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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.

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#501

Walter Greiner

#9333

Overall Influence

1935 - 2016 (81 years)

Walter Greiner was a German theoretical physicist. His research interests lay in atomic physics, heavy ion physics, nuclear physics, elementary particle physics . He is known for his series of books in theoretical physics, particularly in Germany but also around the world.

#502

Melissa Franklin

Melissa Franklin

#13055

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Melissa Eve Bronwen Franklin is a Canadian experimental particle physicist and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. In 1992, Franklin became the first woman to receive tenure in the physics department at Harvard University and she served as chair of the department from 2010 to 2014. While working at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, her team found some of the first evidences for the existence of the top quark. In 1993, Franklin was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. She is currently member of the CDF and ATLAS collaborations.

#503

Alexander Zamolodchikov

#6607

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Alexander Borisovich Zamolodchikov is a Russian physicist, known for his contributions to condensed matter physics, two-dimensional conformal field theory, and statistical mechanics, and is currently the C.N. Yang – Wei Deng Endowed Chair of Physics at Stony Brook University.

#504

Basil Hiley

#5515

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Basil J. Hiley , is a British quantum physicist and professor emeritus of the University of London. Long-time colleague of David Bohm, Hiley is known for his work with Bohm on implicate orders and for his work on algebraic descriptions of quantum physics in terms of underlying symplectic and orthogonal Clifford algebras. Hiley co-authored the book The Undivided Universe with David Bohm, which is considered the main reference for Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory.

#505

Ryogo Kubo

#5843

Overall Influence

1920 - 1995 (75 years)

was a Japanese mathematical physicist, best known for his works in statistical physics and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Work In the early 1950s, Kubo transformed research into the linear response properties of near-equilibrium condensed-matter systems, in particular the understanding of electron transport and conductivity, through the Kubo formalism, a Green's function approach to linear response theory for quantum systems. In 1977 Ryogo Kubo was awarded the Boltzmann Medal for his contributions to the theory of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and to the theory of fluctuation phenomena.

#506

William A. Bardeen

#11933

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

William Allan Bardeen is an American theoretical physicist who worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is renowned for his foundational work on the chiral anomaly , the Yang-Mills and gravitational anomalies, the development of quantum chromodynamics scheme frequently used in perturbative analysis of experimentally observable processes such as deep inelastic scattering, high energy collisions and flavor changing processes.

#507

Moo-Young Han

#12740

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Moo-Young Han was a South Korean-born American physicist. He was a professor of physics at Duke University. Along with Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, he is credited with introducing the SU symmetry of quarks, today known as the color charge. The color charge is the basis of the strong force as explained by quantum chromodynamics.

#508

Shoucheng Zhang

Shoucheng Zhang

#8980

Overall Influence

1963 - 2018 (55 years)

Shoucheng Zhang was a Chinese-American physicist who was the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He was a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, the quantum Hall effect, the quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics, and high-temperature superconductivity. According to the National Academy of Sciences:He discovered a new state of matter called topological insulator in which electrons can conduct along the edge without dissipation, enabling a new generation of electronic devices with much lower power consumption. For this ground brea...

#509

Valery Rubakov

#16634

Overall Influence

1955 - 2022 (67 years)

Valery Anatolyevich Rubakov was a Russian theoretical physicist. His scientific interests included quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and cosmology. He was affiliated with the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

#510

Igal Talmi

#6663

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Igal Talmi is an Israeli nuclear physicist. Biography Igal Talmi was born in 1925 in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His family immigrated to Mandate Palestine later that year and settled in Kfar Yehezkel. After graduating from Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv in 1942, he joined the Palmach.

#511

Stanley Deser

#11845

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Stanley Deser was an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology.

#512

David Kaiser

#12982

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

David I. Kaiser is an American physicist and historian of science. He is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a full professor in MIT's department of physics. He also served as an inaugural associate dean for MIT's cross-disciplinary program in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.

#513

Wilhelm Walcher

#14255

Overall Influence

1910 - 2005 (95 years)

Wilhelm Walcher was a German experimental physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on mass spectrometers for isotope separation. After the war, he was director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Marburg. He was a president of the German Physical Society and a vice president of the German Research Foundation. He helped found the Society for Heavy Ion Research and the German Electron Synchrotron DESY. He was also one of the 18 signatories of the Göttingen Manifest.

#514

Mani Lal Bhaumik

#9196

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Mani Lal Bhaumik is an Indian American physicist and an internationally bestselling author, celebrated lecturer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Early life Mani Lal Bhaumik was born in a Bengali Mahishya family on March 30, 1931 in a small village in Tamluk, Medinipore, West Bengal, India and attended the Kola Union High School. His father Gunodhar Bhaumik was a notable freedom fighter. As a teenager, Bhaumik spent some time with Mahatma Gandhi in his Mahisadal camp. In his boyhood Mani Lal was hugely influenced by freedom fighter Matangini Hazra, popularly known as Lady Gandhi. He received a B.Sc.

#515

Andrew E. Lange

#16047

Overall Influence

1957 - 2010 (53 years)

Andrew E. Lange was an astrophysicist and Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Lange came to Caltech in 1993 and was most recently the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Caltech's president Jean-Lou Chameau called him "a truly great physicist and astronomer who had made seminal discoveries in observational cosmology".

#516

Jill Tarter

#6391

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jill Cornell Tarter is an American astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.

#517

Joseph Weber

#7676

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

Joseph Weber was an American physicist. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors . Early life Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents. His name was "Yonah" until he entered grammar school. He had no birth certificate, and his father had taken the last name of "Weber" to match an available passport in order to emigrate to the US. Thus, Joe Weber had little proof of either his family or his given name, which ...

#518

Michael Peskin

#13711

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Michael Edward Peskin is an American theoretical physicist. He is currently a professor in the theory group at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Peskin has been recognized for his work in proposing and analyzing unifying models of elementary particles and forces in theoretical elementary particle physics, and proposing experimental methods for testing such models. Peskin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. He was appointed a co-editor of the journal Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science as of 2023.

#519

Philip Ball

#3875

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Philip Ball is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.

#520

Sau Lan Wu

#17910

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sau Lan Wu is a Chinese American particle physicist and the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She made important contributions towards the discovery of the J/psi particle, which provided experimental evidence for the existence of the charm quark, and the gluon, the vector boson of the strong force in the Standard Model of physics. Recently, her team located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research , using data collected at the Large Hadron Collider , was part of the international effort in the discovery of a boson consistent with ...

#521

Nicholas Kurti

#5514

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Nicholas Kurti, was a Hungarian-born British physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life. Career Born in Budapest, Kurti went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish laws he had to leave the country, gaining his master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin, working with Professor Franz Simon. Kurti and Simon continued to work together during 1931–1933 at the Technische Hochschule in Breslau. However, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, both Simon and Kurti left Germany, joining the Clarendon Laborator...

#522

Nidhal Guessoum

Nidhal Guessoum

#16556

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Nidhal Guessoum is an Algerian astrophysicist. He is a professor at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. His research interests range from gamma-ray astrophysics, such as positron-electron annihilation, nuclear gamma-ray lines, and gamma-ray bursts, to Islamic astronomy, i.e. crescent visibility, Islamic calendar, and prayer times at high latitudes, problems that have yet to be fully resolved. He has published a number of technical works and lectured internationally at many renowned universities .

#523

Bernard Carr

#11690

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Bernard J. Carr is a British professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London . His research interests include the early universe, dark matter, general relativity, primordial black holes, and the anthropic principle.

#524

Bohdan Paczyński

Bohdan Paczyński

#12316

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

Bohdan Paczyński or Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer notable for his theories and work in the fields of stellar evolution, accretion discs, and gamma ray bursts. He is the recipient of the Eddington Medal , the Henry Draper Medal , the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society , and the Order of Polonia Restituta .

#525

Charles Critchfield

Charles Critchfield

#11303

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Charles Louis Critchfield was an American mathematical physicist. A graduate of George Washington University, where he earned his PhD in physics under the direction of Edward Teller in 1939, he conducted research in ballistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and received three patents for improved sabot designs.

#526

Ryan Rohm

#13100

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ryan Milton Rohm is an American string theorist. He is one of four physicists known as the Princeton string quartet, and is responsible for the development of heterotic string theory along with David Gross, Jeffrey A. Harvey and Emil Martinec, the other members of the Princeton String Quartet.

#527

Ernst Stuhlinger

Ernst Stuhlinger

#6212

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Ernst Stuhlinger was a German-American atomic, electrical, and rocket scientist. After being brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip, he developed guidance systems with Wernher von Braun's team for the US Army, and later was a scientist with NASA. He was also instrumental in the development of the ion engine for long-endurance space flight, and a wide variety of scientific experiments.

#528

John G. Cramer

#8960

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

John Gleason Cramer, Jr. is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, known for his development of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. He has been an active participant with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

#529

Ghulam Murtaza

#11640

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ghulam Murtaza , , is a Pakistani theoretical physicist with a specialization in the physics of ionized plasmas, and is an Emeritus Professor of physics at the Government College University in Lahore. Murtaza's work is recognizable in plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion processes to provide a better understanding of energy propagated by the main-sequence star, the Sun.

#530

Donald D. Clayton

Donald D. Clayton

#11885

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Donald Delbert Clayton is an American astrophysicist whose most visible achievement was the prediction from nucleosynthesis theory that supernovae are intensely radioactive. That earned Clayton the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for “theoretical astrophysics related to the formation of elements in the explosions of stars and to the observable products of these explosions”. Supernovae thereafter became the most important stellar events in astronomy owing to their profoundly radioactive nature. Not only did Clayton discover radioactive nucleosynthesis during explosive silicon b...

#531

Sergio Ferrara

#10343

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Sergio Ferrara is an Italian physicist working on theoretical physics of elementary particles and mathematical physics. He is renowned for the discovery of theories introducing supersymmetry as a symmetry of elementary particles and of supergravity, the first significant extension of Einstein's general relativity, based on the principle of "local supersymmetry" . He is an emeritus staff member at CERN and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#532

Mary K. Gaillard

#15072

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Mary Katharine Gaillard is an American theoretical physicist. Her focus is on particle physics. She is a professor of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, and visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was Berkeley's first tenured female physicist.

#533

Manuel Peimbert

#21274

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Manuel Peimbert Sierra is a Mexican astronomer and a faculty member at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . He was named a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987. Biography Peimbert was born in 1941 in Mexico City. In his first year of college at UNAM, Peimbert went to the Tonantzintla Observatory in Puebla with a friend, Gerardo Bátiz, and they told the observatory director, Guillermo Haro, that they wanted to help at the observatory. Haro put them to work with a Schmidt camera, and Peimbert and Bátiz found a number of planetary nebulae, ten of which had never been described.

#534

Chiara Nappi

#8630

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Chiara Rosanna Nappi is an Italian physicist. Her research areas have included mathematical physics, particle physics, and string theory. Academic career Nappi obtained the Diploma della Scuola di Perfezionamento in physics from the University of Naples in 1976. Her advisor was Giovanni Jona-Lasinio of the University of Rome. She moved to the United States to carry out academic research, first at Harvard University, and later at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. She has since been a professor of physics at the University of Southern California and Princeton University .

#535

Douglas Osheroff

Douglas Osheroff

#8921

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Douglas Dean Osheroff is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson. Osheroff is currently the J. G. Jackson and C. J. Wood Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Stanford University.

#536

Robert Jaffe

#11432

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert Loren Jaffe is an American physicist and the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was formerly director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

#537

Tom Gehrels

#9804

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Anton M.J. "Tom" Gehrels was a Dutch–American astronomer, Professor of Planetary Sciences, and Astronomer at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Biography Youth and education Gehrels was born at Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands on February 21, 1925. He was born in bible-belt Netherlands, and was forced to attend church regularly, an act he despised. When he was older he rejoiced when he found out his childhood church had been destroyed. During World War II he was, as a teenager, active in the Dutch Resistance. After he escaped to England, he was sent back by parachute as an organizer for Sp...

#538

Mark B. Wise

#20249

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Mark Brian Wise is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist. He has conducted research in elementary particle physics and cosmology. He is best known for his role in the development of heavy quark effective theory , a mathematical formalism that has allowed physicists to make predictions about otherwise intractable problems in the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. He has also published work on mathematical models for finance and risk assessment.

#539

Leonard Mandel

#13767

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Leonard Mandel was an American physicist who contributed to the development of theoretical and experimental modern optics and is widely considered one of the founding fathers of the field of quantum optics. With Emil Wolf he published the highly regarded book Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics.

#540

Edward Farhi

#10772

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Edward Henry Farhi is a physicist working on quantum computation as a principal scientist at Google. In 2018 he retired from his position as the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT from 2004 until 2016. He made contributions to particle physics, general relativity and astroparticle physics before turning to his current interest, quantum computation.

#541

Martin Bojowald

#12255

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Martin Bojowald is a German physicist who now works on the faculty of the Penn State Physics Department, where he is a member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. Prior to joining Penn State he spent several years at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. He works on loop quantum gravity and physical cosmology and is credited with establishing the sub-field of loop quantum cosmology.

#542

Malcolm Longair

Malcolm Longair

#11425

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Malcolm Sim Longair is a British physicist. From 1991 to 2008 he was the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Since 2016 he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society.

#543

Horst Korsching

#12507

Overall Influence

1912 - 1998 (86 years)

Horst Korsching was a German physicist. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon. Education Born in Danzig, Korsching began his studies of physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1932. In 1937, he joined the scientific staff at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik , an institute under the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and located in Dahlem-Berlin. He received his doctorate under Hermann Schüler.

#544

Robert Kirshner

Robert Kirshner

#18700

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.

#545

Subir Sachdev

#13532

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, and received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics from 2017–2019.

#546

Rammal Rammal

#7201

Overall Influence

1951 - 1991 (40 years)

Rammal Hassan Rammal was a Lebanese condensed matter physicist. He was born in Doueir, South Lebanon. He lived and went to school in Beirut. He was the top student in his class. He graduated high school and ranked first place in the official exams of the baccalaureate Section II in Lebanon. At 18 years old, he traveled to France to continue his education and start his scientific career. He studied at the Joseph Fourier University in France and got his baccalaureate in mathematics and physics. In 1981, he achieved his international doctorate there and started working at CNRS in Grenoble. Ramm...

#547

Melba Phillips

#8570

Overall Influence

1907 - 2004 (97 years)

Melba Newell Phillips was an American physicist and a pioneer science educator. One of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, Phillips completed her PhD. in 1933, a time when few women could pursue careers in science. In 1935 Oppenheimer and Phillips published their description of the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, an early contribution to nuclear physics that explained the behavior of accelerated nuclei of radioactive hydrogen atoms. Phillips was also known for refusing to cooperate with a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee's investigat...

#548

Engin Arık

#8688

Overall Influence

1948 - 2007 (59 years)

Engin Arık was a Turkish particle physicist and professor at Boğaziçi University. She led the Turkish participation in a number of experiments at CERN. Arık was a prominent supporter of Turkey's membership to CERN and the founding of a national particle accelerator center as a means to utilize thorium as an energy source. She has also represented Turkey at the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization for a number of years. She died in the Atlasjet Flight 4203 crash on November 30, 2007.

#549

Clifford Shull

#6760

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Clifford Glenwood Shull was a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. Biography Shull attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, received his BS from Carnegie Institute of Technology and PhD from New York University. He worked for The Texas Company at Beacon, New York during the wartime, followed by a position in the Clinton Laboratory , and finally joined MIT in 1955, and retired in 1986.

#550

Walter Thirring

#7552

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Walter Eduard Thirring was an Austrian physicist after whom the Thirring model in quantum field theory is named. He was the son of the physicist Hans Thirring. Life and career Walter Thirring was born in Vienna, Austria, where he earned his Doctor of Physics degree in 1949 at the age of 22. In 1959 he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, and from 1968 to 1971 he was head of the Theory Division and director at CERN.

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