Alessandro Volta
1745 - 1827
HPI 85.34107 languages
Alessandro Volta is most famous for his voltaic pile, which was the first battery.
The Most Famous
Physicists from Italy
39 notable people
Trending Physicists from Italy This Week
The top 10 Physicists from Italy trending on Wikipedia in the past 7 days, with a quick note on what drove the spike.
- #1
Ettore Majorana
1906 - 1959
Trending in Italian (#273) Wikipedia (789 views, on Jul 16).
This page contains a list of the greatest Italians Physicists. The pantheon dataset contains 863 Physicists, 39 of which were born in Italy. This makes Italy the birth place of the 6th most number of Physicists behind France and Russia.
Top 10 Italian Physicists
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Italian Physicists of all time. This list of famous Italian Physicists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Italian Physicists.
#1 #2 
Evangelista Torricelli
1608 - 1647
HPI 84.2784 languagesTorricelli is most famous for his invention of the barometer.
#3 
Enrico Fermi
1901 - 1954
HPI 83.22147 languagesEnrico Fermi is most famous for the invention of the first nuclear reactor.
#4 
Luigi Galvani
1737 - 1798
HPI 80.2973 languagesLuigi Galvani was a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna. He is most famous for his work with electricity and animal tissue. He discovered that electricity could make muscles contract in frogs and other animals.
#5 
Emilio Segrè
1905 - 1989
HPI 74.4574 languagesEmilio Segrè was an Italian-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 for his discovery of the antiproton.
#6 
Laura Bassi
1711 - 1778
HPI 73.6851 languagesLaura Bassi was an Italian physicist and mathematician who became the first woman to teach at a European university. She was also the first woman to receive a doctorate in physics from a European university.
#7 
Francesco Maria Grimaldi
1618 - 1663
HPI 71.4239 languagesFrancesco Maria Grimaldi is most famous for his discovery of the diffraction of light.
#8 Ettore Majorana
1906 - 1959
HPI 70.8138 languagesEttore Majorana was an Italian physicist who disappeared in 1938. Majorana is most famous for his proposal of the Majorana particle, a particle that is its own antiparticle.
#9 
Carlo Rubbia
b. 1934
HPI 69.3472 languagesCarlo Rubbia is most famous for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for his work on the discovery of the W and Z particles.
#10 
Giovanni Battista Venturi
1746 - 1822
HPI 66.4630 languagesGiovanni Battista Venturi was a Renaissance architect and engineer who is most famous for his work on the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
People by Birth Decade
Browse notable Italians Physicists grouped by birth decade. Each decade shows the top 10 by HPI; expand to see everyone.
1950s(1)
1920s(2)
1910s(1)
1900s(7)
1870s(1)
1850s(1)
1810s(1)
1790s(1)
1780s(1)
1760s(1)
1730s(1)
1680s(1)
1610s(1)
1600s(1)
Overlapping Lives
Which Physicists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 25 most globally memorable Physicists since 1700.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
