Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Physics,

#1451

Sarah Frances Whiting

Sarah Frances Whiting

1847 - 1927 (80 years)

Sarah Frances Whiting was an American physicist and astronomer. She was one of the founders and the first director of the Whitin Observatory at Wellesley College. She instructed several notable astronomers and physicists, including Annie Jump Cannon.

#1452

Louise Sherwood McDowell

Louise Sherwood McDowell

1876 - 1966 (90 years)

Louise Sherwood McDowell was an American physicist and educator. She spent most of her career as a professor of physics at Wellesley College and is best known for being one of the first female scientists to work at the United States Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

#1453

Marguerite Perey

Marguerite Perey

1909 - 1975 (66 years)

Marguerite Catherine Perey was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie. In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. In 1962, she was the first woman to be elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie. Perey died of cancer in 1975.

#1454

Tatyana Afanasyeva

Tatyana Afanasyeva

1876 - 1964 (88 years)

Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva was a Russian-Dutch mathematician and physicist who made contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. On 21 December 1904, she married Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest . They had two daughters and two sons; one daughter, Tatyana Ehrenfest, also became a mathematician.

#1455

Berta Karlik

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Berta Karlik was an Austrian physicist. She worked for the University of Vienna, eventually becoming the first female professor at the institution. While working with Ernst Foyn she published a paper on the radioactivity of seawater. She discovered that the chemical element 85 astatine is a product of the natural decay processes. The element was first synthesized in 1940 by Dale R. Corson, K. R. MacKenzie, and Emilio Segrè, after several scientists in vain searched for it in radioactive minerals.

#1456

Ștefania Mărăcineanu

1882 - 1944 (62 years)

Ștefania Mărăcineanu was a Romanian physicist. She worked with Marie Curie studying the element named for Curie's homeland Polonium. She made proposals that would lead to Irène Joliot-Curie's Nobel Prize. Mărăcineanu believed that Joliot-Curie had taken her work on Induced radioactivity to gain the prize.

#1457

Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs

1912 - 1954 (42 years)

Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs was a German astronomer. She made key observations of variable stars. Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs was born in Coburg . She studied in Würzburg, Munich and Kiel from 1931 to 1933. After nine years of withdrawal into family life, she studied from 1942 until the end of the Second World War at the University of Göttingen. From 1945, she worked closely with professor Cuno Hoffmeister as an assistant astronomer at the Sonneberg Observatory. In 1951, she received a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Jena. At Sonneberg Observatory Eva Rohlfs met the astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert...

#1458

Emma Vyssotsky

1894 - 1975 (81 years)

Emma Vyssotsky was an American astronomer who was honored with the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1946. Biography Emma earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Swarthmore College in 1916 and worked at Smith College as an astronomy/mathematics demonstrator for a year before finding work at an insurance company as an actuary. In 1927, after receiving a Whitney Fellowship and a Bartol Scholarship, she enrolled in astronomy at Radcliffe College . There, she worked with Cecilia Payne on the "spectral line contours of hydrogen and ionized calcium throughout the spectral sequence."

#1459

Lucy Wilson

1888 - 1980 (92 years)

Lucy Wilson was an American physicist, known for her research on theories of vision, optics and X-ray spectroscopy. She was also the first dean of students at Wellesley College. Biography She was born October 19, 1888, in Bloomington, Illinois, the daughter of Lucy Barron White and John James Speed Wilson Jr. Her father worked for American Telephone and Telegraph in Chicago as did his father and her younger brother. Her younger brother had begun to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two years after Lucy Wilson had entered Wellesley. Wilson not only studied the sciences but also had an interest in languages, especially German, which she studied in high school.

#1460

Valeriya Golubtsova

1901 - 1987 (86 years)

Valeriya Alexeyevna Golubtsova was a scientist who was the director of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute from 1943 to 1952. She was the wife of Georgy Malenkov. Biography Golubtsova was born in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of a teacher in the cadet corps, State Councilor Alexei Golubtsov , and Olga Nevzorova, who was a member of an old noble family. Nevzorova's older sisters were the famous "Nevzorov sisters" — Vladimir Lenin's comrades-in-arms in Marxist circles back in the 1890s. Zinaida married Gleb Кrzhizhanovky in 1899, who in the 1920s headed the GOELRO Commission.

#1461

Antoinette de Vaucouleurs

1921 - 1987 (66 years)

Antoinette de Vaucouleurs was an astronomer who worked in the Astronomy Department of the University of Texas at Austin for 25 years when few women worked in the field. In addition to ongoing collaborations with her husband, Gérard de Vaucouleurs, she carried out her own research in spectroscopy. Her contributions were recognized in a festschrift in 1988, entitled The World of Galaxies.

#1462

Carolyn Parker

1917 - 1966 (49 years)

Carolyn Beatrice Parker was a physicist who worked from 1943 to 1947 on the Dayton Project, the polonium research and development arm of the Manhattan Project. She was one of a small number of African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project. She then became an assistant professor in physics at Fisk University.

#1463

Maria Margaretha Kirch

1670 - 1720 (50 years)

Maria Margaretha Kirch was a German astronomer. She was one of the first famous astronomers of her period due to her writing on the conjunction of the sun with Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter in 1709 and 1712 respectively.

#1464

Sonia Cotelle

1896 - 1945 (49 years)

Sonia Cotelle, née Slobodkine , was a Polish radiochemist. Life and work Sonia Cotelle was born in Warsaw, capital of the Vistula Land, in the Russian Empire on 19 June 1896. She was married, but later divorced. She graduated from the University of Paris in 1922, where she majored in chemistry. While still a student she began working in 1919 as an assistant in the Institute of Radium founded by the Nobel Laureates, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, in the university's Faculty of Science . Cotelle was in charge of the measurement service between 1924 and 1926, after which she was appointed as a chemist in the Faculté des sciences.

#1465

Elizaveta Karamihailova

Elizaveta Karamihailova

1897 - 1968 (71 years)

Elisabeth Ivanova Kara-Michailova , alternatively Elisabeth Karamichailova was a Bulgarian physicist of a Bulgarian father and an English mother. She was among the handful of female nuclear physics pioneers at the beginning of the 20th century, established the first practical courses of particle physics in Bulgaria and was the first woman to hold a professorial title in the country.

#1466

Wang Zhenyi

1768 - 1797 (29 years)

Wang Zhenyi was a Chinese scientist from the Qing dynasty. She breached the feudal customs of the time, which hindered women's rights, by working to educate herself in subjects such as astronomy, mathematics, geography, and medicine. She was well known for her contributions in astronomy, mathematics, and poetry. She was an acclaimed scholar: "An extraordinary woman of 18th century China."

#1467

Frances Wick

1875 - 1941 (66 years)

Frances Gertrude Wick was an American physicist known for her studies on luminescence. Early life and education Wick was born on October 2, 1875, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Her father, Alfred Wick, was an oil producer, an innkeeper, and a store clerk. Together he and her mother, Sarah, had seven children. Wick earned her Bachelor's from Wilson College in 1897. After graduation Wick began teaching at the high school she had attended as a student. When preparing to teach a physics class, Wick became interested in physics. In 1904, she decided to leave her job teaching to study physics at Co...

#1468

Nina Vedeneyeva

Nina Vedeneyeva

1882 - 1955 (73 years)

Nina Yevgenyevna Vedeneyeva was a physicist involved in the study of mineral crystals and their coloration. Heading numerous departments at such institutions as the All-USSR Institute of Mineral Resources, the Institute of Geological Sciences and the Institute of Crystallography, she conducted research into color variants of clay minerals and classifying clays which occurred in organic dyes. She was noted for development and design of instruments to improve the methods of optical crystallography. She was the last partner-muse of the poet Sophia Parnok and was awarded the Stalin Prize and Orde...

#1469

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.

#1470

Ruth J. Northcott

Ruth J. Northcott

1913 - 1969 (56 years)

Ruth Josephine Northcott was a Canadian astronomer based at the David Dunlap Observatory, and president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 1962 to 1964. Asteroid 3670 Northcott is named for her.

#1471

Frida Palmer

1905 - 1966 (61 years)

Frida Palmér, was the first female Swedish astronomer with a doctorate. She studied variable stars. Early life Palmér was born on February 14, 1905, in Blentarp, Sweden, the only child to builder Hans Persson Palmér and his wife Elsa Jeppsson. Her father died when she was five years old and in 1910 Elsa moved to Järrestad. It is unclear how she finished her early education but she must have been somewhat self-taught as access to high school was not formally established for girls until 1928.

#1472

Wanda Leopold

1920 - 1977 (57 years)

Wanda Leopold was a Polish author, medical doctor, and social science activist known for her study of English writings beginning in West Africa, specifically Nigeria. A translator as well as a literary critic, she stressed the artistic qualities of creative writing. She was a scholar of Polish culture, literature, and language. Her book, "O literaturze Czarnej Afryki," was the first Polish introduction to African literature that was written in both English, and French. Some of her first critical essays were on Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Wole Soyinka.

#1473

Sophia Getzowa

1872 - 1946 (74 years)

Sophia Getzowa was a Belarusian-born pathologist and scientist in Mandatory Palestine. She grew up in a Jewish shtetl in Belarus and during her medical studies at the University of Bern, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel. Together they worked in the Zionist movement. After a four-year romance, Weizmann broke off their engagement and Getzowa returned to her medical studies, graduating in 1904. She carried out widely cited research on the thyroid, identifying solid cell nests in 1907.

#1474

Enrica Calabresi

1891 - 1944 (53 years)

Enrica Calabresi was an Italian zoologist, herpetologist, and entomologist. Her family was part of the Jewish community which has played an important role in Ferrara, continuously since the Middle Ages.

#1475

Grace Langford

1871 - Present (154 years)

Grace Langford was an American physicist known for her work in physics education and research on the infrared reflection of phosphates. She taught at Wellesley College and at Barnard College. Early life and education Langford was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the seventh and youngest child of John Langford and Celestina Eldridge Langford. She graduated from Plymouth High School in 1889. She attended Wellesley College, where she was an instructor and undergraduate student simultaneously, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned her B.S. in physics in 1900, as the only woman in her graduating class.

#1476

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."

#1477

Harriet Williams Bigelow

1870 - 1934 (64 years)

Harriet Williams Bigelow was an American instructor and astronomer. Born in Fayetteville, New York, Harriet was the daughter of pastor Dana Williams Bigelow and Katherine Huntington. Her family moved to Pitcher, New York, then in 1878 to Utica, New York where her father became pastor at the Memorial Presbyterian Church. Harriet attended the local public schools, graduating from Utica Free Academy in 1889. She matriculated to Smith College, a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she studied astronomy.

#1478

Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil

Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil

Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil is a Turkish-American astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. She formerly served as a National Science Foundation and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research led to a discovery of an extremely rare galaxy with a unique double-ringed elliptical structure, which is now commonly referred to as Burcin's Galaxy. She was also a 2018 TED Fellow, and a 2020 TED Senior Fellow.

#1479

Frances Woodworth Wright

Frances Woodworth Wright

1897 - 1989 (92 years)

Frances Woodworth Wright was an American astronomer based at Harvard University. During World War II, she taught celestial navigation to military officers and engineers. Early life Frances Woodworth Wright was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of George William Wright and Nellie Woodworth Wright. As a child in 1907, Wright wrote a short essay titled "My Favorite Poem", for the popular national children's magazine St. Nicholas. She earned a bachelor's degree at Brown University in 1920. She was granted a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1958, as a student of Fred Whipp...

#1480

Hedwig Kohn

1887 - 1964 (77 years)

Hedwig Kohn was a physicist who was one of only three women to obtain habilitation in physics in Germany before World War II. Born in Breslau in the German Empire , she was forced to leave Germany during the Nazi regime because she was Jewish. She continued her academic career in the United States, where she settled for the rest of her life.

#1481

Henrietta Hill Swope

1902 - 1980 (78 years)

Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.

#1482

Mildred Allen

1894 - 1990 (96 years)

Mildred Allen was an American physicist. Biography Early life and education Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson.

#1483

Martha Betz Shapley

1890 - 1981 (91 years)

Martha Betz Shapley was an American astronomer known for her research on eclipsing binary stars. Early life Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz and his wife. Her family were descendants of German immigrants, and her grandfather once told her that he had seen astronomer Caroline Herschel in the streets of Hanover in Germany. Her mother and two sisters became schoolteachers, and Shapley herself became a schoolteacher at age 15. Three years later, she began her studies at the University of Missouri, where she earn...

#1484

Carlotta Maury

1874 - 1938 (64 years)

Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.

#1485

Caroline Herschel

Caroline Herschel

1750 - 1848 (98 years)

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German-born British astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel, with whom she worked throughout her career.

#1486

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

1900 - 1979 (79 years)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

#1487

Marietta Blau

1894 - 1970 (76 years)

Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist credited with developing photographic nuclear emulsions that were usefully able to image and accurately measure high-energy nuclear particles and events, significantly advancing the field of particle physics in her time. For this, she was awarded the Lieben Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As a Jew, she was forced to flee Austria when Nazi Germany annexed it in 1938, eventually making her way to the United States. She was nominated for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry for her work, but did not win. After her return to Austria, she wo...

#1488

Sameera Moussa

1917 - 1952 (35 years)

Sameera Moussa or Samira Musa Aly was the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist. Sameera held a doctorate in atomic radiation. She hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner "Atoms for Peace." She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.

#1489

Ellen Hayes

1851 - 1930 (79 years)

Ellen Amanda Hayes was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was a controversial figure, not only because of being a female college professor, but also for embracing many radical causes. Early life Hayes was born in Granville, Ohio, the first of six children to Ruth Rebecca Hayes and Charles Coleman Hayes. At the age of seven she studied at the Centerville school, a one-room ungraded public school and, in 1867, at sixteen, was employed to teach at a country school. In 1872, she entered the preparatory department at Oberlin College and was admitted as a freshman in 1875, where her mai...

#1490

Charlotte Riefenstahl

Charlotte Riefenstahl

1899 - 1993 (94 years)

Charlotte Houtermans was a German physicist. Education Riefenstahl began her studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen in 1922, where her teachers included, among others, Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Emmy Noether, Robert Pohl, and Carl Runge. She received her doctorate under Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann in 1927, the same year as Robert Oppenheimer, under Born, and Fritz Houtermans, under Franck. She was courted by both Oppenheimer and Houtermans.

#1491

Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat

1912 - 1980 (68 years)

Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat was a French theoretical physicist. Her physics research focused on relativistic quantum mechanics under the influence of gravity. Along with the help of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, she attempted to propose one of the first unified field theories. She is also known for her work on the history of special and general relativity.

#1492

Jean Hanson

1919 - 1973 (54 years)

Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...

#1493

Priscilla Fairfield Bok

1896 - 1975 (79 years)

Priscilla Fairfield Bok was an American astronomer and the wife of Dutch-born astronomer Bart Bok, Director of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia and later of Steward Observatory in Arizona, US. Their harmonious marriage accompanied the four decades of their close scientific collaboration, in which "it is difficult and pointless to separate his achievements from hers". They co-authored a number of academic papers on star clusters, stellar magnitudess, and the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. The Boks displayed great mutual enthusiasm for explaining astronomy to the public: described as ...

#1494

Anne Sewell Young

Anne Sewell Young

1871 - 1961 (90 years)

Anne Sewell Young was an American astronomer. She was an astronomy professor at Mount Holyoke College for 37 years. Biography Anne Sewell Young was born in Bloomington, Wisconsin on January 2, 1871, to Reverend Albert Adams Young and Mary Sewell.

#1495

Elsa Neumann

1872 - 1902 (30 years)

Elsa Neumann was a German physicist. She was the first woman to receive a PhD in physics from the University of Berlin, in 1899. Early life and education Elsa was the daughter of Maximilian and Anna née Meyer, an older brother was the ornithologist Oscar Neumann while a sister Alice was a sculptor. As a woman, Elsa Neumann was generally denied access to higher education. In 1890 she graduated with a Lehrerinnenprüfung , a degree that did not require higher education at that time and was considered less than a Realgymnasium education. Thus she took private lessons with various professors in order to acquire the advanced knowledge and skills necessary for university-level studies.

#1496

Christine Kirch

1697 - 1782 (85 years)

Christine Kirch , was a German astronomer. Life She was the daughter of the astronomers Gottfried Kirch and Maria Margarethe Kirch and the sister of Christfried Kirch. She and her sister Margaretha Kirch were educated in astronomy from the age of ten. As a child Kirch assisted her parents in their astronomical observations. Reportedly the young Kirch was responsible for taking time of observations by using a pendulum. As she became older Kirch was instructed in calculating calendars. She assisted first her mother and later her brother in calculating various calendars.

#1497

Mary Watson Whitney

Mary Watson Whitney

1847 - 1921 (74 years)

Mary Watson Whitney was an American astronomer and was the head of the Vassar College Observatory for 22 years, where 102 scientific papers were published under her guidance. Early life and education Whitney was born on September 11, 1847 in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her mother was Mary Watson Crehore and her father was Samuel Buttrick Whitney. Her father was successful in real estate and wealthy enough to provide her with a good education for a woman at the time. She attended school in Waltham, where she reportedly excelled in mathematics. Whitney graduated from the public high school in 1863....

#1498

Louise du Pierry

1746 - 1807 (61 years)

Louise du Pierry or Dupiery, née Elisabeth Louise Felicité Pourra de la Madeleine , was a French astronomer and professor. Life She was born in La Ferté-Bernard, in the French province of Maine, on 1 August 1746.

#1499

Angelina Cabras

1898 - 1993 (95 years)

Angelina Cabras was an Italian mathematician and physicist. She earned degrees in mathematics from the University of Turin in 1924 and in physics from the University of Cagliari in 1927. She obtained a position in mathematical physics at Cagliari, later moving to the institute of theoretical mechanics there. Her research concerned higher dimensional rigid body dynamics, the theory of relativity, and inductance.

#1500

Anna McPherson

1901 - 1979 (78 years)

Anna Isobel McPherson was a Canadian physicist and the first female professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University. Early life and education McPherson received a B.A. degree in Mathematics and Physics with First Class Honors from McGill University in 1921. There she received the Anne Molson Gold Medal for excellence, awarded to the best student in physics, mathematics, and physical science at McGill.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions