| Pioneer | Date | Contribution |
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| 1. |  Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) English science philosopher and political theorist | 1651 | Wrote the book Leviathan, in which he draws analogies between laws of mechanics and features of society. |
| 2. |  Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764)
Italian natural philosopher | 1737 | His Newtonianism for the Ladies "employs the inverse square law to calculate the power of attraction between a pair of separated lovers". |
| 3. |  Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Scottish social philosopher and political economist | 1776 | His Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is said to have found inspiration in Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia, particularly the idea of causative forces. [5] |
| 4. |  John Stewart (1749-1822)
British philosopher | 1789 | Derived a purely materialist physics-based “moral motion” theory. |
| 5. | Nicolas-Francois Canard (c.1750-1833)
French mathematician, philosopher and economist | 1801 | Argued that view that supply and demand are ontologically like contradicting physical forces. [8] |
| 6. |  Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) French social theorist | 1817 | Gave Auguste Comte a job of secretary; the two were said to have worked together for a period of seven years to develop a version of "social physics". |
| 7. |  Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)
Belgian mathematician, astronomer, and sociologist | 1835 | Wrote the book Essay on Social Physics. |
| 8. |  Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
French sociologist and philosopher | 1842 | Outlined the view that 'social physics' needs a Galileo-Newton type description. |
| 9. |  Henry Carey (1793-1879)
American sociologist and economist | 1858 | Developed a theory of 'social gravitation’. |
| 10. | Jules Regnault (1834-1894)
French economist | 1863 | His “Calculations of Chances and Philosophy of Trading”, said to have been strongly influenced by the social physics of Adolphe Quetelet, developed a version of what has been called “financial physics”; was later employed by French mathematician Louis Bachelier (1870-1946) who is said to have used a random hypothesis to treat securities prices similar to gas molecules, moving independently of each other, with future movements being independent of past movements. [3] |
| 11. |  Francis Edgeworth (1845-1926)
Irish mathematical economist | 1881 | Applied mathematical physics to the moral sciences. |
| 12. |  Alfred Marshall (1842-1924)
English microeconomist | c.1890 | Said to have drew on ideas of physicists to develop the notion that economies achieves an equilibrium state like that described for gases by James Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann. |
| 13. |  Louis Bachelier (1870-1946)
French mathematician | 1900 | Building on the work of Jules Regnault, said to have used a random hypothesis to treat securities prices similar to gas molecules, moving independently of each other, with future movements being independent of past movements. [3][5] |
| 14. |  Ludwig Boltzmann
(1844-1906)
(IQ=195) | 1905 | In his Popular Writings (Populäre Schriften), first praised American engineer Willard Gibbs for his systematic development of statistical mechanics, and then said to have commented: [7]
“This opens a broad perspective, if we do not only think of mechanical objects. Let’s consider to apply this method to the statistics of living beings, society, sociology and so forth.” |
| 15. |  Spiru Haret (1851-1912)
Romanian mathematical physicist | 1910 | Developed a physical mathematics based social mechanics. |
| 16. |  Ettore Majorana (1906-1938)
Italian theoretical physicist
(IQ=195) | c.1933 | His circa 1933 article “The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences” suggested the application of quantum statistical physics to social sciences (see: human quantum mechanics). |
| 17. |  John Q. Stewart (1894-1972) American astrophysicist | 1947 | His “Suggested Principles of ‘Social Physics” attempts to outline, formulaically, what he called a “human gas” model of population demographics, in which he viewed each person as a “molecule” (or human molecule, in the modern sense of the term) and uses a shorthand version of ideal gas law to derive formulas for demographic gravitation, demographic energy, among others. He followed this up with several other articles in the following decade. |
| 18. |  George Lundberg (1895-1966)
American sociologist | 1948 | Socially models people as ‘electron-proton configurations’. |
| 19 |  Thomas Schelling (1921-)
American economist | 1969 | His famous “Models of Segregation” outlined a checker-board type social attraction and repulsion model, which showed that small micro preferences for one's neighbors, such as skin color or similar ethnicity, could lead to total segregation. |
| 20. | Roy Henderson (c.1935-)
Australian mechanical engineer | 1971 | Modeled of crowd behavior and pedestrian traffic on fluid mechanics and ideal gas models; in his first paper, the highly-cited 1971 “The Statistics of Crowd Fluids”, he measured the movements of college students on a campus and children on a playground, finding that in both cases their movements fit the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. |
| 21. |  Wolfgang Weidlich (1931-)
German physicist | 1971 | His article “The Statistical Description of Polarization Phenomena in Society”, on the dynamics of opinion forming, is said to be one of the founding papers of sociophysics. |
| 22. |  Elliott Montroll (1916-1983)
American chemist, mathematician, and statistical physicist | 1974 | Did a certain number of humans to molecules comparisons to explain, wherein he used collision theory to explain the transfer of goods and services, family, annual income, and wealth distributions (Pareto's principle). |
| 23. |  Per Bak (1948-2002)
Danish theoretical physicist | 1988 | His highly-cited 1988 article "Self-organized Criticality" introduced the sand pile model of critical states which he alluded could be applied to the social sciences and economics; he extended this model into the social domain in his 1996 book How Nature Works. |
| 24. |  Necip Cakır (c.1963-)
Turkish econophysicst | 1988 | Completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Bogazici, Istanbul, was published as the 1998 book Physics and Economics; currently is a professor of economics and deputy dean at the University of Bahcesehir. |
| 25. |  Rosario Mantegna (1960-)
Italian physicist and econophysicist | 1991 | He started to work in the area of the analysis and modeling of social and economic systems with tools and concepts of statistical physics as early as in 1990; published the first econophysics paper in a physics journal in 1991; co-authored the first econophysics paper in Nature, in 1995;in 1999, he published the first book on econophysics; after earning his tenured position in 1999, he founded the Observatory of Complex Systems, a research group of the Department of Physics of Palermo University, focused on econophysics. |
| 26. |  Eugene Stanley (1944-)
American physicist
| 1995 | Coined the term "econophysics"; wrote the 2000 Introduction to Econophysics, co-authored with Rosario Mantegna; his work was one of the reasons Dietrich Stauffer went into econophysics. |
| 27. |  Yi-Cheng Zhang
(1954-) | 1996 |  His group, at the University of Fribourg, introduced the first econophysics webpage unifr.ch/econophysics, otherwise known as the Econophysics Forum. [1] His asking of Joseph McCauley to write reviews and then articles for the Econophysics Forum was what drew him in to econophysics in 1999. |
| 28. |  Simon Capelin (c.1951-)
English science publishing editor | c.1997 | Said to have led the charge in publishing market by bring out the books by Eugene Stanley and others. [3] |
| 29. |  Malcolm Gladwell (1963-)
American social science writer | 1996 | Popularized a tipping point theory of collective social behavior. |
| 30. |  Dietrich Stauffer (1943-)
German theoretical physicist | 1998 | Began working in the application of statistical physics and in particular computational physics in econophysics (since 1998) and sociophysics (since 2000); in 2003 the international symposium "Unconventional Applications of Statistical Physics: Physics of Random Networks, Econophysics, and Models of Biophysics and Sociophysics" was held in his honor; his 2006 Biology, Sociology, Geology by Computation Physicists, contains an end chapter on end chapter to the social science, mentioning Empedocles, Ettore Majorana, Thomas Schelling, Serge Galam, Wolfgang Weidlich, and Jurgen Mimkes; his 2011 article “Statistical Physics for Humanities: A Tutorial” suggests how to use Fortran to build computer simulations for a type of human statistical physics. |
| 31. |  Mark Buchanan (1961-)
American physicist | 2000 | Theorizes on power laws and social atoms. |
| 32. |  Victor Yakovenko (c.1960-)
Russian-born American physicist | 2000 | Began promoting econophysics, about the US, out of the University of Maryland. |
| 33. |  Philip Ball (1962-)
English chemical physicist | 2001 | Writes on ‘physics of society’; concepts such as ‘critical mass’. |
| 34. |  Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (1967-)
Romanian-born American physicist | 2002 | Discusses hubs, connectors, links, and ties social models; student of Eugene Stanley. |
| 35. |  Joseph McCauley (1943-)
American physicist | c.2003 | Completed his 1972 PhD under Norwegian-born American thermodynamicist Lars Onsager at Yale University; authored the 2004 Dynamics of Markets: Econophysics and Finance; head of the econophysics department at the University of Houston, which as of 2008, is said to be one of the only universities that offers a PhD program in econophysics. [4] |
| 36. | Victor Yakovenko () | c.2003 | Runs an econophysics research group at the physics department of the University of Maryland. [6] |
| 37. | Carlos Perez (1955-)
Spanish sociologist | 2004 | His “The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences” reprints (in English) and recounts the circa 1935 social quantum mechanics article Ettore Majorana. |
| 38. | Richard Ecob (c.1983-)
English physicist | 2005 | Developed an atomic radioactive decay model of how people look for partners on the view that anyone’s romantic life can be reduced to a series of transitions, or ‘transit states’, e.g. ‘twice-divorced and now single’; a sort of nuclear decay version of chemistry's transition state theory. |
| 39. |  Ted Erikson (c.1928-)
American chemical engineer | 2005 | Since circa 2005 has been working on a Planck-scale theory of panpsychism consciousness and growth; discussing it in talks, such as at the local Chicago area American Association of Physics Teachers meetings (2008), American Institute of Chemical Engineering meetings (2010), etc.; his 2009 chapter “What Makes Us Human: Panpsychism and Thermodynamics Explored” outlines some of his ideas. |
| 40. |  Libb Thims (c.1975-)
American chemical engineer, electrical engineer, and thermodynamicist | 2007 | His 2007 textbook Human Chemistry introduced the exchange force model of human chemical bonding (mediated by field particles: primary and secondary), the Feynman diagram model of human interactions (attraction and repulsion movements), and the outline of human quantum mechanics, among other theories. |
| 41. |  Adrian Bejan (1948-)
Romanian-born American mechanical engineer | 2007 | Developed a social dynamics constructal theory. |
| 42. | Daniel Gilles () | 2008 | Co-authored, together with Didier Sornette, the article “Econophysics: Historical Perspectives”, in the four-volume Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance |
| 43. |  Dean Hamden (c.1950-)
American physicist | 2008 | Has been conducted a four-year research project on the subject of the physics of human behavior, at Montclair State University, involving 500 individuals, the results of which are explained in the nearly finished 2012 book The Physics of Human Behavior, some of which is touched on at 2008 BehaviorPhysics.Blogspot.com; in this work, he applies concepts such as Newtons laws of motion, Hooke’s law, the laws of thermodynamics, entropy, the uncertainty principle, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, among others, applied to human behavior, finance, and economics, all framed around an end run effort to facilitate guidance on happiness attainment and relationship satisfaction. |
| 44. |  Len Fisher (1942-)
Australian-born English chemist, physicist, biologist, and philosopher | 2009 | Discusses the physics of crowd and swarm behavior. |
| 45. |  Ignacio Gallo (c.1982-) | 2009 | Did PhD thesis on the physics of social equilibrium; research is to develop a statistical mechanics theory of social interaction, using generalizing econometric discrete choice models, among others. |
| 46. | Oscar Bolina (c.1959-)
American mathematician | 2010 | Chapter: “Society from the Statistical Mechanics Perspective”. [2] |
| 47. |  Dan Cobley (c.1960-)
English physicist and marketing director | 2010 | Noted for his implementation of physics concepts such as Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method, and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding. |
| 48. | Curtis Blakely ()
American justice systems professor | 2010 | Article in "Sub-atomic Particles and Prisoners: a Novel Examination of Socio-Physics and Penology". |
| 49. | Alberto Douce (c.1951-)
American geologist | 2011 | In his Thermodynamics of Earth and Planets, he lists as one of his research interests the application of statistical physics to human societies. |
