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William Mason
1808 - 1883 (75 years)
William Mason was a master mechanical engineer and builder of textile machinery and railroad steam locomotives. He founded Mason Machine Works of Taunton, Massachusetts. His company was a significant supplier of locomotives and rifles for the Union Army during the American Civil War. The company also later produced printing presses.
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Royal Wasson Sorensen
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Royal Wasson Sorensen was the inventor of the vacuum switch, professor of electrical engineering and head of the electrical engineering department at California Institute of Technology, and was also noted for his work in high voltage transmissions and air pollution. Sorensen was also a fellow and president of American Institute of Electrical Engineers and Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu.
Go to Profile#3758
Clark Blanchard Millikan
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Clark Blanchard Millikan was a distinguished professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology , and a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. Biography Millikan's parents were noted physicist Robert A. Millikan and Greta Erwin Blanchard. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, graduated from Yale College in 1924, then earned his PhD in physics and mathematics at Caltech in 1928 under Professor Harry Bateman. He became a professor upon receiving his degree, full professor of aeronautics in 1940, and director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical La...
Go to Profile#3759
Arthur T. Ippen
1907 - 1974 (67 years)
Arthur Thomas Ippen was a noted hydrologist and engineer and was an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born to German parents, he attended high school and college in Aachen, Germany graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1931. He then took an Institute of International Education scholarship to study at the University of Iowa but after his doctoral advisor, Floyd Nagler, died suddenly, Ippen transferred to Caltech to complete his Ph.D. His doctoral work, supervised by Theodore von Kármán and Robert T. Knapp, explored sediment transport and open-channel ...
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Charles D. Coryell
1912 - 1971 (59 years)
Charles DuBois Coryell was an American chemist who was one of the discoverers of the element promethium. Coryell earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a job with the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago and at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee . His group had responsibility for character...
Go to Profile#3761
Theodore von Kármán
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Theodore von Kármán , was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
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Wayne B. Nottingham
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
Wayne B. Nottingham was a US physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , specialized on electronics, field electron emission, thermionics, photoelectrics and low pressure equipment.
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Paul Martyn Lincoln
1870 - 1944 (74 years)
Paul Martyn Lincoln was president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1914 to 1915. He invented the synchroscope. Biography Lincoln was born on January 1, 1870, in Norwood, Michigan. He entered Case Western Reserve University in 1888 but transferred to the Ohio State University before his sophomore year to major in electrical engineering. While a sophomore, he participated in the formation of the first Ohio State football team, and played, at guard, in the first Ohio State game on May 3, 1890. In the fall of that year, Lincoln was elected captain of the team for its first f...
Go to Profile#3764
Alexis Caswell
1799 - 1877 (78 years)
Alexis Caswell was an American educator, born in Taunton, Massachusetts. He graduated Brown University in 1822, and entered the Baptist ministry. Career Caswell was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Brown University from 1828 to 1850, and of mathematics and astronomy from 1850 to 1864. Professor Caswell was president of Brown University from 1868 to 1872. He was one of the founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served as its President in 1857.
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Lilian Vaughan Morgan
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Lilian Vaughan Morgan was an American experimental biologist who made seminal contributions to the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, although her work was obscured by the attention given her husband, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan. Lilian Morgan published sixteen single-author papers between 1894 and 1947. Probably her most significant scientific contribution was the discovery of the attached-X chromosome and an entirely new pattern of inheritance in Drosophila in 1921. She also discovered the closed or ring-X chromosome in 1933. Both are important research tools today.
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Thomas Hope Johnson
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Thomas Hope Johnson was an American physicist, known for his research on cosmic rays. He was elected in 1930 a fellow of the American Physical Society. Biography Johnson graduated in 1920 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and economics from Amherst College. From 1920 to 1921 he was a graduate student and instructor in mathematics at the University of Maine. During the summers of 1922 and 1923 he studied at the University of Chicago. From 1922 to 1923 he taught at Moses Brown School. At Yale University he was from 1923 to 1924 an assistant in physics, from 1924 to 1925 a laboratory assistant in optics, and from 1926 to 1927 a Sterling research fellow.
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John Wheatley
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
John Charles Wheatley was an American experimental physicist who worked on quantum fluids at low and very low temperatures. Biography Wheatley received his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1947 from the University of Colorado in Boulder and his Ph.D. in physics under David Halliday in 1952 from the University of Pittsburgh. From 1952 to 1966 he was an instructor and then a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1966 he became a full professor in the physics department of the University of California, San Diego. From 1981 to 1985 he did research at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a permanent staff member of the Laboratory.
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C. H. Waddington
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Conrad Hal Waddington was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
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Sinclair Smith
1899 - 1938 (39 years)
Sinclair Smith was an American astronomer. His observations of the Virgo Cluster were among the first to suggest the existence of dark matter. Biography In 1906, his parents took him to Italy for two years, then to Indiana, where they lived until 1913, when they moved to California.
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Floyd Firestone
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Floyd Alburn Firestone was an acoustical physicist, who in 1940 while a professor at the University of Michigan invented the first practical ultrasonic testing method and apparatus. He was granted US Patent 2,280,226 for the invention in 1942. Manufactured by Sperry Corporation, the testing device was known variously as the Firestone-Sperry Reflectoscope, the Sperry Ultrasonic Reflectoscope, the Sperry Reflectoscope and sometimes also just as a Supersonic Reflectoscope, the name Firestone had originally coined for the instrument. The technology is not just used in quality control in factories to reject defective parts before shipment, but also revolutionized transportation safety.
Go to Profile#3771
Semen Altshuler
1911 - 1983 (72 years)
Semyon Alexandrovich Altshuler was a Soviet physicist known for his work in resonance spectroscopy and in particular for theoretical prediction of acoustic paramagnetic resonance in 1952. Early years Altshuler was born in 1911 in Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire. He finished school in Nizhny Novgorod and later moved to Kazan, where he spent most of his life. In 1928, he entered the physics faculty of the Kazan University aiming to study theoretical physics. He graduated in 1932 and obtained a post-graduate scholarship, but had to change university due to the scholarship rules. He moved to Moscow to study with Igor Tamm whom he admired for his books on electricity and magnetism.
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Thomas Thundat
Thomas George Thundat is an American scientist. He is currently the Empire Innovation Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo. Thundat is one of the pioneers in the field of nanosensors and a leading expert on microcantilevers.
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Gerald B. Cleaver
#3774
Richard Laub
1900 - Present (125 years)
Richard S. Laub is a scientist from the United States. He is curator of geology at the Buffalo Museum of Science, and directs excavations at the Hiscock Site in Byron, New York. His work includes development of the hypothesis that tuberculosis led to the extinction of the mastodon.
Go to Profile#3775
Hubert Mack Thaxton
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Hubert Mack Thaxton was an American nuclear physicist, mathematician, engineer, and the fourth African American person to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Thaxton's research focused on proton scattering, which at the time was a largely unexplored area of study.
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David L. Webster
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
David Locke Webster was an American physicist and physics professor, whose early research on X-rays and Parson's magneton influenced Arthur Compton. Biography David Locke Webster was born November 6, 1888, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Andrew Gerrish Webster and Elizabeth Florence Briggs. He attended Harvard University, earning an A.B. in 1910 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1913. His teaching career began at Harvard as a mathematics instructor, 1910–1911; physics assistant, 1911–15; and physics instructor, 1915–1917, during which time he published several papers on X-ray theory. This work continu...
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Louis Bell
1864 - 1923 (59 years)
Louis Bell was an American engineer, physicist, inventor, and academic. He was an early pioneer in illumination engineering and the transmission of electricity, being awarded 25 patents in power transmission.
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Frank T. M. White
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
Frank Thomas Matthews White was an Australian mining and metallurgical engineer and mineral science educator. His career included appointments in Australia, Fiji, Malaya, and Canada. An examination of White's career reveals steady progression from an initial technical focus on the goldfields of Western Australia, to the challenge of new mining enterprises in Fiji, to post-war rehabilitation of tin mining in Malaya, ultimately to encompass a broad appreciation of the complexities of the minerals industry as a whole, its human factors, and societal context. He applied these insights in developi...
Go to Profile#3779
Robert Emerson
1903 - 1959 (56 years)
Robert Emerson was an American scientist noted for his discovery that plants have two distinct photosynthetic reaction centress. Family Emerson was born in 1903 in New York City, the son of Dr. Haven Emerson, Health Commissioner of New York City, and Grace Parrish Emerson, the sister of Maxfield Parrish. Emerson was the brother of John Haven Emerson the inventor of the iron lung.
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Frank Malina
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Frank Joseph Malina was an American aeronautical engineer and painter, known for his pioneering work in early rocketry. Early life Malina was born in Brenham, Texas. His father came from Moravia. Frank's formal education began with a degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1934. The same year he received a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology , where he obtained his doctoral degree in 1940.
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Alexander Smith
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Prof Alexander Smith FRSE LLD was a Scottish chemist, who spent his working life teaching in the universities of America. Biography He was born at 4 Nelson Street in Edinburgh's New Town, the son of Isabella and Alexander W. Smith, a music teacher. His paternal grandfather was the sculptor Alexander Smith. The family moved to 4 West Castle Road in the Merchiston district while he was young.
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Fernando Sanford
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Fernando Sanford was an American physicist and university professor. He was one of the 22 "pioneer professors" for Stanford University. Sanford was born on a farm near Franklin Grove in Lee County, Illinois, on February 12, 1854. He was the son of Faxton and Maria Mariah Sanford. He attended Carthage College, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1879. He taught school until the mid-1880s, then studied physics in Germany under Hermann von Helmholtz for two years.
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Walter Gordy
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Walter Gordy, was an American physicist best known for his experimental work in microwave spectroscopy. His laboratory at Duke University became a center for research in this field, and he authored one of the definitive books on the field.
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Eugene Gardner
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Milton Eugene Gardner was an American physicist who worked on radar systems at the Radiation Laboratory in Massachusetts. Early life He was born in Santa Cruz, California, but would have been born in China if his father, a missionary under the American Board of Missions, had not returned temporarily to the United States for safety during the Boxer Rebellion.
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John F. McCarthy Jr.
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
John Francis McCarthy Jr. was an American scientist and engineer. He worked for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as director of its Center for Space Research; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as the director of its Lewis Research Center; the United States Air Force, where he served with the Strategic Air Command and as a member of the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; North American Rockwell, where he oversaw the design and development of the Apollo command and service module that took the first men to the Moon, and the S-II of the Saturn V rocket.
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Howard P. Robertson
1903 - 1961 (58 years)
Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
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Henry Pachter
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Henry Pachter was a Marxist intellectual and a libertarian socialist activist. Perhaps best known as an essayist, who dealt with both historical and political matters, he also authored a number of books on a variety of subjects. An exile from the Nazi regime, deeply concerned with the lessons offered by the Weimar Republic, he taught at the New School for Social Research and then at the City College of the City University of New York until his death in 1980.
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Harry M. Weaver
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Harry M. Weaver was an American neuroscientist and researcher who made contributions to medical research in the fields of Multiple sclerosis, and was the Director of Research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis when the Polio vaccine was discovered and developed by Jonas Salk. Dr. Weaver also served as the Vice President for Research at the American Cancer Society, Vice President for Research and Development at the Schering Corporation, and as the Director of Research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
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Herbert J. Herring
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Herbert James Herring was an American college dean. Herring received his A.B. degree from Trinity College in 1922 and his M.A. degree from Columbia University in 1929. He also received his Doctor of Laws from Juniata College. Herring married Virginia Cozart, with whom he had two children: Virginia Frank Herring and Herbert J. Herring, Jr.
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Alysia D. Marino
Alysia Diane Marino is an American experimental particle physicist. She is the Jesse L. Mitchell Endowed Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2022, Marino was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "major contributions to understanding the physics of neutrino production and interactions, and for leadership in data analysis in the T2K and NA61/SHINE collaborations."
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Nicolae Giosan
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Nicolae Giosan was a Romanian agricultural engineer and communist politician. Biography Origins and scientific career Born in Drâmbar, Alba County, his parents Ioachim and Maria were peasants who owned six hectares of land. They had three other children who remained on the land. Despite material difficulties, Nicolae was a top student throughout his academic career. Following primary school in his native village from 1927 to 1932, he attended Mihai Viteazul High School in Alba Iulia from 1932 to 1940. Then, from 1940 to 1945, Giosan studied at the Cluj Agronomy Faculty, temporarily relocated to Timișoara due to the Second Vienna Award.
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James Gilluly
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
James Gilluly was an American geologist. Regarding the Cupriferous Porphyry Genesis, Gilluly integrated detailed observations of the Ajo porphyry between 1936 and 1936 with experimental data . Gilluly concluded that after the Ajo quartz monzonite intruded and crystallized, it was fractured by magmatic bypass solutions . Gilluly frequency experimental restrictions to estimate a paleo depth between 1000 and 3000 , consistent with solidus temperatures of 900 °C for granite, containing 4% by weight of water. He realized that the source magmatic content was water, sulfur and halogens, and that the binders can form complexes with metals to produce an aqueous fluid with larger volumes.
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Gordon Pall
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Gordon Pall was a Canadian mathematician. In 1945, he and Lloyd Williams founded the Canadian Mathematical Congress. Education and career Gordon Pall got a B.A. at the University of Manitoba in 1926, an M,A. at the University of Toronto in 1927, and a Ph.D. in 1929 under Leonard Eugene Dickson with the dissertation "Problems in Additive Theory of Numbers" at the University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1929.
Go to Profile#3794
Gennady Potapenko
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Gennady Vasilyevich Potapenko was an American radio astronomer of Russian origin. After the signal discoveries made by Karl Jansky in the mid-1930s, Potapenko , along with Caltech physicist Donald Folland and Palomar telescope designer Russell Porter, attempted further researches in 'star static' in 1936. They were able to confirm Jansky's results with a loop antenna, then a single wire, but were unable to secure adequate funding to continue.
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Wallace Sterling
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
John Ewart Wallace Sterling was an American educator who served as the 5th President of Stanford University between 1949 and 1968. Life and career Sterling was born in Linwood, Ontario, the son of Annie and William Sterling, a Methodist clergyman. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Alberta.
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Richard Lorenz
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Richard Lorenz was an Austrian chemist. He was the son of historian Ottokar Lorenz. He studied chemistry at the Universities of Vienna and Jena, receiving his doctorate in 1888 with a dissertation on the valence of boron, "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Valenz des Bors". After graduation, he worked as an assistant in the biological institute at the University of Rostock. In 1892 he obtained his habilitation in physical chemistry at University of Göttingen.
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Eli Sternberg
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Eli Sternberg was a researcher in solid mechanics and was considered to be the "nation's leading elastician" at the time of his death. He earned his doctorate in 1945 under Michael Sadowsky at the Illinois Institute of Technology with a dissertation entitled Non-Linear Theory of Elasticity and Applications. He made contributions widely in elasticity, especially in mathematical analysis, the theory of stress concentrations, thermo-elasticity, and visco-elasticity.
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Jay Robert McColl
1867 - 1936 (69 years)
Jay Robert McColl was the dean of Engineering for University of Detroit starting in 1911. A Detroit elementary school is named after him. Biography The son of Robert McColl, he received his general education at Ann Arbor High School and graduated in 1890 from Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing, Michigan. He was appointed to the U.S. Geological Survey in 1890 but did not accept this post. Instead, he took special post-graduate courses at Michigan Agricultural College and Cornell University.
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Jean‐pierre Bibring
#3800
